excuse me... my mind was just blown.

This isn't an official post.  I'm just telling you guys this because at the moment you are the only people I can think of who might care:
For the last couple weeks I've been doing a bit of research into a family called the Lutgen's who lived in Alameda from 1883 to some point in the early 1910s.  There is no reason for me to go into detail about them, but the patriarch was a liquor wholesaler whose company was based in San Francisco.  In fact, almost every hit I've gotten on Mr. John Lutgen have been turn-of-the-century ads for the Wichman, Lugten & Co.  I know the ads well enough that I can spot one just by glancing at a newspaper page.  But in all this time I never really looked at the address of Wichman, Lugten & Co, until I just noticed 431 Clay Street.   And then in clicked.  That is exactly where I've worked for the last eight years!  The address to my hotel (The Le Meridien Hotel) is on Battery St, but if there was a 431 Clay, we would be it.  I know it's menial, but this felt like the historical equivalent of suddenly seeing somebody you know on a nationally syndicated television show, like The Colbert Report or something.
I remembered seeing a picture of 1906 earthquake damaged warehouse at the corner of Clay and Battery and hoped it was Wichman, Lutgan & Co.  I found the picture, but it was a tobacco and cigar warehouse.  I think it was across the street.  Damn.

Is it bad form to hope for the destruction of livelihoods and property of people who died a century ago just so you can get a small thrill from saying, "I know where that is!"?
(I'd make a poll asking that question, but once again the CHMN site is being fickle)

getting hitched

I am the bride who has the font on her wedding invitations picked out before going on the first date.  California history is my potential husband, who likes me, but keeps saying we really need to get to know each other better before we start making plans.  And you all are my bridesmaids, who are going to have to listen to me yammer on for the next six weeks about every piece of minutia on my mad rush to the alter (btw, ladies! I picked out the most amazing band to play the wedding, but more on that once I actually get the song).

Speaking of alters, I had always thought the word libation to simply be another word for an alcoholic beverage, but I figured if I’m naming my podcast The Bear Flag Libation, I should have a better idea of the actual meaning.  It turns out a libation is any liquid that is used as a ritual offering to a god or the dead, usually poured out on a grave or alter.  So when you pour out some of your 40 oz. of Old English malt liquor on to the sidewalk for all your dead homies… that is a libation!  I like this meaning and that sealed the deal with the name.

To strain this wedding metaphor even further, I wanted your guys’ opinion on where I should get the knot tied and do my inaugural episode.  I even created a nice looking poll from the CHNM tool builder that asks this question, but does not record any votes (see below post).  Deciding where and when to begin a history is a tricky thing; here is the case for my top five prospective starting points:

Sonoma- An obvious choice considering the title of the project is taken from the Bear Flag Revolt, which took place in Sonoma in June of 1846.  Though the reports that eventually reached Washington DC described the incident as a siege of “a well-fortified presidio”, the truth was the American settlers had rode into the unmanned town in the middle of the night and simply knocked on the door of Commander Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo.  Despite Vallejo’s hospitality in opening his wine and brandy stores to the motley group of Los Osos (the Bears), they took him captive and sent him off to explorer and “topographer”, Captain John C. Fremont.  The rebels that stayed in Sonoma raised an ad-hoc flag with the picture of a bear and a red star and declared California it’s own free republic, making Sonoma the first American capital of the soon-to-be state (well... not really).

Monterey- The first capital of Alta California in the Spanish and Mexican eras (from 1877-1846), however it seems in the later years what little Californio government there was, was run out of Los Angeles.  There are also some good stories here in the lead up to the Mexican-American War, with Commodore Thomas Jones jumping the gun by four years and seizing the city under belief the war had started.  Also, Fremont shows up again a few months before the war to nonsensically provoke a standoff with General Jose Casto.  Monterey is the spot where the U.S. would officially claim California in July of 1846.

Bolinas- home of the actual oldest bar in California: Smiley’s Schooner Saloon, established in 1849.  I already wrote a piece of Smiley’s for the Boozing By the Bay blog, so makes my job a little easier.  It's also very near the place Sir Francis Drake landed in 1579 and declared the region to be "Nove Albionis" (New Britain).

Dana Point- Besides the fact that Richard Henry Dana gives a lot of insight into what California was like before there were­ many Americans here, there is my own sentimental value in Dana Point, having grown up there.  The first bar that I was ever served booze in was actually in Lubbock, Texas, but that’s another and unrelated story, but the second bar was a place called Turks in the Dana Point Harbor.  I believe I’m older than this bar, but it’s the only dive in town and was known as the place they don’t look at your ID too close.  Turk himself is an interesting character because he was this huge, burly old guy with a white beard that had been a B-movie actor in the 40’s and 50’s.  He always played a pirate or sailor or rapscallion of some sort.  I think there is a good angle about the contrast between R.H. Dana (true rugged sailor and icon of California History) and Turk (the Hollywood image of a rugged sailor, but Hollywood images are just as important to California history than the real deals).
 

