Freestone Hotel filled with history

From the outside, the old Freestone Hotel looks like any other clapboard building from the Gold Rush era, but step inside and you enter a time machine. Jim Kidder’s time machine, to be specific.

“Everything has a story,” says Kidder, 89, about the treasures that line the walls of the old hotel in the center of town that has been his home since 1970.

He was born in Klamath Falls, Ore., and his family moved to Chicowhen he was 6 months old. After college at Chico State and a stint in the service in the South Pacific, he moved to a boarding house in North Beach. Eventually, he met his late partner, Tom Golden, a real estate developer.

Kidder always had an interest in plants, and the two often came up to Sonoma County on plant-buying expeditions. When they found out the old Freestone Hotel and neighboring plant nursery were for sale, they decided to buy them and move to the Freestone.

As Kidder explains, they rescued the property from “hippies” who nearly ruined the building when they moved out, ripping out wiring and cutting holes in the floor. The pair revamped the existing nursery business and renovated the 10,000-square-foot, 16-room building themselves, transforming it into a majestic home with three large rooms that are essentially galleries of artifacts from their remarkable lives.

Guided by countless trips to Mexico, an eye for artwork and a general interest in all things collectible, the couple’s possessions date from the 1500s to the present. There’s a display case full of paperweights, a carousel horse Kidder “made sure was left over” from his time as director of the Sonoma County Fair Flower Show in the 1980s, a complete set of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves cardboard masks from the 1930s and a wall full of knick-knacks that “even the cleaning lady” hasn’t touched for more than 30 years.

The oldest piece on the property is a small wooden table purchased from a young couple in Mexico that dates back to the 1500s. Arguably the most delicate piece is an intricate Tree of Life statue from Oaxaca made of wires and plaster.

“The only reason to have anything is we just liked it,” Kidder says. “You would have a hard time deciding what is valuable and what is junk.”

There are, however, a few things that would never be mistaken for junk. A majority of the pieces have a connection to the environmental artists Christo and his wife, Jeanne-Claude.

Kidder and Golden met them in 1976 when they came to Sonoma County to create their epic “Running Fence” installation, which covered 24.5 miles between Sonoma and Marin counties. Golden introduced himself to the famous duo at one of the first community meetings they attended in their effort to win over the local residents, including many of the 59 ranching families whose land they asked to use.

Kidder recalls that Golden assured Christo he “was gonna get his fence,” and their relationship blossomed from there. Golden became the director for every major project Christo and Jeanne-Claude did, including the “Pont Neuf Wrapped” in Paris and “The Umbrellas” in Japan and California.

Golden and Kidder donated the majority of their Christo-related collection to the Sonoma County Museum, but there are still many mementos from this relationship at the Freestone Hotel.

There’s a framed postage stamp with an image of the Pont Neuf Bridge, plus a signed letter of appreciation from a French post office official and a piece of the Berlin Wall, both gifts from Jeanne-Claude.

An 18-foot section of the Running Fence that was given to Golden in 1976 after the installation was taken down now hangs in the TV room, and one of the only original sketches of the current “Over the River” project in Colorado hangs in the cathedral-like front room.

The back doors of the Freestone Hotel open to an expansive garden that once was Kidder’s retail Wishing Well Nursery. It was renowned in Sonoma County for its flowers and sculptures, including a replica of the Statue of Liberty that was moved from New York.

The statue became the centerpiece of a 100th anniversary “Liberty Weekend” celebration in 1986, a huge party at the hotel that included the Analy High School band, Sebastopol’s mayor and several members of Congress.

Other notable statues date to 1915 and are still visible behind slowly creeping vines - an elaborate stone griffin and a larger than life ring of “garland ladies.” According to Kidder, these statues were “extras” from the Palace of Fine Arts renovation. The Palace was built for the ?1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition and will celebrate its 100th anniversary this year.

In addition to the fuschias and rhododendrons Wishing Well Nursery specialized in, tourists were drawn by these statues for 38 years while the nursery was open to the public.

Nowadays, the hotel and garden are private. Kidder lives comfortably in his historic home with his dog Molly, and often is visited by friends and helpers. The greenhouse is now a light-filled painting studio where he works on watercolors.

Kidder plans to enter one painting in the Art for Life contest this fall, staged by Face to Face, a local organization that works to end HIV in Sonoma County.

Kidder says he has a plan for everything on the property, which is on the list of national historic places and a designated Sonoma County landmark. He knows what will stay with the building and what will go when he is no longer here.

At this point, he says, the objects he’s collected almost “look like they belong here.”