SR's John Taylor made the most out of his mountain
Published: Sunday, August 28, 2005 at 3:00 a.m.
Last Modified: Saturday, August 27, 2005 at 9:00 p.m.
The news from the Open Space District is good news. The county will buy 823 acres on Taylor Mountain, open country on Santa Rosa's southern border that will eventually become a regional park.
This is good news for several reasons. First, it accomplishes what the winning combo of city, county and state has done on the eastern edge of town with the line-up of Howarth, Spring Lake and Annadel parks to assure that the hills dividing our valleys remain inviolate.
Second, it is a bow to our history, making certain that what remains of the vision of the Gold Rush pioneer John Shackelford Taylor is not lost in a forest of condos and McMansions like the hills of Fountaingrove at the other end of town.
Third, it will give us a new place to play. It is a decision, like the acquisition of the Cardoza Ranch on Lakeville Highway, that indicates the intention of the Open Space District to acquire not only the distant vistas, but closer land that can be accessed by the public.
And finally, it's good news because John Shackelford Taylor would be so pleased.
I'VE ALWAYS had a soft spot for old John Taylor. I can call him "old John" without fear of being politically incorrect, I think, because he lived to be 99 years old, having watched Santa Rosa grow from a dusty little village to a bustling farm market town.
For one thing, I might just owe him my career. The story, as Taylor told it, was that he stopped by the saloon (or maybe it was John Walker's barber shop) in the Santa Rosa House stage stop one day in 1857 - four years after he came from the gold mines of Downieville to his mountain ranch - and he met a young man named Alpheus Russell, who came to town to open a general store. Russell said he had been thinking that Santa Rosa needed a newspaper.
Taylor gave Russell a $5 gold piece and said to consider him his first subscriber. That was, apparently, all the incentive Russell needed. The Sonoma Democrat made its debut in October of that year, became The Press Democrat 40 years later and, well, you know the rest.
Another reason I've always been interested in Taylor and his mountain is that he embodied so many of the essential elements of the town's history. He was a '49er who left his home in Virginia at age 21 to seek his fortune and, like so many, made a little money in the mines, but not a lot.
He came to Santa Rosa in 1853, before there was a town here, and settled, as he liked to put it, on "government land." It's possible that Taylor was actually a squatter, taking a chance on a claim of what had been a Mexican land grant. Most of the adventurous young men who settled here in those years were squatters.
If so, Taylor was one of the successful ones. By the time he had seen the town established in the valley below him, he had title to 1,400 acres, had a herd of dairy cows, had planted one of the first vineyards (60 acres of mission grapes, but also zinfandel) was making wine and had found a small coal deposit up the mountain, which he was mining and selling.
His interest in trotters settled him squarely in horse-crazy early Santa Rosa society. He built the first race track, called Taylor's Racing Oval, and it was there the earliest county fairs were held.
In 1862, with the population around San Francisco Bay increasing and the steamer and stage routes well-established, the first wave of tourists found Sonoma County's mineral springs. They came to the Sonoma Valley, to Skaggs Springs, Lytton Springs and Mark West Springs.
John Taylor, with a bubbling hot spring on his land, saw opportunity. He built a small resort he called White Sulphur Springs. When the first building burned in 1870, Taylor replaced it with a charming, two-story hotel with a wide veranda, a bathhouse, gazebo and landscaped grounds.
It was completed just in time to welcome travelers on the San Francisco and North Pacific, the first railroad to Santa Rosa, which began passenger service on the last day of 1870.
Taylor married Nannie Clark in 1876 and they had a son and a daughter. The resort business was booming. The ranch was making money. And Santa Rosa was becoming an important business community. Taylor's entrepreneurial fires burned brightly. He hired managers for his ranch and resort and moved into town, to a big house on Mendocino Avenue near Seventh Street and became vice president of the Santa Rosa Bank (later Bank of Italy and ultimately Bank of America). He also became a force in Democratic politics and was once a candidate for sheriff.
Then, in 1906, the killer earthquake left San Francisco in ruins and did even more damage, per capita, in Santa Rosa, including 100 dead in a population of 8,800.
The Taylor family escaped injury, but the earthquake shut off their mineral spring.
Taylor leased the hotel, the name was changed to Kawana Springs, reputedly suggested by Luther Burbank, and it was converted to one of the new resorts that catered to the automobile trade - known as roadhouses.
THERE'S NO question that Taylor Mountain, like it's namesake, has a history that reaches out and grabs you. Take, for example, what happened there during Prohibition.
When the manufacture, sale and possession of alcoholic beverages became illegal in the United States in 1919, bootleggers became astonishingly resourceful.
The San Francisco men who leased Kawana Springs were relatively bold about their venture. Neighbor Roy Michie would later recall the five-ton trucks loaded with sugar (a main ingredient in the manufacture of whiskey) that rumbled up Kawana Springs Road and the odd comings-and-goings, sometimes late at night.
When federal agents raided the old resort in 1927 - the same year old John died - they found that the building had been gutted and contained a two-story distillery.
The "still," in the vernacular, was producing a significant amount of San Francisco's illegal liquor supply. The feds estimated production at 1,400 gallons per day.
The man they arrested on the site was a steamfitter who claimed to be dismantling the two story still, but they arrested him anyway.
The Taylors' daughter, Zana, who was married to Eugene Weaver, was living on their prune ranch in the Dry Creek Valley. Entrusted with management of the Taylor Mountain property, she was horrified to learn what the lessees had done to the gracious old hotel and she ordered it torn down. It was never rebuilt.
Late, after Eugene Weaver died, Zana Weaver moved back to the resort, remodeling the bathhouse into an attractive home where she lived for the rest of her life.
IN 1969, the year before she died, there was another significant earthquake in Santa Rosa - two of them, in fact, about two hours apart, and, lo and behold, Kawana-White Sulphur spring began to flow again.
For a time, a revival of the historic resort seemed possible. But the spring lasted less than a year and diminished to a trickle.
Will it come back again? Who can say. We know that the days when San Franciscans arrived at the railroad depot with their trunks to spend two weeks or a month of their summer at White Sulphur Springs, sitting on the shaded porch, wandering in the acres of flower gardens, "taking" the waters, are gone forever.
But there will be a park. Public tours could begin as soon as the transaction is completed. People can visit the gazebo, see where the spring used to be, wander the remnants of the garden.
And the Taylor name, like McCord and McCormick and so many of the pioneer names that the Open Space program has kept in our minds, will be preserved.
Unless (she said wickedly) it isn't. The news stories about the purchase have already pointed out that development of the park must await financing by, as the writer put it, "cash-strapped local government."
Does this mean we could see a Costco Mountain, or a Wal-Mart Park?
Say it won't be so.
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