200th birthday celebration to include talk by descendant

Two centuries ago, a woman was born who would become the wife of General Don Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, the military commander who was a key figure in California’s history at a time it was changing from a Mexican province to part of the United States.

Vallejo’s name is carried on in the largest city in Solano County. When the neighboring city was founded, one requirement was that it would be named for Vallejo’s wife, Doña Francisca Maria Felipa Benicia Carrillo de Vallejo.

Originally, the new city was intended to be called Francisca. But across the bay, Yerba Buena had been renamed San Francisco. So the new city was called Benicia, to avoid any confusion.

Benicia Historical Museum will mark the 200th anniversary of Doña Benicia’s birth in a celebration Aug. 23 that will feature a talk by her great-great-granddaughter, Martha Ann Francisca Vallejo McGettigan.

McGettigan herself is a California historian who has dedicated her life to preserving the histories of the Vallejo family, colonial Alta California and the women who lived then, as well as during the Californios-Rancos period and California’s early statehood.

She has researched the Native-American tribes of Napa and Solano counties, preserving a language and history of an extinct branch of the Suysun Patwin people.

McGettigan is a Presidio Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) member who has participated in the Heritage Program of the Presidio Trust’s transformation of the Officer’s Club into a new San Francisco museum.

During more than two years of her involvement in that transition, she helped with research, consulting and artifact reproduction for the Spanish and Mexican eras.

In March, McGettigan received the prestigious National DAR History Award Medal, given to those in recognition of their “study and promotion of American history” that has “significantly advanced the understanding of our nation’s past.”

“By sharing her family’s rich heritage and expanding on it with diligent research, Martha Vallejo McGettigan has enlightened us about the nature of relationships between the peoples living in Alta California,” the DAR noted in giving her the medal.

Doña Benicia’s ancestors arrived in California during the second Anza Expedition.

In 1776, Upper Alta California was a frontier in the territory of New Spain that had been administered for 250 years by Spanish officials.

Between 4 million and 5 million people lived under Spanish control from Alta California to Peru. Members of the second Anza Expedition were seeking better lives in the new Spanish territory, and reached this area from Europe by crossing the stormy Atlantic Ocean and traveling hundreds of miles across rough land.

Doña Benicia, as she is called in the city named for her, was married to General Vallejo when she was 17. While pregnant, she traveled 600 miles by mule in four weeks, arriving to join her husband for a new life in what would become the San Francisco Bay Area.

She gave birth to 16 children, of whom six died before they were 6. She managed the various homes into which her family moved, and she provided a classical education for her children, making sure they were familiar with the arts.

Her letters recorded the happenings in California as it grew from a distant European possession to an American state.

Her son Platon described his mother as “what we would call a level-headed woman.”

Besides McGettigan’s presentation, Benicia Historical Museum’s celebration will have birthday cake, chips and salsa and virgin margaritas for refreshments, as well as a Mexican musical program by vocalist Teressa Delavega, accompanied by Jean Brown.

The celebration at the museum, 2060 Camel Road, is open to the public and starts at 1 p.m. Aug. 23.