Where the California state flag was born — Sonoma Plaza, June 14, 1846. Before sunrise on June 14, 1846, about thirty American settlers rode south out of the Sacramento Valley, crossed into the Mexican pueblo of Sonoma, and took General Mariano Vallejo into custody at his home on the north edge of the town's eight-acre plaza. They had with them a strip of unbleached cotton on which one of them, William Todd, had hand-painted a grizzly bear, a five-pointed star, a red bar at the bottom, and the words "California Republic." They raised that flag over Sonoma Plaza and declared an independent republic — the only republic California has ever had. It lasted twenty-five days. On July 9, 1846, the United States flag was raised over the same plaza, ending the California Republic and folding Alta California into the Mexican-American War. The hand-painted Bear Flag became the basis of the state flag of California, formally adopted in 1911. Sonoma Plaza is still the largest town plaza in California — and the Bear Flag still flies there on the anniversary every June.
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.
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.