Sutter’s Fort- I still don’t know much about the eccentric Swiss adventure and impresario who established New Helvetia (New Switzerland) at the spot where Sacramento now stands.  I’ve heard he had sailed up the Sacramento River from the San Francisco Bay with the plans of carving his own empire out of the unsettled and wild American West (ala Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now).  I know his was the first non-native settlement in the Central Valley.  He seems to have been of the dodgy sort, always swearing his loyalty and giving aid to both the Mexicans and the Americans at the same time.  It’s interesting that he was able to safely hedge his bets for so long and see who came out the winner.

So hopefully you guys can help me chose a good place to begin.  I’d have you vote on that nice looking poll below, but unfortunately my technological inadequacies outweigh my ambition.  So I said screw it and started a twitter feed: https://twitter.com/#!/BearFlagHistory.

Well, it looks kind of pretty...

Tying the Knot

Where should my California History project begin? Sonoma Monterey Bolinas Dana Point Near Sutter's Fort view results

CHNM Poll Builder

The Life and Death of Powell Alexander McDonell

There has not been much reason for anybody to go digging into the life of Powell Alexander McDonnell.  He did nothing to sear his name into the history books, or even be mentioned in one history book to my knowledge.  He was not particularly prominent among his small community in Alameda in the late 19th century.  He was one of the early vegetable farmers on Bay Farm Island, had no children of his own and died in 1908.  In fact, the only feature of Mr. McDonell’s life that gave me cause to spend an afternoon researching any possible information about the man’s 84 years on the planet was that he had owned some furniture.  His dining room set was passed to his niece, Hattie, whose daughter one day donated the table, chairs and china cabinet to the Alameda Museum.

I hardly glanced at the polished dark wood furniture when the museum director, George Gunn, pointed it out while explaining the need for information about McDonell to go with the display.  It was my first day as an intern and the furniture was just one stop along a series artifacts I needed to research- there was also pottery from a long defunct Alameda brick maker, a Victorian dollhouse and set of china that all required some amount of research the largely volunteer museum staff was not trained for and did not have time for.  Each item we looked at drove home the fact that I was supposed to be the trained researcher and, at that moment, I did not have the slightest idea of how to find out anything about these long dead people.  About McDonell, George wanted to know when he moved to Alameda, if he served in the Civil War as his grandniece claimed and when he died.

Luckily, the museum had a copy of the 1888 voting register.  I felt a sudden rush when we opened the withering, yellow tome and found the name: P.A. McDonell.  There he was.  His name neatly typed into the rolls, telling us he was from Alabama and was 60 years old at the date of registration.  He was a real person.  It’s not that I thought the lady who donated the furniture was lying about having a great uncle who actually existed, but seeing his name printed in official government records made him real to me.  He registered to vote.  In 1888, he could have voted for Grover Cleveland or Benjamin Harrison for president.  Being a white man from Alabama, he probably was a Democrat who voted for Cleveland, but that’s some drastic speculation.  I knew nothing of the man; why he left the South, nor why he chose Alameda, California to settle.  I yearned to know more, to know everything about P.A. McDonell, a man ignored by history, but real nonetheless.

At the Alameda Public Library I began where every trained historian begins: Google.  Of course, that came up dry, but I was able to knock out the mysteries of the pottery company and dollhouse fairly quickly.  After searching through many of sites dedicated to finding Civil War veterans (established thanks to this country’s booming interest in genealogy, but perhaps not as helpful when the person your looking for has no direct decedents who maintain an online memory), I found one Allexander McDonell who served as a corporal in the 42nd Infantry, Company K, “The Bull Mountain Invincibles”, from Marion County, Alabama (I wasn’t able to find the original site I used ten days ago, which had given me the most information [in the future I’ll write this stuff down], but I did link to the two of the sites that give almost the same information).  The 42^nd fought in some of the major battles of the war, at Vicksburg, Chattanooga and Atlanta.  Though the first name is absent and the middle name is spelled slightly different, these were reasonably common and minor discrepancies for any record keeping in the 19^th century.  The time, place and the spelling of McDonell with one “n” (much more rare than the double “n” spelling), seemed to be enough to confirm to George we had our man when I reported back.

