Descendants of founders and famous sustain ties to Sonoma County’s past

They are among the most widely recognized figures in Sonoma County history: author Jack London, Santa Rosa founder Maria Carrillo and Gen. Mariano Vallejo, once the most powerful man in Mexican-controlled California.

They signify names attached to cities and schools, or in London’s case to books known around the world and a legend of adventure swollen to near mythic proportion.

Everyone has ancestors, and therein interesting stories from the family tree. But most lack someone famous in their roots.

Still, in Sonoma County, the chances are good of rubbing elbows with the descendants of one of these historical personages, because they live and work among us, albeit it in relative anonymity.

Jack London’s great-granddaughter lives in a modest home in Rincon Valley, roughly 10 miles from the beloved Beauty Ranch in the Valley of the Moon immortalized by London, where he rode on horseback a little more than a century ago and compared the air to wine, with rolling hills of grapes, red with autumn flame.

Vallejo’s great-grandson lives in Sonoma, the pueblo the Mexican general founded in 1835, the oldest city in the county and where in his old age, his vast land holdings virtually gone, the general reflected on his youth of strength and riches.

And several generations of Carrillo progeny live in Santa Rosa, not far from the crumbling adobe that represents Santa Rosa’s first house on the sprawling land grant that gave the city its name. In the early 1800s, the ranch supported a herd of 1,500 horses and 3,000 cattle and sheep.

On a holiday weekend where we reflect on our national heritage, we retain a closer connection to these iconic historic personalities through their living bloodlines - the survivors who haven’t strayed far from the lands their forebearers cultivated and cherished.

They stoke our curiosity about the past, inform our present, and remind us of the need to safeguard our historic places.

Larry Carrillo

As a descendant of Santa Rosa’s first nonnative settlers, Larry Carrillo feels a responsibility to preserve his historical heritage.

He has the keys to the gate of the metal fence that surrounds the ruins of the Carrillo Adobe, and his family led efforts to put a protective roof over its crumbling walls to keep the rain from further eroding Santa Rosa’s oldest building.

He’s helped retrieve posts and beams from the adobe that were taken by vandals and later found in a homeless encampment.

For Carrillo, it’s personal. It was his great-great-great-grandmother, Maria Ygnacia Lopez de Carrillo, who occupied the adobe, built circa 1838, when she became one of a handful of single Californio women to be given a land grant in what was then part of Mexico.

Larry Carrillo is descended from one of Doña Maria’s younger daughters, Marta, who married Joaquin Carrillo, a second cousin and part of another branch of the Carrillo family with deep roots in early California.

“There’s a lot of responsibility for people of founding families. We need to stay involved,” said Carrillo, 73, a board member of the Historical Society of Santa Rosa.

His daughter, Kelly Carrillo Fernandez, 48, also a board member, looked toward the fallen remains of the adobe on Friday. “I’m hoping in our lifetime this is honored and preserved in some way,” she said.

The adobe and surrounding property is now owned by a private developer who has plans to build 165 condo dwellings, but also agreed to maintain and stabilize what remains of the adobe as part of a 2-acre park.

Carrillo wants to make certain the foundation is not built upon, since he sees as much educational value in that, as trying to reconstruct the adobe, which may have been built on the remains of a slightly earlier mission outpost abandoned by the Catholic Church.

He said that ultimately it’s up to the public to decide, although the city planning department may have more say. That doesn’t put him at ease.

“Santa Rosa has a horrible record of what they’ve done with historical things - from the courthouse, to the (Carnegie) library, to the Hogue House,” he said referring to landmarks that were knocked down or neglected and suffered irreversible damage.

The Carrillo Adobe is the poster child for that neglect, even though it represents Santa Rosa’s very beginning.

It started when Doña Maria, a widow and her nine children, headed north from San Diego around 1836, traveling 500 miles in an ox cart on El Camino Real. She wanted to be closer to her daughter, Benicia, who was married to Gen. Mariano Vallejo, the Mexican military commander of Alta California living in the pueblo of Sonoma.

