LeBARON: Heated rail battles raged in county a century ago
Published: Sunday, February 12, 2012 at 4:01 a.m.
Last Modified: Sunday, February 12, 2012 at 8:22 a.m.
The latest attempt to derail the SMART train was deemed, officially, a failure a couple of weeks ago. But opponents of the railroad proposal say the fight is not over. This should not come as a surprise. Sonoma County factions have been fighting over railroads since the first "iron horse" chugged into town in the fall of 1870.
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Crowds gathered at the railroad tracks in 1905 to watch the last skirmish in what is known as The Battle of Sebastopol Avenue.
Some of the best of the "good old stories" in the annals of our history are, in fact, tales of railroad battles that get more colorful and draw bigger crowds with each telling.
Nobody argued with the premise that the area needed a railroad when it was first suggested. The town's new newspaper, in its first edition in 1857, predicted that rails were coming and that the sound of the steam whistle could be heard in the land.
It would have taken keen ears to make such a fantasy true. A functional railroad was still 13 years away.
Col. Peter Donahue, who built steam engines in his Union Iron Works, established the first regular passenger service with his San Francisco and North Pacific line in January of 1871.
Donahue looked like a shoo-in to collect the $5,000 per mile subsidy offered by Sonoma County to the first railroad company to build from county line to county line. He had completed the tracks from Donahue's Landing on the Petaluma River to Santa Rosa. But the Mendocino County line lay far to the north and there was another company with a plan in mind.
Milton Latham, a former governor and U.S. senator, had plans to build a rail network across and around Northern California that centered in Vallejo. He wanted that Sonoma County subsidy. His California Pacific, known as the Cal P, showed up in March and began laying track on the same route north where Donahue already was working. The game was on.
Donohue's all-Irish crews and Latham's Chinese workmen worked furiously, building two railroads, side-by-side, heading toward Healdsburg.
It was more of a contest than a fight — a winner-take-all race to see which of two competing rail lines would be first at the county line, north of Cloverdale.
Those who saw it and recorded their impressions indicate that it was fun to watch — at first.
The two companies were both making great time despite the imprecations in two languages and the mud, rocks and clods the two crews were shoveling into each other's roadbeds.
People came out from town in buggies and wagons to cheer for their favorites and place their bets. It has been said that a lot of money changed hands.
Soon enough, the Cal P's much larger force of Chinese workmen, 300 or more, forged ahead, laying an unbelievable mile of track per day. And, in April, on the advice of his financiers, Donahue sold the SF&NP to Latham.
By September, the powerful Central Pacific had stepped in, bought all of Latham's holdings and completed the rails to Cloverdale, and beyond, in time to collect the subsidy.
Just for the record, Donohue bought the railroad back because the Big Four of the CP — Crocker, Huntington, Hopkins and Stanford — decided that there was no real reason to push on into what they described as "coyote country."
By the start of the 20th century, Santa Rosa was a railroad hub, with the old SF&NP, now known as the California Northwestern, moving both passengers and freight along the north-south route and west to Guerneville. Meanwhile, Southern Pacific linked the county and its agricultural products to the rest of the nation with a line through the Sonoma Valley that connected to the transcontinental railroad.
In 1903, a third line was proposed, backed by Petaluma's leading milling family, the McNears, and the San Francisco sugar barons, the Spreckels. This was an electric railroad, a "juice" line, welcomed by all because it offered lower rates plus an interurban trolley service that would connect to street railways. This would bring the prosperous farmers and their wives directly into the heart of the shopping districts.
By the spring of 1905, the trolleys and freight cars were running between Petaluma and Sebastopol. But they were stopped way short of the connection with the Santa Rosa's street rails.
The problem was that the Petaluma and Santa Rosa electric company, to reach the downtown tracks it already owned, had to cross the California Northwestern main line within its yard limits.
The CNW owner, A.W. Foster, a Marin industrialist with a slew of business interests in the North Bay, was adamant that this upstart competition would be stopped.
Despite a petition signed by 92 merchants supporting the electric line and threatening to boycott Foster, he refused to allow a grade crossing.
The result was not one but two fierce encounters which collectively became known in railroading lore as The Battle of Sebastopol Avenue.
The first skirmish came in January, when the electric line crew brought a ready-made crossover on a flat car and began to saw through the California Northwestern tracks to make a space for it.
Before the crossing was in place, main line engines fitted with nozzles that could spray steam and boiling water rolled down the tracks from both directions, and the workmen ran for their lives. An innocent bystander was scalded, the only injury.
The electric line abandoned the crossing, for a time, and succeeded in using horse and mule teams to haul one of their trolleys across the mainline tracks onto its town-side rails.
They made it before Foster's war machines could be fired up. But the path was now blocked by a spur track to the Grace Brothers Brewery and Foster got a temporary injunction to stop them not in their tracks, but just short of their tracks.
The trolley was marooned there for two months. The frustrated Santa Rosa merchants could do no more than complain bitterly — and supply a "bus bridge," to use a modern term.
After a two-month court fight, the injunction was dissolved. On March 1, the truce ended.
The battle began before dawn when a Petaluma and Santa Rosa freight car loaded with what railroad historian Gilbert Kneiss termed, "a small army of workmen, armed with picks and shovels," pulled up to the main line with a crossover.
Foster's "mobile artillery" was boiling and ready, along with carloads of dirt to fill the crossing excavation as fast as it was dug.
It was a first-class mud fight and, amazingly, no one was seriously burned.
The electric crew managed to haul wagons onto the tracks as barricades to keep back the engines, but they smashed through them.
By noon a crowd had gathered. Kneiss says there were 3,000 people That sounds high for a town of 8,000, but who knows, word spreads.
As the dirt flew and the locomotives refueled with hot water, the track came down again. Banker Brush, a stockholder in the electric line, actually threw himself across the tracks to stop the engine. Mercifully, it stopped. Within inches. And the two factions engaged in a tug of war with the banker, electric crews holding him on, while the main line workers tried to pull him off.
At this point — finally — the police arrived, loaded the CNW workers into a paddy wagon and hauled them off to court.
The end came about 4 p.m. when, as Foster arrived from San Rafael with 150 more men, he was handed a restraining order. The court had decided in favor of the P&SR.
Taking no chances, the electric crew worked into the night and the crowd stuck around to cheer as, in the morning hours, the first electric car crossed over and went all the way to the courthouse.
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