A short history of the Old Adams District

The east side & the river

Petaluma was laid out in 1852 on the west bank of a tidal slough then called Petaluma Creek (it was renamed the Petaluma River only in the 1960s). The creek was the town's whole reason for being: scows and steamers carried eggs, hay, and lumber down to San Francisco Bay, and by 1858 it was reckoned the busiest waterway in California, making Petaluma one of the state's leading inland ports. documented

The land east of the creek had a different origin. It lay within General Mariano Vallejo's undisputed Rancho Petaluma grant, and in 1853 Vallejo sold 267 acres of that east-bank land to the settler Tom Hopper — whose name still marks the area. The east side filled in slowly, a working-class counterpart to the downtown across the water. By the December 1894 Sanborn fire-insurance map the grid was sketched in but only sparsely built: Adams, Edith, Washington, Bremen, and Hopper streets all appear, with scattered houses among open lots. documented

The presidential streets & the name

Several of the cross-streets running off Lakeville were named for U.S. presidents — Madison, Washington, Jefferson, and Adams. The street that was Adams is the one that carries the district's name today: it is now East D Street.

We can show that the change came late. Across five consecutive Petaluma Sanborn editions — 1885, 1888, 1894, 1906, and 1910 — the east-side street is labeled "Adams" every single time, with no exception. The name was still "Adams" as late as November 1910. documented

Map details: Sanborn fire-insurance maps of Petaluma, 1894 / 1906 / 1910. Public domain, Library of Congress, Geography & Map Division.

Why East D, of all things? Because downtown already had a "D Street." Petaluma's west side used a lettered grid — A, B, C, D, E, F Streets — and a separate D Street runs through the old business district there (you can see it labeled on the 1906 map below). When the city tidied up its street names, the east-side "Adams" was folded into that lettering as "East D" — the eastern counterpart to the downtown D — rather than a second plain "D." how it fits

The same period rationalized other east-side names. Bremen Street — which still appears as "Bremen" on the 1910 map — was renamed Wilson Street during World War I, when anti-German feeling "forced the switch," and the east-side Washington likewise gained its "East" prefix. documented

The World's Egg Basket

What made the east side hum was chickens. In the late 1870s Petaluma became the cradle of the practical chicken incubator — developed here by Lyman Byce and Isaac L. Dias — and the hatcheries, feed mills, and egg-packing houses that followed earned the town a nickname it wore for decades: the "World's Egg Basket." By 1909 Petaluma was said to ship some 86 million eggs a year. The river, the railroad, and the cold-storage plants existed largely to move all those eggs to market. documented

Two landmarks on the east side

Two brick survivors of that era still stand within a few minutes' walk of East D Street. Each has its own page here.

Timeline

The neighborhood today

The Old Adams District is an everyday, lived-in neighborhood — modest homes on a walkable grid, much of the original housing still standing. The name itself is the newest thing about it: "Old Adams District" is a name residents have recently revived, reaching back to the street's original title. It is not a historic or official municipal designation, and you won't find it on an old map. What is on the old maps is "Adams" — and that's the thread this whole project pulls on. community-adopted name