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SOME HARDHEADED FOUNDERS

In the course of its unusual history, the name of this tiny town on its mesa between wooded hills has variously been recorded as Summit, Meeker’s, Howards Summit, Howards Station, Howards and, finally, Occidental. At one point, in the latter part of the century, it was not one, but two towns. The town of Howards, which existed semi-formally but tenaciously from 1879 to the late 1890s, was the creation of one of the area’s original settlers and principal landowners, William “Dutch Bill” Howard, who arrived around 1849. This small geopolitical entity was created in competition with a bright new town called Occidental which had been founded in 1876 by a dynamic newcomer, Melvin Cyrus “Boss” Meeker.

“DUTCH BILL” HOWARD

As eminent local historian Harry Lapham points out, the doughty pioneer “Dutch Bill” Howard was not Dutch, nor was his name William Howard. He was in fact a Danish sailor named Christopher Thomassen Folkmann, born in 1823 on the island of Bornholm on the Baltic Sea. Folkmann/Howard, according to his grandson Ray Roix, was serving (under the name of Faulkner) as an able-bodied seaman on the U.S. ship St. Mary’s which dropped anchor in San Francisco Bay in January of 1849. Unable to resist the lure of California’s recently-discovered goldfields, Folkmann and nine other sailors jumped ship, stole a small boat and headed north, followed closely by pursuing military police. The fugitives abandoned the boat in Richardson Bay and eight of the men were apprehended almost immediately. Folkmann and another sailor named Thompson, however, made it as far as Paper Mill Creek near Tomales Bay before spotting their pursuers less than a mile away. Thompson was quickly caught and arrested for the crime of desertion and stealing government property, but his wily shipmate eluded capture by squirreling into a large pile of debris piled up in the creek by winter flooding.

Though sentenced to 100 lashes in absentia, Folkmann/Faulkner was never apprehended. Borrowing the name of a captain of topsails he had once sailed with, the man subsequently known as William Howard headed north, somehow fetching up on the unclaimed timbered plateau which was to become the site of Occidental. Soon after establishing a squatter’s camp on the site of his future home, he left for the California goldfields, where he was moderately successful in mining, but quickly lost all he accumulated in a cattle speculation. In November of 1849, he and another Dane, Charles Roamer or Romer, started a ranch on what was then government land, now the intersection of Graton Road and Bohemian Highway (see #44A in the Walking Tour).

In October of 1855, Howard married Caroline Kolmer, daughter of a German family which had settled some years previously in a nearby valley (See “Coleman Valley Road,” below). The wedding, like many of Dutch Bill’s activities to date, was a somewhat unorthodox affair. Samuel M. Duncan, of Duncan’s Mill at nearby Salt Point, had imported a preacher (a rare commodity in pioneer California) named G. Robinson to officiate at his own elaborate wedding ceremony to Miss Fanny Holliday. Robinson was so delighted by his kindly treatment and handsome fee that he offered to perform a second ceremony free of charge. Among the wedding guests were William Howard and Caroline Kolmer, who stepped right up to the line. Local legend has it that Caroline’s father Michael Kolmer, mightily displeased by the match, went hunting for Dutch Bill with a firearm, thus adding a new twist to the concept of “shotgun wedding.”

Following the wedding, Dutch Bill bought out his partner, and the Howards settled down to farming, stockraising and the begetting of nine children, only one of whom died in infancy. In the midst of these domestic and agricultural activities, Dutch Bill accumulated even more land (he eventually owned 465 acres), and somehow became an American citizen under his assumed name in 1865. In the early 1870s, when the North Pacific Coast narrow-gauge railroad was proposed, he granted the railroad company a free right of way through his property. As a result, he received a lifetime railway pass (the train often stopped at his gate for him), and the railroad station was marked with a sign which read “Howards.” Eventually, in competition with the town-building activities of M.C. Meeker (see below), whose family owned much of the rest of the townsite, Howard founded his own town (for more on the town of Howards, see #52).

The town of Howards existed informally through the late 1800s, when, following his wife Caroline’s death, Dutch Bill’s hard drinking and careless spending and lending led to financial reverses. He began to spend more time in San Francisco (family legend has it that he was a musician of sorts), married a second time, and borrowed large amounts against his land from a Bodega merchant, L.S. Goodman, who eventually found it necessary to foreclose on the property to regain the sum of $6,346.37 owed to him. William Howard died in San Francisco in 1899, and today his name survives only in that of Dutch Bill Creek, which arises on his old homestead north of town, and in that of the Howard’s/Howards Station Cafe (#16 in the Walking Tour). He never returned to Denmark.

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Copyright 1997 by Amie Hill

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