In 1838, Vallejo granted Doña Maria permission to settle in an area north of Sonoma, along Santa Rosa Creek. Her sons, aided by native labor and her son-in-law, Salvador Vallejo, built the large adobe.

The amount of land Carrillo and her family were granted in the early 1840s to raise cattle and grow crops is mind boggling now.

The 8,800-acre Cabeza de Santa Rosa grant took in parts of Rincon and Bennett valleys and the current downtown.

“It was where all the good farmland was, not as far as the lagoon (Laguna de Santa Rosa) with all the lakes and water,” Larry Carrillo said.

Doña Maria’s children also were beneficiaries of large land grants.

Her oldest son, Joaquin, received the 13,300-acre Llano de Santa Rosa encompassing Sebastopol. Daughter Josefa’s husband, Yankee sea captain Henry Fitch, was granted 48,840-acre Rancho Sotoyome in Healdsburg. Daughter Ramona’s husband, ship captain John Wilson, was awarded the 18,800-acre Los Guilicos land grant near Kenwood.

But much of the lands were lost to waves of settlers in the aftermath of the California Gold Rush and ineffective court battles drawn out over years to try to evict squatters and protect property rights.

“Americans took their land. They weren’t money rich. They were land rich. They had a lot of cattle,” Larry Carrillo said.

Doña Maria died in 1849 at the age of 52. Her son, Julio, who inherited the bulk of the Rancho Cabeza de Santa Rosa, donated some of the land to build a courthouse and lay out the town of Santa Rosa.

Larry Carrillo said he admires the diversity and toughness of his ancestors. The treatment they received from the newly arrived Anglos makes him sympathetic to the prejudicial treatment other minorities have experienced.

And although Doña Maria, a strong Catholic, was said to be well-liked by Indians, “we were taking their land, trying to change their culture by converting them to Christianity,” he said.

Vallejo Haraszthy

When sculptor Jim Callahan was looking to get the details right for the newly installed statue of Gen. Mariano Vallejo in Sonoma Plaza, he didn’t have to go far.

He studied the profiles of local resident Vallejo Haraszthy and his son, Sean, to get the lines of the general’s chin and nose.

“With Val, if you put some mutton chops on him, he could be a pretty good likeness (to Gen. Vallejo),” Callahan said.

Haraszthy, 69, is not only the great-grandson of Vallejo, the founder of Sonoma and one of the most influential figures in early California history, but also of Agoston Haraszthy, a colorful Hungarian nobleman who’s been called the father of California viticulture.

Val Haraszthy’s distinctive family roots are traced to the 1863 marriage of Vallejo’s daughter, Natalia, and Haraszthy’s son, Attila, at the Sonoma Mission. The ceremony was part of a double wedding that also included Vallejo daughter, Jovita, and Haraszthy’s son, Arpad.

“I’m just part of this lucky sperm club,” Val Haraszthy says. “I’m riding the coattails of other people’s accomplishments.”

Val Haraszthy has been a winemaker for close to 40 years and owns Haraszthy Family Wines with his wife, Vickie. The wine label has a grizzly bear with a grape in its claws, a nod to the Bear Flag Rebellion in family history that preceded the outbreak of war between Mexico and the United States in 1846.

It marks the short-lived California Republic declared by a band of renegade Americans who imprisoned and mistreated Gen. Vallejo, the Mexican military commander of California.

One of the things that fueled the Bear Flag Rebellion was the newer American settlers not being allowed to own land, Haraszthy said, and “it resulted in war on the frontier.”

But Haraszthy is proud of his famous ancestor who later became a state senator when California joined the union.

On the other side of the family tree, Agoston Haraszthy emigrated to the United States in the early 1840s with his parents, wife and their six children. He carried himself in an aristocratic manner, which apparently led people to refer to him by the title of “count.” But that was a misnomer, according to his great-great grandson.

“Agoston Haraszthy was as much a count as Col. Sanders was a colonel,” he said, referring to the American businessman known for founding the fast-food restaurant chain Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Agoston lived in New York and Wisconsin before taking his family by wagon train to San Diego where he served as sheriff and was elected to the state Senate. He turned northward to Sonoma in search of good farmland.

