‘Sonoma County Stories’ at Museum of Sonoma County tells history of area in fresh new ways

People who think they know local history through luminaries like Luther Burbank, Jack London and men whose names appear on buildings, monuments and big headstones in the cemetery, will now get a different and deeper story when they visit the Museum of Sonoma County.

The museum, housed in the old 1911 Santa Rosa Post Office building on Seventh Street, has scrubbed its 20-year-old local history display downstairs in favor of a new permanent exhibit that interprets Sonoma County’s history through a fresh and wider lens.

Inspired by dozens of oral history interviews conducted over several decades by local historian and longtime Press Democrat columnist Gaye LeBaron, the new $1.2 million interactive exhibit called “Sonoma County Stories” offers the perspectives of a multitude of individuals, groups and communities who helped shape the county over the last 200 years. The collection includes Native Americans, Latinos, Asian and African Americans, European and other immigrants, farmers, grassroots activists and everyday folk. Not all of them are famous or important by conventional standards, but their efforts and labor are central to Sonoma County’s story, said Eric Stanley, the associate director and history curator for the museum.

The exhibit, in the works since before the pandemic, opens Saturday to the public at 11 a.m. with a welcome, festivities and a ribbon cutting. Free admission will be offered all weekend.

It was created by The Sibbett Group, which also designed the new House of Happy Walls exhibit in Jack London State Historic Park, and is equipped with interactive touch screens and a listening stations where visitors can tune in to edited versions of LeBaron’s in-depth interviews.

A veteran reporter and North Coast native, LeBaron frequently recounted local history in a lively, human and unvarnished way in stories and a daily column that ran for years. After dramatically scaling back in 2001, she retired for good in 2022.

Over the years she sat down for long chats with people like David Pesonen, a forestry student and Sierra Club employee who led the fight to prevent PG&E from building a nuclear power plant at Bodega Head in the early 1960s. She talked to big wheels like Clover Stornetta founder Gene Benedetti and magnate and philanthropist Henry Trione. She also mined the memories of colorful characters like free-spirit artist Bill Wheeler who founded a quintessential hippie commune in the west county in the 1970s.

LeBaron’s interviews lend a richness and human context to our understanding of Sonoma County’s history, said Staci Pastis, a member of the museum board of directors. As chairwoman for development, she led a major fundraising effort for the exhibit and accompanying educational programs that include a future Sonoma County storytelling festival that will invite even more people to share their own stories.

“Gaye’s oral histories are so incredibly diverse. She was interested in people who were interesting people, like Song Wong Bourbeau, who was Asian American, ” Pastis said, referring to the late restaurant owner whose life spoke to the Chinese American experience in Santa Rosa’s Chinatown in the early part of the 20th century. “What is so beautiful about it is, it was not by design. It is an incredibly diverse group of oral histories. It’s got everybody’s experience.”

Another chapter breaks down communities not by geography but by commonalities, Stanley said. Towns tend to grow around rivers or at crossroads and are more about commerce. This display defines communities as places where people gather because of their shared heritage and shared ideas, he said, like the Chinese American community, the African American community and the Utopian communities like Fountain Grove that flocked to Sonoma County in the 19th century.

It also challenges what might be a few sacred cows in some quarters and asks visitors to question familiar stories they accept as true or significant because it’s what they’ve always heard. But history can be told from many viewpoints depending on who is doing the telling.

“Some stories are left out. Some stories are told at certain times for particular reasons,” Stanley said. He pointed to a touch screen about the 1846 Bear Flag Revolt, when a group of American settlers in Mexican-controlled Alta California staged a short-lived insurrection and ran a flag with a grizzly bear up a pole in Sonoma, laying claim to “The Republic of California.”

The display, he added, is a deconstruction of that story.

“This is the source of our state flag. It’s this event that happened, that people talked about and told about. But is it important?” Stanley said, adding, “It’s not hugely important … Unless you’re an academic historian, how do we understand our history? People share stories. That is how you come to understand history but the stories aren’t always true or the most important. How does one story get selected and (be) representative of everybody?”

Sonoma County’s story is told through chapters strung chronologically throughout the museum’s mezzanine, beginning with the land itself and the diverse Native American communities who first inhabited it, many with their own distinct languages and culture.

Decisions about what to include in the new exhibit came partly out of a series of “visioning sessions” with various community groups that started before the COVID pandemic, Museum Executive Director Jeff Nathanson said. The exhibit accomplishes what the museum has been trying to do for years — which is to be more inclusive of different communities within the larger community, to represent a variety of cultural perspectives and “embrace the diversity of the county,” he said.

