The Railroad Arrives: Eighteen Seventy One
Near Healdsburg, California
For its first years Healdsburg was a farm town at the end of a dusty road. The town was named for Harmon Heald, an Ohio businessman who had squatted on the Rancho Sotoyome land grant since eighteen fifty and bought part of it in eighteen fifty-seven, and it was incorporated on the twentieth of February, eighteen sixty-seven. The railroad changed everything.
In eighteen seventy one the San Francisco and North Pacific Railroad pushed its tracks into Healdsburg. A permanent depot followed, and it was no rough shed. Suddenly the crops and timber of these valleys had a fast road to the wharves of San Francisco and the wider world.
Packing houses and canneries and lumber operations clustered around the tracks so they could load directly onto the cars. Hops, prunes, wine, and redwood lumber all rolled south out of town. The same rails also carried something in the other direction, city vacationers looking for the river.
The line that hauled freight by day became the line that delivered summer crowds to the resorts around Fitch Mountain. In eighteen seventy one the outside world arrived in Healdsburg on a set of iron rails, and the little town was never isolated again. The town still sits where the Alexander Valley, Dry Creek Valley, and Russian River Valley wine regions come together, and Fitch Mountain, the hill above that old resort riverfront, is now a one hundred seventy-three acre open space preserve.
