NORTH BAY DESTINATIONS | ROHNERT PARK
History
By Jason Walsh I ncorporated in 1962, Rohnert Park is what’s known as a “planned city”—a development term for a community that was carefully planned since its inception. It’s why the streets in many neighborhoods begin with the same letter—city planners wanted to make it easy to navigate. It’s why most sections of the city have their own small park, a nearby school and accessible major thoroughfares. Most North Bay towns we know today weren’t formally planned, but sprang up around trade or transportation centers—i.e. lumber mills, rail stations or bay-connected shipping routes. Their city centers are defined by train stops; their streets named for town founders and landowning families. Unlike Rohnert Park, there was a lot less planning and a lot more Old West-style land grabbing involved in the formation of most North Bay towns. But even planned communities have their origin stories. And Rohnert Park is no different. Among the original residents of what is today’s Rohnert Park area were a tribe of Miwok-related indigenous peoples who called their village, Kotate, according to local historian John H. DeClercq, who in the 1970s penned a history of the city titled, A History of Rohnert Park: From Seed to City. (Kotate is from where Cotati, to the south, derives its name.) As with other indigenous peoples across America, local tribes were marginalized and forced off their ancestral lands by European settlers as early as the 16th century when Spanish expeditions first arrived. In the late 17th and early 18th centuries, forced relocations to nearby Spanish missions in San Francisco, Sonoma and San Rafael were part of the tragic decline at the hands of European settlers for many in the North Bay indigenous population. The Spanish in the 18th century began asserting a firmer military (and religious) grip over much of Alta California, as it was then known; when Mexico gained independence in the 1820s its military garrisons leveled their own harsh controls over the region. Among the first non-military European settlers to claim land in Sonoma County was Irish cattle farmer John Reed, who in 1827 built a house near what is today’s Crane Creek Regional Park, east of Rohnert Park. Reed’s stay was brief: Local tribe members set fire to his property and he retreated south to the southern Marin area where he built a mill to supply wood to the growing Presidio of Yerba Buena (today’s SF). Reed’s lumber operation gave name to the City of Mill Valley. Days of the Ranchos Hoping to draw settlers to populate its vast expanse, the Mexican government offered land grants in the form of ranchos to retired soldiers as an inducement for them to stay in the area. Juan Castaneda, a former soldier of Mariano Vallejo, the general who built a rancho in Petaluma and commanded the garrison in Sonoma, was in 1844 granted what was dubbed the Rancho Cotate—17,238 acres between Petaluma and Santa Rosa, encompassing today’s Rohnert Park, Cotati, Penngrove and beyond. The delineation of Rancho Cotate from Petaluma to the south and Santa Rosa to the north was important—while the latter communities incorporated into cities in the 1850s and ‘60s, the privately owned Rancho Cotate remained sparsely populated farmland. Meanwhile, Seeds of a city The origin story of Rohnert Park
Rancho Cotate passed through a variety of private owners—from Castaneda to Thomas Larkin to Thomas Ruckel to Dr. Thomas Page. Page acquired the land in the time following the 1846 Bear Flag Revolt in Sonoma, which led quickly to California becoming a territory of the United States. When Thomas Page died in 1872, “the Rancho was broken up and sold off piecemeal,” DeClercq described. Northern homesteaders and sharecropping tenants bought land, while larger parcels were sold as ranches. By 1900, Page’s sons still owned about 4,000 acres in the grazing lowlands of the valley where several creeks led to frequent flooding. Meanwhile, the San Francisco and North Pacific Railroad had established a rail line from Petaluma to Santa Rosa, with a fuel stop along the way at what was called Page’s Station (today’s Cotati). As business grew around the station, streets were established and settlers arrived. With the area growing, the Pages sold what was left of Rancho Cotate to George P. McNear, the prominent area businessman and son of Petaluma town founder John McNear. In 1929, the rancho was acquired by Waldo Emerson Rohnert, a central California seed farmer who successfully mitigated the ranch’s flooding woes and turned the land into a successful seed farm—one of the most prominent horticultural businesses in the county. Rohnert died in 1933, and his son Fred took over the family seed business. In the ensuing years, especially following World War II, a population boom in the county replaced “the orchards and fields with subdivisions,” as DeClercq wrote. A modern city In the early 1950s, Sonoma County attorneys and developers Paul Golis and Maurice Fredericks had drawn up a master plan—based on Levittown, Pennsylvania and its concept of the “neighborhood unit”—to create a new city of 30,000 people, featuring eight subdivisions each with pools, parks, schools and city services. Their desired location: The 2,700-acre Rohnert seed farm property. In July of 1955, Golis and Fredericks purchased the entire seed farm from the Rohnert family for $540,000. Partnering with the Valley View Land and Development Company, which owned the adjacent 580-acre Brians Ranch, the builders petitioned the County of Sonoma for the creation of a special assessment district, to allow property taxes and the selling of bonds to pay for public improvements such as streets, water and sewer lines and other necessary infrastructure. When the Rohnert Park Community Services District was created in 1956, it consisted of two rental houses, a barn, flooded fields, pheasants, but “not a single tree,” according to DeClercq. By 1957, “the old seed farm became a flurry of construction,” he added. Within 18 months, wells were dug, a sewage plant was built, and streets and sidewalks were laid. By 1958, the first Rohnert Park homes were completed. With the population increasing in the ensuing years, calls to incorporate as a city grew. An initial vote to incorporate in 1960 failed, 85-118, with residents skeptical about separating from county governance. Two years later, a second election was held. By a vote of 308-238, residents approved incorporation. On Aug. 28, 1962, the City of Rohnert Park was born.
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Rohnert Park 2025
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