Around the time of our amazing postcard visit to Sutter Home Winery in 1908, St. Helena was the bustling hub of the Upper Napa Valley and its wine industry. It was 60 miles north of San Francisco, and lauded as an ideal place to live with a climate where fruits of all kinds grow in abundance.
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In the late 1800s, Sonoma County made a name for itself as home to a number of Utopian colonies. Located not too far from one another, they were clustered within the great Russian River watershed that flows through the Santa Rosa plain. The 110-mile river is a vital resource in Northern California — from its headwaters in the north near Ukiah in Mendocino County, it meanders in every direction through the heart of Sonoma County’s wine country to make its way to the Sonoma Coast and the Pacific Ocean…
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It all began about 1870 with a house, a mansion really, in St Helena in upper Napa Valley. It sat majestically on a hill above St. Helena’s Main Street (Rte. 29), on a 13-acre property on the outskirts of town going north; a few years later the Beringer Bros. Winery and its imposing Rhine House would become their next-door neighbors.
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Some of the prettiest, and earliest, postcard views documenting the pre-Prohibition California wine industry are those published from photographs taken by Turrill & Miller. And all of them that are in my collection have been immediate and longtime favorites. I recently stumbled upon an online site of The Society of California Pioneers, San Francisco, that features the photographic work of Turrill & Miller, especially their wine country images. It’s a great story.
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Including the “Beautiful California :: Wine Industry” series, there are some two dozen postcards in my California Wine Country collection that can be identified as Turrill & Miller photographic images — all are in Sonoma or Napa counties. Also, there are probably another dozen or so not bearing a Turrill & Miller imprint that could well be from their camera. The California Pioneers online video “survey” titled “An Escape to Wine Country” presents about three dozen images; it is not clear how many became postcards. There are about twice as many Napa images (29), and I have fifteen of them as known postcards. A thorough survey of the T & M photographic wine country archive (550+images) at the Society would be a valuable endeavor. In the meantime, traveling first to the Sonoma County area, here is a fine showing, with good stories.
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