Sonoma California Retro Vintage Washed Cap - Charcoal Logo

The town's lore comes from the Plaza and from the Valley. Residents will point you to the back room of the Sonoma Barracks where Todd is said to have painted the flag the night before the raising, and tell you how Vallejo, in full dress uniform, offered the Bear Flaggers his own brandy while waiting to be taken to Sutter's Fort. They'll point east to Buena Vista's 1857 vines and the European rootstock Haraszthy brought back that started an industry, and north to Glen Ellen, where Jack London wrote The Valley of the Moon at Beauty Ranch and died in 1916 with a Sonoma novel on his desk. And they will tell you, too, that Coast Miwok, Pomo, and Wappo families lived in this valley for thousands of years — and that the 1838 smallpox epidemic which swept the Sonoma Valley remains the heaviest layer of that long history.

Walk Sonoma Plaza today and the town is still organized around it. Eight acres of lawns, paths, fountains, a pond, and a 1908 Mission Revival City Hall at the center, ringed on all four sides by an unbroken arc of adobe and brick — the same buildings that framed the pueblo when Vallejo laid it out in 1835 and the Bear Flaggers raised their standard in 1846. Mission San Francisco Solano stands on the northeast corner, the Sonoma Barracks beside it; the Bear Flag Monument, a bronze of a Bear Flagger raising the flag dedicated in 1932, marks the spot on the northeast lawn where Todd's flag went up. The Toscano, Swiss, and Sonoma Hotels face the square from the north and west. It is the largest town plaza in California, a National Historic Landmark district — and the only town square in the state where a sovereign republic was ever declared.

Why People Visit Sonoma California

Sonoma is the rare California town where the state's earliest chapters are still standing on the same square. Visitors come for the Plaza — the largest town plaza in California — and the adobes that ring it. They come for the Bear Flag Monument and the story of the 25-day California Republic. They come for Mission San Francisco Solano, the last of the California missions. They come for Buena Vista and the Sonoma Valley AVA, where California's premium wine country began. And they come because Sonoma is, in the most literal way, where California started.