Planes, trains & automobiles: The history of transportation in Santa Rosa

If you are underlining the milestones in the history of how Santa Rosans have come and gone in the past 150 years, put a line under the last day of 1870.

That's when the first train chugged into town. For 60 years, the daily life of the town was punctuated with train whistles. From 1870 to the 1930s, there were 'up trains' and 'down trains,' ten a day by the 1900s, 'in and out' trains carrying crops and shoppers from the farmlands.

Everyone rode those trains — students and salesmen, bank couriers and cargo-tenders, honeymooners and soldiers home from the wars. By the numbers: In 1906, the main north-south line, then known as the California Northwestern, carried 100,814 passengers in and out of this city of 9,000.

Next in the transportation milestones came the day in 1899 that Dr. James Jesse drove his 'Schelling' into a vegetable wagon, which was the only way to stop the first automobile in town.

Described by historians as 'a snorting buckboard,' it was one of a pair built by bicycle shop owner George Schelling and his brother Alex, and it brought Santa Rosa into the age of the automobile.

In 1868, the year of the city charter, the early settlers' hard use of the old Native American trails had worn them into what passed for roads. Next the streets and roads were graveled, even paved. They became highways, then freeways.

Santa Rosa and Mendocino avenues were State Route 101, taking travelers around our courthouse on the way to Portland or San Francisco. That changed in 1948 when a bypass (called a freeway but with stoplights) was built a block or two east of the railroad.

Raised to true freeway status in the 1960s, Highway 101 has been the subject of many debates in the past 50 years — bond issues for more lanes, more overpasses, improved access — all the markers of a growing city.

The final year of significance would be either 1923 or 1937, the first being the year that banker Frank Doyle assembled a group of San Francisco and North Bay civic leaders to end decades of 'just talk' about bridging the Golden Gate. It was in 1937 when 'the bridge that changed everything' was opened to traffic and the newly accessible communities north of the bay opened to all sorts of new economic possibilities.

Today's generations of Santa Rosans don't need to be told about how the 'age of the automobile' affected the design, the commerce and the composure of the town.

As Santa Rosa grew, air travel figured more prominently in our transportation. Any development in aviation was front-page news — Fred Wiseman's historic airmail flight from Petaluma in 1911, the barnstormers, the daredevils in the first mail plane from San Francisco in 1920, rides for $5 in a Ford Tri-Motor.

A municipal airport on Fountaingrove property, opened in 1929, was by 1936 a stop on a commercial airline's regular run from Eureka to San Francisco.

Meanwhile, Congressman Clarence Lea worked tirelessly through Depression times for a modern airport. Then came Pearl Harbor. Three days after Dec. 7, 1941, the Army Air Corps started condemnation proceedings on ranch land 7 miles north of town to build an airfield. At war's end the site became the Sonoma County Airport, now named for the 'Peanuts' creator Charles M. Schulz.

With complaints about commuter traffic mounting with the population figures, in 2017 Santa Rosa joined a two-county plan and the long-lost railroad came back to town.

SMART, which is not only a noun meaning train in the current vernacular but an acronym (Sonoma-Marin Area Rapid Transit), is where the city places that eternal hope for a smooth ride back to the future.