Gerald Hill
Hill on History
When the California Constitution went into effect on Feb. 18, 1850 there were 27 counties incorporated under provisions of that constitution, which owed much to the efforts of Sonomans General Mariano Vallejo and the multi-talented Robert Semple (dentist, printer, publisher, writer). Today there are 58 California counties. So what happened?
Since there has been no increase in the size of California, the present counties are made up of the original 27 counties, plus some uninhabited areas not included within the organized counties when California was admitted as a state on Sept. 9, 1850, becoming the 31st star in the flag. Thus, the additional counties were created by dividing existing counties, combining portions of several of the original 27, and adding unorganized open spaces. From the start, counties were organized to provide certain basics of local government such as law enforcement, including sheriffs and district attorneys; facilities like courthouses, jails, and tax collectors; financial and record-keeping functions and elected policy-making and taxing officials called supervisors.
Among the original counties in the Bay Area were Sonoma, Marin, Napa, San Francisco, Contra Costa, Solano and Yolo. In each there existed established communities of various sizes. There was no minimum population requirement. Mendocino County north of Sonoma numbered only 55 citizens, not including Native Americans. The state’s population was skewed toward the north by the continuing influx of gold-seekers to the mining country in the Sierra Nevadas and the advanced business and trade centers like San Francisco and Sacramento. Expansion of agriculture also had a head start in the north. In fact, until 1876 Sonoma County was more populous than Los Angeles County.
The counties hurried to choose county seats and provide courthouses. The town of Sonoma was the county’s first center of government, and hastily purchased its judge’s shoddily constructed adobe, across what is now Napa Street, south of the Plaza, to serve as a courthouse. Following the rapid growth of the community of Santa Rosa, in 1854 Sonoma County’s 600 registered voters elected to move the county government there. To ensure that the decision would be final, in a midnight raid Santa Rosans broke into the Sonoma courthouse and carried away records and furniture in a cart pulled by a pair of mules, while papers blew away in their wake. In 1861 the abandoned courthouse collapsed. Sturdier were the charming courthouses built in Mariposa in 1854, and shortly thereafter in Napa, both remarkably still in use.
When the first 27 counties were drawn in the early 1850s, there were outlying areas that had not been settled, often isolated from useable trails. Typical was the nearly unpopulated redwood forest on the northwest corner of the state tucked against the Siskiyou Mountains of southern Oregon, reachable only by ships or via arduous treks. In 1853 the U.S. Army sent Captain U.S. Grant to build a fort on Humboldt Bay (named for the famed German explorer). Soon there was sufficient population to form Humboldt County and then Del Norte County.
Sometimes the exact borders of counties in rugged mountain country or casually surveyed wildernesses were uncertain. The officials of Mono County, incorporated in 1861 in the rough country on the east side of the Sierras, discovered two years later that its official county seat was actually across the border in the state of Nevada, and a new town had to be selected.
New settlements soon grew into full-sized towns, and existing counties proved too sprawling to be effectively governed. In response, starting in 1852, several new counties were created by splitting off parts of existing counties, beginning with the eastern half of Los Angeles County becoming San Bernardino. Contra Costa on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay was divided into two parts to create Alameda County (Oakland, Berkeley, San Leandro, Alameda island, Livermore valley and a slice of Santa Clara) in 1854. John C. Fremont’s gigantic purchased land grant called “Mariposa” spread from the Sierras westward across the floor of the San Joaquin Valley. It was sliced and diced to help form several new counties, including Fresno and Merced. Lake County was chopped off the high country of Napa County. Stanislaus (named for Estanisloa, a rebellious Indian chief defeated by General Vallejo) in the valley was taken from Tuolumne County and San Mateo from San Francisco.
Tehama in the northern Sacramento Valley was pasted together from parts of Shasta, Butte and Colusa counties. Nevada County was cut from Yuba County, and Kern pieced out of Tulare and Los Angeles counties. In 1880 Orange (the one county named for a product) was carved from Los Angeles as the Santa Fe Railroad deposited hundreds of thousands of Americans from Iowa, Missouri and waypoints into southern California.
In 1893 the people of the future Madera County, the geographic center of the state, successfully petitioned the legislature for authority to split off from Fresno County. The impetus for the separation was both local pride and the potential benefit of taxes from the sale of the logs that floated down the nation’s longest flume from the mountain forests to the lumber mills in the valley town of Madera (Spanish for wood). When water was piped in to the previously desert-like Coachella and Imperial Valleys located in southern San Bernardino and eastern San Diego counties, the territory became ripe for development and the founding of Riverside and Imperial counties in 1893 and 1907, respectively.
The last change in county lines was made to Kings County in the San Joaquin Valley, which had been formed in 1893 with land taken from Tulare County. A hundred years ago, in 1908, 100 square miles were transferred from Fresno County to Kings by agreement.
Since 1907, California has had its 58 counties, now ranging from Alpine, with just over a thousand residents, to Los Angeles, America’s most populous, at more than five million.
Gerald Hill is co-author with his wife, Kathleen Thompson Hill, of six books on wine regions of the West Coast, including “Sonoma Valley – the Secret Wine County,” “People’s Law Dictionary,” Facts on File Dictionary of American Politics” and the “Encyclopedia of Federal Agencies and Commissions.”
