Coast Miwok, Southern Pomo, and Wappo people had lived in the Sonoma Valley — Jack London's "Valley of the Moon" — for thousands of years before any of this. Father José Altimira raised Mission San Francisco Solano on the north edge of what would become the plaza on July 4, 1823 — the twenty-first, last, and northernmost of the California missions, and the only one founded under Mexican rather than Spanish rule. The mission was secularized in 1834. General Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo arrived from Monterey the following year and in 1835 laid out the Mexican pueblo of Sonoma around its eight-acre plaza, building barracks on the north side and his own home, Lachryma Montis, just west of town. Twelve years later, the Bear Flag Party rode in. After the United States took California in 1848 and statehood followed on September 9, 1850, Sonoma settled into its second chapter — agriculture, wine, and the railroad. Agoston Haraszthy founded Buena Vista Winery just east of town in 1857, planting European Vitis vinifera and earning the title father of California viticulture. The city formally incorporated in 1883.
Our Sonoma retro logo carries the California Republic bear and star — the same bear and star Todd hand-painted on the Plaza in 1846, the same pair that became the state flag in 1911. The "Est. 1850" beneath them marks California statehood, the year the Republic settled finally into the United States. Rendered in black-and-white with a hand-printed, distressed feel, the design reads less like a souvenir and more like a piece of California's actual paperwork — the original flag, the original star, the original year. On a tee or a cap it carries the simplest possible statement: California started here.
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.