I never was able to establish exactly when my subject left the Yellowhammer State for the Golden State, but my first thought was to check the library’s old directories.  Sure enough, there was a P.A. McDonell in the first Alameda directory of 1877, listed as a resident of the Yosemite Hotel.  Two years later, he is listed as a resident and farmer on Bay Farm Island.  The directories themselves were a pleasure to search through, with every inch of space extra space packed with old advertisements for Bay Area teamster companies, boot makers, oyster depots, funeral homes, lawyers, parasol stores… parasol stores!  How delightfully quaint, while also being totally frinking awesome, is a store that exclusively sells women parasols? 

Then I remembered the California Digital Newspaper Collection from my Public History class and The San Francisco Call opened many small windows into the lives of McDonell and his relatives.  The obituary for his wife, Harriet, in 1903, mentions she was one of the first settlers on Bay Farm Island, residing there for 42 years.  When I searched Bay Farm Island itself, one of the earliest hits was from a "Lost & Found" listing in 1867 for a “Large Lighter, with Anchor and Chain” (perhaps some kind of boat?) found by P. McDonell.  After that there is nothing about the family until Harriet’s death, which apparently was a double tragedy because while at the funeral Marie McDonell contracted pneumonia and died two weeks later.  Marie was the wife of Edward, one of Powell and Harriet’s nephews, who was only 31 years old and had a child of only 11 months (ever get wispy about living in bygone age?  These are nice reminders that the 21^st century isn’t so bad.  Another document I came across recently while at the museum is a report from the Alameda School District superintendent in 1881 describing how many kids have either died or missed school due to a outbreak of Scarlet Fever).

In 1905, a family dispute went to court and was blurbed in the papers when Edward attempted to claim the family farm before his uncle Powell had died.  Edward, who was a captain in the U.S. Army, said the old man had signed the deed over to him and simply forgot.  Powell insisted that nobody was supposed to touch the plot until he died, in which case the farm would be divided to his foster children, Edward, James and Hattie.  I never did figure out how it was that Powell and Harriet came raise their nephews and niece, while never having children themselves, but for all intensive purposes it seems they raised a sibling’s offspring as their own.  This is where some oral history from the living relatives would be nice, and in my opinion probably fun to do, but that’s for somebody writing an article on the early settlement of Bay Farm Island. 

Anyhow, Powell lost the court case to Edward and was enraged enough by the outcome to destroy the deed to farm (the S.F. Call fails to mention how Powell disposed of the document, but I like to imagine that he either tossed it into a fireplace while drunk on whiskey on a dark and stormy night, or he simply crumbled the paper into a ball and ate the deed when Edward came around to gloat).  A judge decided with the physical deed or not, Edward would get the farm and it would seem that was the end of that.

On April 29^th, 1908, Powell Alexander McDonell died in his home at 1041 Lincoln Ave in Alameda (his obituary mentioned Powell was 84 at the time of his death, meaning his family believed he was born in 1824, where the voting register of 1888 had him born in 1828).  It was in the early 1890s that members of the McDonell clan were first listed at 1041 Railroad Ave, which was renamed Lincoln some time between 1905 and 1908. 

I drove past the house on Lincoln on my way home that day.  The address fits a beautiful and large Victorian on the corner of St. Charles Street.  I can assume this is indeed the same house the McDonell’s moved into after they stopped living on the farm.  The same house where Powell lost his beloved wife of more than four decades.  The same house where two soldiers of different generations, men who were nearly father and son, were torn apart over a small plot of land that is most likely part of a golf course now. The same house where actual lives were led, for better and worse, around a dining room set of dark polished wood that I would one day hardly glance at in the Alameda Museum.

How many other people have lived there? I wondered from my parked car.  Who lives there now?  Meh.  Nobody important, I’m sure.  I'm going to get a burrito.


Addendum: So how's this for a huge slap in the face?  Without really thinking about it, I just typed "Powell McDonell" into Google to find a picture perhaps to add to this posting.  I knew there was nothing there, I had checked ten days ago.  Everything there is about the man is from what his grandniece told George and what I found in old San Francisco Call issues, right?  So why did this pop up in my search?!  
First of all, it gives a quite a bit more information than I had.  Secondly, it completely changes his Civil War service to the Mexican-American War!  I don't know how reputable this site is, but honestly, it makes more sense when considering the time-line of McDonell's life.  Should I rewrite the above post?  Probably.  Am I going to?  Hell no.  Most of the facts remain.  I knew the Civil War connection was sketchy, but I wanted to believe I had found the right guy.
Finally, and probably most upsetting to me, is the fact somebody else already wrote something about Powell McDonell.  The whole point of this post was to write about somebody who had slipped through the cracks of history, an ordinary person historians have no reason to research and write about.  Donna L. Becker kind of undercut me there.
Obviously, I will be changing my write-up for the Alameda Museum so the correct information is displayed with the furniture.  
Here's where I should say: "Lesson learned", but what did I learn?  Check Google?  I still can't believe I got tripped up by a Google search.

