Petaluma City Map Poster

About Petaluma

The city is a tourist destination for its famous Petaluma Poultry Festival, held each May. The first non-indigenous person to enter the valley was probably José Carreño in 1776.The area that is now Petaluma was part of a large Mexican land grant given by Governor Pablo Vicente de Solá to Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo called Rancho Petaluma. This grant eventually came into the hands of a clipper ship captain from Fairfield, Connecticut named Thomas W. Pierce (1798–1869). He not only built his home in 1856 where he lived with his family but also established an agricultural ranch which he stocked with sheep and cattle and where grain crops were raised as well as orchards of fruit trees such as pears and apples; however it's unknown if any structures still exist on this land today.[citation needed]In 1868, Pierce divided the rancho among four partners: Daniel Murphy Jr.