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.
The town's lore comes from the Plaza and from the Valley. Residents will point you to the back room of the Sonoma Barracks where Todd is said to have painted the flag the night before the raising, and tell you how Vallejo, in full dress uniform, offered the Bear Flaggers his own brandy while waiting to be taken to Sutter's Fort. They'll point east to Buena Vista's 1857 vines and the European rootstock Haraszthy brought back that started an industry, and north to Glen Ellen, where Jack London wrote The Valley of the Moon at Beauty Ranch and died in 1916 with a Sonoma novel on his desk. And they will tell you, too, that Coast Miwok, Pomo, and Wappo families lived in this valley for thousands of years — and that the 1838 smallpox epidemic which swept 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.
