Smith: Renaming Annadel State Park a fitting tribute to Henry Trione

What Henry Trione did for Sonoma County - more than we’ll ever know - was so exceptional that we need to make, for him, a rare and bold exception.

I speak, of course, of the proposal to rename in Trione’s honor the jewel that is Annadel State Park. The co-founding of the park was one of his proudest achievements. If your initial response to the idea is to wince, you’re entitled.

“Annadel” is a beautiful name that the 5,000-acre park in southeast Santa Rosa has worn well since its creation late in 1971. The mind naturally scans for ways to honor Trione that wouldn’t require shelving the historic name that purportedly started out in the late 19th Century as “Annie’s Dell.”

Perhaps Empire College could be renamed Trione College. The private business and law school got its start when Trione purchased the clock-capped former bank building on Old Courthouse Square in 1961 and scouted for something worthy to put in it.

There may be naming options also at the Wells Fargo Center for the Arts. It was a bankrupt former church when, in 1981, Trione became key to a deal to purchase and transform it into the Luther Burbank Center for the Arts.

BUT THAT PARK, it was Trione’s crowning philanthropic glory. He could have used his business connections and resources to take part in developing those hills into an elite housing development, but that’s not what he regarded the right thing to do.

In the 1960s, he’d become a partner in the then-new Oakland Raiders at the urging of homebuilder Wayne Valley, one of the team’s original owners. Valley told him of his intention to develop the former Annadel Farms on the edge of Santa Rosa with 5,000 homes.

Trione recalled his reaction to the plan in his memoir, “Footprints of the Baker Boy.” He wrote that he was familiar with the property, having ridden it with his fellow equestrians in the Sonoma County Trail Blazers.

“I knew how beautiful it was,” he wrote. “And, as much as I liked Wayne, I felt the scale of his proposal was overwhelming.

“The land, bordering Santa Rosa on the east, seemed to me to be a perfect site for a park.”

WHAT HAPPENED between that moment in 1969 and the deeding to the state of thousands of acres of stunning new parkland on Dec. 23, 1971, was complex and involved many players.

But Trione, his vision, his advocacy and financial contributions were indispensable to the deal. Along the way, several parcels that had been part of Annadel Farms were sold, including land that Trione purchased for a polo field and that his sons developed into the Wild Oak residential project.

Had Trione viewed the entire former Annadel Farms property as an investment/development opportunity, he might have profited richly. Instead he donated more than $1 million to assure that the vast share of it would become and forever remain a public park.

IT’S SERIOUS BUSINESS to consider changing the name of a longstanding, beloved landmark. But this is an extraordinary circumstance, an opportunity for Sonoma County to pay lasting and appropriate tribute to someone who loved this place deeply and graced it with more caring, zeal, leadership and financial support than we can comprehend.

For Annadel to no longer be Annadel would be jarring for a time, but new names do catch on. When the community arts center Trione helped to create was rebranded the Wells Fargo Center, I predicted that most people would continue to call it the LBC. Wrong.

The name of the splendid recreation area adjacent to Spring Lake Regional Park has already changed once. At the very outset 40-plus years ago it was Annadel Farms State Park.

I don’t know what the area was called by the Southern Pomos who prized it for the obsidian they worked into knives, scrapers and arrowheads. It’s been referred to by several names since it was part of the Rancho Los Guilucos land grant of 1837.

How fitting and grand should it now become Henry F. Trione State Park.

Chris Smith is at 707-521-5211 and chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @CJSPD.