The Bear Flag Libation?

Surely, it’s kismet.  The first book I crack open (The Bear Flag Rising by Dale L. Walker) to officially begin research for my California history podcast project and it has an introduction about Richard Henry Dana sailing up and down the coast in the 1830s.  If I believed in omens, this was a good one.  I went over to my book shelf and found the thin copy of Dana’s memoir, Two Years Before the Mast that I last read about twenty-five years ago.  Inside the front cover is the large blue stamp, “PROPERTY OF R.H. DANA SCHOOL” to discourage sticky fingered 4th graders such as myself.  Apparently, I knew it would come in handy.

Statue in Dana Point Harbor

Growing up in a town bearing Dana’s name -Dana Point- and attending an elementary and high school also bearing his name actually has the opposite effect that you might think.  The blue-blooded Harvard dropout turned rugged sailor is not some towering figure in the lives of Dana Point residents (though there is a large statue of a manly and shirtless Dana in the harbor [coincidentally, it stands near the same spot I was arrested, also shirtless, for swimming with friends in the harbor when I was sixteen]). He was just some guy everybody in town knows as once throwing hides off the soaring cliffs to his trader ship below.  We all know the ship was called the Pilgrim because a replica of it is now docked in the harbor.  In the 4th grade every kid in south Orange County reads Two Years Before the Mast and spends the night aboard the replica Pilgrim, but who really remembers any of that into adulthood.  The only memory that I have of that overnight field trip was the fake captain telling us we were only allowed to use two squares of toilet paper (because that’s all Richard Henry Dana was allowed to use?  Beats me.  Historical reenactors tell children strange things hoping it will make the history come alive and it only makes them fear taking a number two for next ten hours).
My point is this: I had not thought about Dana, as a human being or as a historical figure, in decades.  Even with a life-long love of history, which became major in college in history, which became a focus on California history, which has become the hope of a career in local Public History?  My grand plan for a grad school project is a podcast that will make people aware of the living pieces of local history that is all around them and it took a book that I bought for the story of John C. Fremont to remind me Richard Henry Dana might actually have some interesting things to say.
So, Mr. Dana?  What words of wisdom do you have based on your impression of California under Mexican rule?   

“In the hands of an enterprising people, what a country this might be!”  

How true, sir.  How true… and kind of racist.

This blog is part of Digital History course I am taking at Cal-State East Bay as I learn to use the tools of web design to better bring history to the public in the 21st century.  I’ll be covering some of the bits of California history I find interesting as a research and plan for the eventual podcast project, but this blog will not be part of it.  What is the podcast project I keep mentioning?  I’m glad you asked.
Last Fall I worked on a blog for a California History class with Dr. Ivey (same professor as this Digital History class) where I explored the history behind some of the Bay Area’s oldest bars and saloons.  When I chose the topic it simply seemed like fun idea; a way for me to practice my research skill, an excuse to drive out to some of the parts of the Bay I never get to see and maybe drink a few beers along the way.  It wasn’t until about half way through did I realize that telling the history of a bar is really telling the history of a community, town or subculture.  And in that I was telling the story of California itself.
In writing about Smiley’s Schooner Saloon in Bolinas, I was telling the story of Americans carving a logging and shipbuilding town out of a Mexican ranchero.  In writing about The Warehouse Café in Port Costa, I was telling the story of a quintessential Wild West town that was briefly a major shipping hub during the wheat boom of the 1880s and then suffered a long and definitively odd decline.  In writing about Vesuvio in San Francisco, I was telling the story of the Beats and the birth of San Francisco’s famous bohemian reputation.
By the end of the course I yearned to continue the project, or rather start anew with the thesis from the beginning that I would be providing the history of California by way of the state’s oldest watering-holes.  I’m an avid listening of podcasts, especially a good history podcast (of which there are few [some of my favorites are The History of Rome, Hardcore History, Memory Palace and The History of the World in 100 Objects]) and I can think of no better way to bring history to interested, but busy, people these days.  The bars will serve as a hook to draw people in to places they know, have been to, or may want to go to.  This will be in no small part a travel guide to the Golden State.  More importantly, the bars are perfect anchors for episodes on a particular person, place, event or era, rather than trying to tackle the vast sea of information that is California history.  I’m thinking, part Huell Howser’s California Gold, part Dave Attell’s Insomniac.  
And by the end of this course, the podcast should come with a pretty kickass website.  Right now I’m toying with the name The Bear Flag Libation.  Maybe with the logo will be the bear on the flag walking toward a beer pint or glass of whisky.  Please let me know what you think.  The name, the logo, the entire concept… will it work?

If you'd like to check out the Bay Area historical bar blog I did it's at BoozingByTheBay.blogspot.com