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.
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 an 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 vines and earning the title father of California viticulture. The city formally incorporated in 1883.
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.
