Sears Point is as colorful as its namesake

Sears Point, at the southern end of Sonoma Valley, was named for pioneer Franklin Sears, who was born in Indiana in 1817 and spent his childhood in Missouri.

At the age of 27, he set out for Oregon with a rifle, a mule, a dollar fifty in cash, and his cousin, Granville Swift. Along the way, Swift veered south to California. Sears kept going to Oregon, but didn’t stay long. One Oregon winter was enough for him. Sears got so sick of the rain that one morning he announced, “I’m going to California,” saddled up his mule, and left in a downpour.

Reaching Sutter’s Fort, he met up with Swift again and the two men hunted deer and elk in the Central Valley. The following year, 1846, Swift, along with Franklin’s brother John, were two of the “Bear Flaggers” who seized Sonoma and declared California an independent country. John Sears’ wife is said to have provided cloth for the Bear Flag from a supply she’d brought by wagon all the way from Missouri.

Franklin probably would have been there too but for the fact that he was still recovering from injuries suffered from falling off his horse. After the U.S. took over California from the Bear Flaggers a few weeks later, Sears volunteered for the army. At an engagement near San Diego, seven bullets riddled his buckskin shirt. As one of the few American survivors of that battle, he earned the nickname, “Hero of San Pasquale.”

When the war ended, Sears married Swift’s sister Margaret and the couple moved onto a ranch south of the pueblo of Sonoma. There they built a home of hand-hewn redwood. Later, Sears and Swift purchased 15,000 acres of land for a huge cattle ranch that stretched from Sears Point to Lakeville on the Petaluma River.

In old age, Sears suffered from dementia and sometimes wandered off aimlessly into the hills. When his absence was discovered, the local fire bell would ring and the community would gather to search the hills until he was found.

In a way, Sears Point itself also has gone adrift in the landscape. As its name implies, it originally jutted into San Pablo Bay and was surrounded by water. Extensive reclamation of the tidelands around it in the late 19th and early 20th centuries left Sears Point high and dry. Today, its original relationship to the bay is a hazy memory at best.

But that won’t necessarily be true forever. Rising sea level and efforts to restore tidal wetlands are gradually bringing the bay closer. Sears Point probably could be a “point” again in the not-so-distant future.