Blog Roll
Owen Kenny
As part of our First Annual Napa Valley Lodging Industry Hall of Fame Ceremony, we have compiled a series of biographies of the historic inductees. Local historian Tom Spaulding has contributed the fourth of five articles. Long-time...
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Len D. Owens
As part of our First Annual Napa Valley Lodging Industry Hall of Fame Ceremony, we have compiled a series of biographies of the historic inductees. This short history of Len D. Owens, written by local historian Don Winter, is the third of...
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Sam Brannan
As part of our First Annual Napa Valley Lodging Industry Hall of Fame Ceremony, we have compiled a series of biographies of the historic inductees. This short history of Sam Brannan, written by Kathy Bazzoli of the Sharpsteen Museum, is the...
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Swen Alstrom
As part of our First Annual Napa Valley Lodging Industry Hall of Fame Ceremony, we have compiled a series of biographies of the historic inductees. This short history of Swen Alstrom is the first of five articles. It comes from History of...
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Napa’s First People
The first settlers came to Napa County about 10,000-12,000 years ago. The Southern Patwin, so-called for their word pat-win, meaning “people,” were a southern branch of the Wintun (or Wintu) that occupied most of the land around Suisun,...
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Pope Valley Schools: A Primer
This is an excerpt of an article written by the late Alice Carey, an award-winning architect and preservationist who lived in Pope Valley for many years. It was first published in the Vol. 19, No. 1 edition of Tidings, our quarterly newsletter. To get your copy of...
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Hamden McIntyre
Hamden W. McIntyre, the now legendary Napa Valley winery designer, was born in Randolph, Vermont in 1834. As a young man he apprenticed as a piano and organ maker, and later was the superintendent of lumber company before taking up machinery manufacturing. He formally...
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Admission Day
On September 9, we celebrate Admission Day in honor of California becoming a state in 1850. But admission to the United States was a tricky process that had its roots in slavery. Back in 1820, congress agreed to the Missouri Compromise, which attempted to balance out...
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Judge Palmer
Augustus Caesar Palmer was born in Virginia about 1838. He married Indiana native Serilda, born in 1848, about 1868. They came to California and had a child, Frank. On March 5, 1869, the Palmers filed for bankruptcy, but by 1870 they were living in Napa where Augustus...
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Charles and Sarah Grace Crouch
Charles Wiley Crouch was the younger of two boys born to New York natives Francis Asahel Crouch and Rachel Wiley Dutcher in Canandaigua, Michigan, on July 21, 1867. The Crouch family headed west when Charles was ten, and settled in...
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Atlas Peak Fire
While the Rocky Fire continues to rage just north of Napa – take a gander at the Los Angeles Times’ excellent coverage for updates - let’s take a look back at one of the worst fires in Napa County history, the Atlas Peak fire of 1981. The 1981 fire was the result of...
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Mary Ellen Pleasant
On August 19, Mary Ellen Pleasant was born. Her birth year is disputed, and while most sources say 1814, her grave in Napa denotes 1812. She lived into her 90s, and passed away on January 4, 1904. Here's a brief biography of this incredible woman. Napa had a tenuous...
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Ask a Librarian: The KKK in Napa
Is it true that there were KKK rallies in Napa? The Ku Klux Klan saw a great resurgence after its reestablishment in 1915, heralded in part by D. W. Griffith’s Klan homage film Birth of a Nation. Many Americans were fearful of the violent and chaotic events taking...
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Pruneville
Horace Lockwood Gibbs was well known in his day. Born in New York about 1851, Horace married Wisconsin native Nora P. his same age. In 1881, Gibbs had a vineyard of 2.5 acres with 2,500 vines in Calistoga (perhaps on or near his Money Lane property). The Selected U.S....
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Port Chicago Mutiny
The Port Chicago explosion on July 17, 1944, was the tragic result of ordering undertrained men into “manifestly unsafe working conditions at the base where only blacks were assigned the dangerous duty of loading ammunition.”[1] The Napa Daily Journal described the...
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Remembering Salvador Vallejo
This is an excerpt of an article written by Nancy Brennan, local historian known as "The Cemetery Lady" for her Tulocay Cemetery Tour. It was first published in the Vol. 21, No. 1 edition of Tidings, our quarterly newsletter. To get your copy of Tidings, become a...
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Protect Your History!
Congress is drafting a new Copyright Act, and while there is no official bill yet, if the proposals made by the US Copyright Office are put into effect it could prove detrimental and devastating. The recommendations hurt not only archival...
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Ask A Librarian: Kearney Street
Where did Kearney Street in St. Helena get its name? Kearney Street in St. Helena, California, is one of the older streets in the city. Although it contains mostly modest single-family homes, many well-known public servants grew up on there. For more than 125 years,...
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Yountville Development Flyer
During a research request on Yountville during its Incorporation period in the 1960s, this flyer was uncovered. There is no date, but it appears to be from the 1980s or 1990s at the latest, and there is no known publisher or printer. It was produced by a community...
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Napa Redevelopment, 1974
One of our volunteers came across this intriguing brochure while organizing our ephemera files, and it was just too cool not to share. The brochure is from the volume 2, number 1, Fall 1974 edition of the New Era Reporter, a publication put out by the Napa Community...
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Fire in Pope Valley!
On the afternoon of June 9, 2015, a fire kicked up in Pope Valley. It raged on the hill above and around the Henry Haus Blacksmith Shop, a historic building owned by Napa County Historical Society. Thankfully Brad Kirkpatrick, a former Pope Valley Fire Chief, put the...
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