In Sonoma he founded Buena Vista Winery in 1857, perhaps the first commercial winery in California.

But it was a yearlong trip to Europe that led him to be dubbed the father of California viticulture. He collected hundreds of grape varietals and cuttings to plant in California and was relentless in his promotion of the Golden State’s wines.

Agoston Haraszthy would later meet an ignominious end on a trip to Nicaragua where he was looking to buy land to grow sugar cane and make rum. He disappeared near the bank of an alligator-infested river.

Val Haraszthy likes to believe he has inherited some of Agoston’s entrepreneurial spirit. And the Haraszthy name is surprising well-known nationally.

“It’s been a wonderful adjunct to my business to have sort of instant recognition,” he said.

Chaney Delaire

Chaney Delaire likes to think her great-grandfather Jack London’s socialist values and concern for the common man rubbed off on her.

Delaire, 66, a retired project manager and director of housing development for the nonprofit Burbank Housing, said her passion to create affordable housing for families could have to do with being related to London.

“Our parents raised us to be socially responsible people and politically active,” said Delaire, a Santa Rosa resident who lives in Rincon Valley. “I can’t say it’s all because of my socialist great-grandfather.”

London’s older daughter, Joan, Delaire’s grandmother, was active throughout her life politically, “and an active, prolific writer in her own right” who worked as a librarian for a labor organization, Delaire noted.

That activism was passed on to Delaire’s father, Bart Abbott, a progressive, pro-union longshoreman and Joan London’s only son.

Delaire said that since she was little, she went on peace marches with her parents and was taught never to cross a picket line.

“I don’t know if you’d call it an inheritance, or a family tradition of being aware of common people and basic human needs and rights,” she said.

London, one of America’s most popular and successful writers, had many facets: adventurer, early environmentalist, war correspondent, prospector, oyster poacher, seaman and hobo who in the 1890s rode trains to the nation’s capital as an idealistic member of the Industrial Army of the Unemployed.

His family tree is somewhat complicated.

Chaney Delaire is named after her great-great grandfather, astrologer William Chaney, who abandoned London’s pregnant mother, Flora Wellman.

Jack London was actually born John Griffith Chaney, but his mother married John London and Jack took his name.

Jack London’s widow, Charmian, is well-known for carrying on his legacy after he died in 1916, tending to his copyrights and writings.

But not everyone knows Jack London was married before he met Charmian.

“They don’t think about Jack and his first wife, Bessie, and that they had two daughters,” Delaire said. “That got erased from history to a large degree.”

She said Jack London wrote tender and loving letters to his daughters, but didn’t see them much.

Divorce was not common at the time and it was a long trip for London to make from Sonoma Valley to Piedmont to see his girls.

“It was a fractured situation and difficult all around,” Delaire said. “It was a little painful for some of us in the family.”

Her grandmother’s book on London included almost all the letters he wrote to her, but Delaire said they are hard to read.

“Had Jack London known more about parenting and relationships with children and maintaining a relationship with an ex-spouse, things would have been better,” she said.

Delaire feels the connection to her famous great-grandfather the most at Jack London State Park, what remains of his beloved, 1,400-acre Beauty Ranch in the Valley of the Moon, especially inside the mid-19th century cottage where he wrote in his study.

“I say to myself, ‘My great-grandfather used to live here. He wrote in this little house, all these stories and novels.’ In my imagination, I can see him,” she said.

Delaire said she has mixed feelings about London’s works. She loves how descriptive he is and how well he painted a picture with words. But some of his writings can come across as racist, she said, although part of mainstream vernacular at the time.

In addition to his breakthrough novel “Call of the Wild” and adventure stories like “White Fang,” he also wrote politically oriented pieces and social commentary.

“The Iron Heel,” a dystopian, futuristic story about oligarchical control, almost seems prophetic to her.

“He knew what things are going to be like in the future,” she said.

You can reach Staff Writer Clark Mason at 707-521-5214 or clark.mason@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter@clarkmas.