Harmon Heald, the Squatter Who Founded a Town

Healdsburg is named for a man who started out as a trespasser. Harmon Heald was an Ohio native who came to California in the great gold rush, tried mining, and decided there was more money in selling to miners than in digging. Around eighteen fifty one he built a cabin on the west side of the well traveled road between San Francisco and the northern mines, right on land that legally belonged to the Fitch family's Rancho Sotoyome.

In other words, he was a squatter. But Heald was a builder, not a fighter. He put up a small general store, opened a post office inside it in eighteen fifty four, and watched a little settlement gather around him.

Then he did the thing that made him a founder rather than a footnote. Instead of simply holding ground, in the mid eighteen fifties he bought part of the rancho outright, hired a surveyor, and laid out an orderly town of eighty five lots around a central plaza. Settlers could now buy clear title from him.

Within a few years the place had a few hundred residents and a name that stuck, Healdsburg. When the town formally incorporated in eighteen sixty seven, the man who had arrived as a squatter was remembered as the founder of a proper California city.