Origins of Bloomfield’s name up for debate

Bloomfield is a community located in the southwest corner of the county, halfway, as the crow flies, between Sebastopol and Tomales in Marin. Several stories recount the origin of its name. One holds that Larkin Cockrill, who organized a wagon train from Missouri to Sonoma County in 1853, built the second house there and named the settlement after a former home in Bloomfield, Kentucky. Or was it Bloomfield, Missouri? Larkin was from South Carolina and there’s no written record that he, or his wife, Didamia Stamps, ever lived in those Bloomfields. But the two were married in Kentucky and did live in Missouri on their way west.

George Woodson, another early settler, is also rumored to have come from Bloomfield, Kentucky. But his wife, Rebecca, recalled that when settlers petitioned for a post office in 1856, George suggested naming it after Frederick Gustavus Blume, the owner of the Rancho Cañada de Pogolimi, which had included the land on which the town sat.

Coincidentally or not, blume in German means “bloom” or “blossom.” A native of Saxony (now part of Germany), Blume was trained as a surgeon and worked on whaling ships in the Pacific. During one voyage he rode along in the harpoon boat. As they approached a whale, it crushed the craft with its fin, sending everyone into the water. With Ahab-like desperation, Blume grabbed onto the whale. A harpoon from another boat barely missed his head and passed through the lower part of his hand. Rescued, Blume bore the harpoon scar for the rest of his life.

Afterwards, Blume went into the mercantile business in Hawaii and then San Francisco, before setting up shop on the Sonoma Plaza. There he met and married Maria Dawson, widow of Rancho Cañada de Pogolimi’s original owner.

Moving to the rancho, Blume brought a small stock of trade goods. One night in 1849, a group of native people returning from the gold country camped near his house. They ended up buying everything Blume had to sell for 18 pounds of gold dust - worth nearly a half-million dollars today.

After the Bloomfield (or Blumefield) post office was established, a street grid was laid out. As a result of the hunger of ever-growing San Francisco, it briefly became the county’s second-biggest town, fueled by a “potato boom.” Demand was so high for the “Bodega Reds” that one grower received 1,000 acres of land for 1,000 sacks of potatoes. Bloomfield was the potato capital of California.

Things settled down by 1880. With a population of about 250, Bloomfield boasted a telegraph office, stores, hotels, churches, blacksmith and wagon shops, a flour mill, a school and one lawyer. A daily stagecoach connected it with the rest of the county. But without water or railroad access, it was predicted that “the town will never be much larger than it is now, as communication with the city is too remote.” At last count in 2010, Bloomfield’s population was still just 345.

The other interpretation of the name has nothing to do with Kentucky or Missouri or a German doctor on a whaling boat. Every year, about this time, it earns its name once again from the “many and varied wildflowers that rise up in the spring.”