The Petaluma Silk Mill

How a silk mill came to a chicken town

Silk seems an odd fit for Petaluma, but in the early 1890s California was still trying to build a home-grown silk industry, and the Carlson-Currier Silk Manufacturing Company of San Francisco was looking to move. On August 19, 1891, the Petaluma Courier, under the headline "For a Silk Mill," reported that a meeting of citizens — among them the shipping magnate John A. McNear and trustee H.T. Fairbanks — had gathered to discuss luring the company to town. The campaign worked: the firm bought its mill site from McNear on February 23, 1892 for "$1500 gold coin." documented

The deal carried an ugly mark of its era. A contract recorded in Sonoma County on March 11, 1892 bound the company to employ "one hundred white persons" — an exclusion aimed at Chinese workers that was distressingly common in California labor agreements of the 1890s. It belongs in an honest account of how the mill came to be. documented

The mill rose quickly. It was the scene of a dedication ball on October 11, 1892, and the Petaluma Courier Special Edition of October 19, 1892 hailed the "recently completed silk factory." documented

The building

The original 1892 mill — a two-story red-brick building under a low hipped roof, about 160 by 45 feet, with a single central tower — was designed by the pioneer San Francisco architect Charles I. Havens (1849–1916) and built by the contractors Hedges & Paff. Its design deliberately echoed the Victorian textile mills of England and New England, where an external brick stair-tower freed up open floor space for belt-driven machinery. documented

The 1906 earthquake damaged the original tower; it was rebuilt with extra courses of brick and a lower roof pitch. Then in 1922 the noted Petaluma architect Brainerd Jones — designer of the town's Carnegie library and Elks hall — added a second tower and a matching wing, roughly doubling the mill to 310 feet long and giving it the symmetrical, two-towered face it still wears. By 1924 the plant ran about 5,600 spindles across some 30,000 square feet, with around 200 employees. documented

From silk thread to fishing line

For its first decades the mill made silk thread and fine sewing silk. Ownership passed from Carlson-Currier to Belding Bros. (later Belding-Heminway-Corticelli) in 1917. Silk manufacture at the site ended in 1929, though the plant kept running, and in 1940 the Sunset Line & Twine Company bought the building — switching it to silk and synthetic fishing lines and, later, specialized cords and tapes for industry and government. The painted "Carlson-Currier Co. Silk Manufacturers" sign on the towers gave way to "Sunset Line & Twine Co." documented

A landmark, and a hotel

The Petaluma Silk Mill was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1986 (reference #86000386), recognized for its architecture and its place in the town's commerce and industry. In 2018 the long-vacant building was rehabilitated into a Hampton Inn that opened that June, preserving the twin towers, the brick, and the smokestack. The mill's historic address is 420 Jefferson Street; the hotel is numbered 450. documented

The mill stands a few minutes' walk from East D Street, on the block framed by Erwin, Jefferson, and Wilson (the street that, as Bremen, you'll meet again in this neighborhood's story). geography