The General's Bargain: Founding of a City

In eighteen fifty, California was barely a state. Sacramento was a river town still digging out from flood mud. San Jose, the first capital, was a village of tents and adobes with no building large enough to hold the legislature in comfort. Into this situation stepped General Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo with an offer that was either visionary or desperate, depending on how the next few years went.

Vallejo owned Rancho Suscol, an eighty-four-thousand-acre Mexican land grant sprawling across what is now Solano, Napa, and Sonoma counties. He proposed to donate one hundred fifty-six acres of it for a new state capital, to be called after himself, and to contribute three hundred seventy thousand dollars toward the construction of a capitol building, a university, a penitentiary, a botanical garden, schools, and hospitals. The legislature accepted.

The town was laid out in eighteen fifty-one. The man generally credited with actually building it, as opposed to giving it his name, was General John B. Frisbie, Vallejo's son-in-law, who hired the surveyor E. H. Rowe to design the grid. Rowe named the east-west streets after states and the north-south streets after California counties.

The legislature met here in January of eighteen fifty-two. They met in a building with a leaking roof, using barrels for seats and crates for desks. After eleven days they relocated to Sacramento and did not look back. The following year they returned to Vallejo only to vote formally on moving the capital again, this time to Benicia, named for Vallejo's own wife. The general had funded a capital that lasted, in practice, eleven working days.

He kept the land. The state kept the address.