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.
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.
