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A big tree, a little church, a restoration
Santa Rosa Park Planning and Development Director Richard Hovden admires the available light in the newly refurbished Church of the One Tree, Thursday Dec. 23, 2010 in Santa Rosa.
(Kent Porter / Press Democrat)Published: Saturday, December 25, 2010 at 3:00 a.m.
Last Modified: Sunday, December 26, 2010 at 8:23 a.m.
Once again, Christmas has come shining through the darkness of winter storms and the gloom of an economic year that cost us much in the way of human needs.
It may come as a surprise, unsettling as the budgetary concerns have been, that Santa Rosans got some fine gifts this year. A trio of treasures, you might say.
One is from the Webley family. Jennifer and John Webley's project to restore the McDonald House back to its 19th-century grandeur has captured the interest of the community.
Santa Rosans have been detouring by way of the city's fanciest avenue for the past two years to check the work in progress on Mark McDonald's 1878 “summer cottage.”
As the crown jewel of the first truly upscale (long before the term was in use) addition to the young city, it represents our Age of Elegance. What the Webleys have done is given coming generations another reason to consider the town's interesting past.
The DeTurk Round Barn on Donahue Street is a gift not quite ready to be unwrapped yet, but very soon. It comes with the promise of good times — neighborhood parties, weddings, and theater in the round — in the town's historic West End neighborhood.
One of three round barns built in Sonoma County at the end of the 19th century, when the circular structures were an architectural fad, this one comes with the echo of horses' hooves and the cheers of the crowds, a significant part of Santa Rosa's racing past.
Finally, the best-kept secret in the city this year, the newly renovated, shored up, beautified Church Built from One Tree.
The bottom line is that the church, which has long sat neglected at the northern edge of Juilliard Park with its back to the 400 block of Sonoma Avenue, now has purpose. It has become a first-rate little assembly hall.
Work on the church, which dates to 1873 — oldest of the three buildings — has been going on slowly, without fanfare and without much expense to Santa Rosa taxpayers (the best part) for more than a decade.
Its new life means that it's time to tell its story one more time.
The most interesting part of the history of this church has been muffled, lost, even, by the outcries over where it should go and what should happen to it.
Truth is, it was a landmark long before hometown hero Robert Ripley drew it for his hugely successful “Believe It Or Not!” cartoon.
In fact, when it was featured in the Ripley cartoon, sometime in the early 1920s, it had already been “written up” in the nation's press, achieving what Guerneville lumberman Rufus Murphy had hoped to accomplish when he sold the congregation the redwood lumber for the new church at Ross and B streets (think city parking lot in today's world) and told them proudly that it had all come from one single giant redwood.
His plan was to make this fact as widely known as possible to promote the sale of redwood.
It was originally the First Baptist Church, a direct descendent of the Lebanon Baptist congregation, the earliest (1852) Protestant group in Santa Rosa. The first church was a tiny structure built in the short-lived community of Franklin near the Carrillo Adobe and rolled down the creek on logs to a site on the new town plaza (now Old Courthouse Square).
When talk of this giant tree began, some members of the congregation were dubious. So a well-respected attorney named Thomas J. Butts filed an affidavit with the county attesting to his time, in the early 1870s, as an employee of Murphy's mill.
His official testimony describing the circumstances of the tree's arrival at the mill, the sawing and the delivery to the church site, was read from the pulpit in 1900.
The tree, according to Butts (and Murphy), was 18 feet in diameter. It was felled a mile northwest of Guerneville, near Armstrong Woods, by John K. Wood. It was cut into saw logs at the site by Ferdinand Scott, hauled to the truck landing by James Hinkley and to the mill by William C. Smith.
At the mill the logs were sawed by Albert Billington and edged by a man named Harrison, supervised by foreman Alonzo Hewitt.
Butts himself planed the lumber under the watchful eye of Murphy, who told him where the lumber was promised and how he intended to advertise the fact that it was all from one tree.
Half a century would pass before Robert Ripley's early years as a syndicated cartoonist. He was a Santa Rosa boy, grew up on Orchard Street, attended Lewis School, Santa Rosa High School and, significantly, Sunday school at the First Baptist Church.
He may have remembered hearing, as a 10-year-old in 1900, lawyer Butts' testimony from the pulpit. Or he may have followed the occasional stories in national newspapers. At any rate, he sketched the church for his “Believe It Or Not!” and printed beneath the picture, “Church Built From One Tree ... . My mother attended this church.”
He neglected to mention that the floor was pine.
Fast-forward another 25 years or so, to 1957, when the City of Santa Rosa determined that Ross and B, across from the California Theater, would be an ideal site for public parking.
The Baptists, who had already decided it was time for a new church, graciously offered the old, famous one to any nonprofit that could raise the money to relocate it.
With the city assuming ownership, The Press Democrat took on the fund-raising task. With service clubs and citizens rallying 'round, the building trades volunteering services, ladies' clubs holding rummage sales and schoolchildren emptying their piggy banks, the campaign collected $10,000 and secured the lot next to the park. The construction firm of Rapp, Christensen & Foster took the building apart and rebuilt it on the Ellis Street site.
Now the talk was what would become of it. In 1970, a group called Friends of Robert Ripley dedicated the structure in his memory and raised funds for maintenance.
In 1982, in an agreement with the company that owned Ripley museums in several large cities, it became the smallest — and most certainly the most obscure — of the Ripley Museum chain.
It was stocked with curiosities supplied by the Ripley Museum firm, including a two-headed calf with six legs, a fish with fur and a wax figure of Ripley at a desk cluttered with his cartoons.
The museum, which drew a small number of visitors each year, survived a steeple fire, a windstorm that damaged the stained-glass windows, and persistent attempts of vagabonds to use it as shelter.
The Ripley Museum closed in 1998 and its contents were returned to the franchise company.
Which brings us to Rich Hovden and the city's Recreation and Parks Department. Rich, who is also project director for the glorious resurrection of the DeTurk Round Barn, is the planning and development manager for city parks.
He is a man with a deep appreciation for history. He keeps a close eye on our landmarks.
The city-owned building isn't really a park building, although it borders the park. And Hovden, who considered it part of his “province,” noted, about 1990, that it was, as he put it, “deteriorating quickly.”
When the museum closed in '98, it was clear,” he said, “The city was keeping it up, minimally, but it needed more love and care than the park budget could afford.”
Proposals to move it into the park, facing Santa Rosa Avenue, or to “Spaghetti Park” along Sonoma Avenue came and went without action. And Hovden decided the city could not allow it to “just rot away.”
He explored all avenues — grants from the State Resources Department to pay for structural work and painting and restoration of the stained-glass windows. Add volunteer labor, and work that city employees could do as their regular duties allowed.
Gradually, the project began to take shape. It only took 20 years, yet another example of LeBaron's Third Law of Civic Progress that says, “Everything takes 20 years.”
The result is a sweet, little 2,000-square-foot hall with shiny new wall panels and floors, a dressing room for brides (with a lighted make-up mirror, which we all know one cannot get married without), electrical outlets and Wi-Fi for classes and meetings. The foundation is new, the siding and the roof are new.
It is, as you might guess, for rent.
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