Plan for statue of Gen. Mariano Vallejo in Sonoma Plaza proves divisive

Considering his outsize influence and role in Sonoma and California history, some are saying it’s about time that Gen. Mariano Vallejo is honored with a statue in the town he founded more than 180 years ago.

Vallejo, once the most powerful man in Mexican-controlled California and who also favored annexation by the United States, is getting a life-sized bronze likeness that will be placed in a prominent spot in the Sonoma Plaza, following unanimous approval by the City Council last week.

“No one deserves a statue more in the plaza than the founder of the pueblo and the person who laid it out,” said Robert Demler, president of the Sonoma League for Historic Preservation.

“This is really significant and very exciting,” said Vallejo’s great-great granddaughter, Martha Vallejo McGettigan, a former Sonoma resident and member of the monument committee, who said the statue is long overdue.

“Sonoma has been behind the times, as far as acknowledging this,” she said Friday.

Vallejo has been described as a man of high principles, rare culture and wealth. One of his biographers, George Tays, wrote, “it’s been justly said that any institution is but the lengthened shadow of one man. This is likewise true of Sonoma. For without Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, there would have been no town.”

But the statue has its critics, including members of the city’s Cultural and Fine Arts Commission, which approved it 4-3 over objections that included its casual depiction of Vallejo sitting on a bench, his arm stretched over the back.

Longtime Sonoma resident and retired attorney Robert Parmalee is also a prominent naysayer, arguing that the plaza should be kept a venue for families, students and civic events.

“Don’t turn the plaza into a ‘mausoleum of the past,’” he stated in an e-mail to the City Council last year. He noted that there is already a “splendid relief portrait” of Vallejo at the entrance to City Hall.

“Another monument could open the door to memorials for people such as General Hap Arnold, Jack London, California Indians and Chinese workers and more,” he said, listing some of the prominent personalities and groups that are part of Sonoma Valley’s history.

None of the objections voiced over the statue is based on the legacy or actions of Vallejo, who held high military positions in California when it was under Spanish and then Mexican rule. Popular among visiting foreigners, he spoke English well and learned French and Latin, according to biographer Alan Rosenus.

When California became a state, Vallejo helped draw up its constitution and was elected a state senator. He also was California’s first commercial wine grower.

At one time, his holdings - which included his Rancho Petaluma - encompassed about 175,000 acres, according to McGettigan, and he donated land to establish the cities of Benicia and Vallejo.

By the time he died in 1890, his holdings were down to less than 300 acres, with most of his lands and livestock lost to squatters and settlers amid failed attempts to get American courts to recognize his title.

Currently, the only statue in the Sonoma Plaza is the century-old Bear Flag monument. It commemorates the 1846 uprising of a rag-tag band of American settlers who surprised the sleepy town and declared the short-lived California Republic. In the process, they imprisoned Vallejo, the Mexican military governor.

At the time, there were relatively few Americans in California, but many more were on the way in wagon trains, and nervous Mexican military authorities were threatening to expel them and take their possessions.

Ironically, Vallejo was sympathetic to Americans and had expressed a desire to make California a part of the United States.

He almost died after being taken by the Bear Flaggers to Sutter’s Fort in Sacramento, where he endured months of poor treatment and contracted malaria.

At last week’s City Council meeting, Sonoma attorney Tom Hauser said he wasn’t so much objecting to the Vallejo statue as the lack of a master plan for the plaza.

Jim Callahan, who is creating the sculpture in his Sonoma foundry, is a good artist, Hauser said, but “the city should be saying ‘This is what we want,’” not “ ‘well, OK, this sounds like something nice, let’s accept this ad hoc proposal.’ ”

Hauser noted that some critics felt the statue of the seated Vallejo with one arm extended along the top of the bench was disrespectful and common.

“I have been told Ronald McDonald does this also,” he said.

But City Council members embraced the statue’s design and the proposal by the monument committee, which made its initial pitch a year ago.

Mayor Laurie Gallian agreed that the plaza is a “beautiful precious gem” that needs to be safeguarded, but said the statue is a legacy that “needs to be there, as far as a community statement.”

Councilwoman Rachel Hundley called the statue tasteful and noted that people who have seen a model like the design. The city won’t be paying for it because the sculpture is being funded by donations, she said.

The statue and bench, on a base of basalt stone, are estimated to cost between $70,000 and $80,000, and about half of the money already has been raised, according to Demler, the preservation group’s president.

He said the statue, which could be in place in 10 months to a year, will serve as a gathering spot and a photo opportunity.

It will be “like meeting under the clock at Grand Central Station,” Demler said, but instead people might say “meet you at the general’s bench.”

He said the installation also will display a small digital code that schoolchildren and other visitors will be able to scan with their smartphones to access photos and information on Vallejo.

“It’s going to be wonderful,” Councilman David Cook said.

“This is a great improvement to the backside of City Hall,” Councilman Gary Edwards said.

He noted that by placing Vallejo’s likeness on the north side of the plaza, the statue will be facing across Spain Street in the direction of his original home, the two-story “Casa Grande” adobe that Vallejo built in the 1830s.

Vallejo was a lieutenant in the Mexican army when he founded Sonoma in 1835 under orders of Mexican Gov. Jose Figueroa. His wealth would multiply along with his titles.

He was sent to settle and colonize Alta California - which extended north from about Monterey - to counter the presence of Russians who established Fort Ross on the Sonoma Coast.

He chose the spot near the previously established San Francisco de Solano Mission to build troop barracks and lay out a dusty plaza and training ground.

“Sonoma was the prominent place. San Francisco didn’t exist. At the time, it was still Yerba Buena,” McGettigan, an independent historian, said of the pueblo’s significance. “All the important things that happened pretty much happened in Sonoma.”

Even though Vallejo lost his cattle herds and land holdings that once stretched from Mendocino County to the Carquinez Strait, he still retained his homestead in Sonoma when he died in 1890 at the age of 82.

He remained a man of distinction and influence. But in the end, Demler said, “the richest man in California wound up in very modest circumstances.”

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