The town's lore comes from the Plaza and from the Valley. Residents will point you to the precise corner of the Plaza where Todd painted the flag the night before the raising — a back room of the Sonoma Barracks. They'll tell you about the morning Vallejo, in full dress uniform, offered the Bear Flaggers his own brandy while waiting to be taken to Sutter's Fort. About Buena Vista's 1857 vines and the rootstock Haraszthy brought back from Europe that started a wine industry. About Jack London writing The Valley of the Moon at Beauty Ranch in Glen Ellen up the road, and dying there in 1916 with the manuscript of a Sonoma novel on the desk. Coast Miwok, Pomo, and Wappo families lived in the Valley for thousands of years; the 1838 smallpox epidemic that swept through the Sonoma Valley remains the heaviest layer of that long history.
Walk Sonoma Plaza today and the town is still organized around it: the adobe ring on every side, Mission Solano on the northeast corner, the Sonoma Barracks beside it, the Toscano Hotel and Swiss Hotel along the north edge, the Sonoma Hotel of 1880 to the west, the Bear Flag Monument standing on the northeast lawn where Todd's flag went up. The Plaza is a National Historic Landmark district. Beyond it the Sonoma Valley AVA runs north toward Glen Ellen and the Mayacamas; the Sonoma Coast lies forty miles west on the Pacific. Where California began — and where the flag was born.
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.