“This exhibit has a little bit of a lot in it. We’re trying to include everybody but that is part of the challenge of this ongoing program,” he said. “We intend this to be the starting point for a relationship that our community can build with the museum, with this being a place where people can continue to add their stories.”

Pastis said there will be a place within the museum where people can record their own personal histories and reflections. A showpiece of the space is a wall to ceiling glass vitrine stretching over 40 feet overlooking the ground floor. Called The Wall of Time, it represents a literal and figurative window onto history with dozens of objects from the museum’s collection.

The exhibit is intended to be dynamic, Stanley said, with new stories continually added to the digital archive, Several new interviews have recently been completed by LeBaron. Others have contributed as well. Retired Press Democrat columnist Chris Smith interviewed former Sonoma County Supervisor Ernie Carpenter and Brett Crozier from Santa Rosa, who was relieved of his command of a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier after raising the alarm about an onboard COVID-19 outbreak.

“We’ll continue to interview people, and there will be a programmatic element to this. And we’ll have an annual storytelling festival where we’ll invite all sorts of people from the community to come tell their story. That’s the whole heart and spirit of this, to let people tell their stories in their own words,” he said.

The first oral histories

LeBaron began her oral history project more than 30 years ago with Talmadge “Babe” Wood, who grew up on a ranch on River Road established by his grandfather. Excited by the possibilities of the REO Speedwagon, the precursor to the pickup truck, he bought an automobile agency that remained in the family for 80 years.

“I sat next to him at a birthday party and he got to talking about growing up,” LeBaron said. “He was a good talker. I thought to myself,’ I’ve got to get this guy on tape.’ So I hired a videographer and we went out to Spring Lake Village to talk to him.”

Wood was among the first ranchers to participate in The Bracero Program, which brought Mexican men legally to the U.S. starting in World War II to do short-term work on ranches and farms.

LeBaron, 87, said her favorite oral history interview video was with Rafael Morales, who through grit and unyielding persistence, came to the U.S. from Oaxaca, Mexico, and became a leader in the local Latino community.

“He told me about 17 times being sent back and finally getting on a truck headed to the Grace Ranch in Healdsburg to pick apples or grapes or pears,” she recalled. “ And when the workers he was with were sent back because they were in The Bracero Program and he was not, he just walked up and down the streets of Windsor knocking on doors and saying ‘Do you need any help?’” until he found a rancher willing to take a chance on him after he vowed he could learn to drive a tractor and prune. It was his honest plain speaking and his cadence in relating his story that convinced LeBaron, more accustomed to telling stories in written words, that oral history offered something that print could not.

“Just the way he talked made me believe in the digital operation, which was fairly new at the time,” she said of the interview, recorded in 1995. “The way he talks is what makes it perfect in the same way that it was with Babe or with Hugh Codding being on a ladder building Town and Country (shopping center) when a guy comes to the foot of the ladder and offers to buy the whole thing, and with that money he started Montgomery Village. It’s Hazel Mitchell talking about saving Bodega Head and Helen Rudee (the first woman elected to the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors) talking about not being afraid to be the only woman on the board because ‘I have a lot of brothers and I know how to kick.’ These are the things that make people come to life.”

Nathanson said the project, with an ultimate cost of $1.5 million including educational programming for the community, was made possible by the support of more than 260 contributors, as well as city, county and state grants.

Among the under represented groups in the community who are included in Sonoma County Stories are the Filipinos and Native Americans. Laws barring interracial marriages brought the two groups together in a blended community, with Filipino immigrants finding wives among Native American women.

Cheryl Boden, a retired teacher from Windsor, participated in the oral history project. Her grandmother was Southern Pomo and her mother, who was born on the Dry Creek Rancheria, married a Filipino.

“People are unaware that we exist in this community. My mother was the youngest of 13 children. I have hundreds of cousins among multiple generations,” she said. “There are so many of us in this community that walk among us who you would never know, are Indigenous to Sonoma County or who are, like myself, of mixed race.”

She said she’s excited to see the new exhibit.

“The reason I agreed to do it is that it’s important to share our stories from our own authentic voices,” she said. “Not stories about us but from us.”

(Editor’s note: The Press Democrat is a financial sponsor of the exhibit.)

You can reach Staff Writer Meg McConahey at 707-521-5204 or meg.mcconahey@pressdemocrat.com. On X @smallscribe.