Solano County Articles

Solano County, CA
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Last Updated 3-29-2010

Solano Woman Celebrates Her 100th Birthday
Benicia (Solano Co), Sept. 7. Mrs. Mary G. Harley celebrated the one hundredth anniversary of her birth today in Benicia. She was born in Berlin, Mass., September 7, 1832. She comes of a long line of Quaker ancestry, one of whom, Christopher Holder, shares with William Penn the honor of establishing the Quaker faith in America. On October 24, 1837, she sailed from Boston harbor aboard the three-masted sailing vessel, Imperial, for California. There were 24 passengers on board, and they came by way of Cape Horn, sighting land only once during the entire journey, lasting four months. The vessel arrived in San Francisco Bay on March 3, 1858. Mrs. Harley went immediately to Sacramento by boat, then on to Woodland, Yolo County, by stage to visit a sister, Mrs. James Beane.
Mrs. Harley taught school in Yolo County for three short terms. Her first school was at Smith's Ferry on the Sacramento River, the second in Capay Valley, and the third in the town of Yolo. On April 5, 1860, she was married to Aaron Harley, a pioneer of Yolo County who crossed the plains in a train of over 100 covered wagons, arriving during the gold rush of 1849. After their marriage, Mr. and Mrs. Harley immediately went to his farm eight miles northwest of Woodland where they lived until Harley's death on June 11, 1885. Mrs. Harley continued to live on the farm until 1893 when she moved to Benicia where she has since made her home with her daughter, Mrs. Harry K. White. While a resident of Yolo, she became interested in the improvement of the cemetery of St. Mary's Chapel where many pioneer Yolo County citizens have been laid to reste. Through her efforts, the St. Mary's Chapel Association was organized, and she personally collected the money necessary to improve the burying ground adjacent to the church. The church, which was a place of worship for many of the early day settlers, still stands.
On Sunday, September 11th, there will be a gathering of 26 relatives at the White home in Benicia in honor of "Grandma" Harley. Besides her daughter, Mrs. White, Sr., she has two sons living, Arthur Harley of Dunnigan, Yolo County, and Sherman Harley of Byron, Contra Costa County. There are two grandchildren, Henry K. White, Jr. of San Francisco, and Miss Marian White of Benicia.
[Unknown Solano County newspaper, 9-7-1932. Submitted by Kathie Kloss Marynik.]

Vet Gets his Due After 86 Years - Civil War buffs help right a wrong for Union Army soldier -- and ex-slave -- misidentified as a Confederate

For more than 85 years, no one noticed the mistake on Samuel Brown's gravestone. The marker said he was a veteran of the "Confederate States Army." But Brown was a member of the Union Army, the winning side, not a Rebel. Not only that, he was a former slave, emancipated and enlisted in the dying months of the Civil War. Brown's grave sits in a hillside cemetery in Vallejo, where he was buried in December 1923. On Saturday, he finally got the right marker on his grave, in a ceremony attended by scores of his descendants and conducted by another score of Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War, dressed in period uniforms. Over the years, as the mistake went ignored or unnoticed, a tall walnut tree grew to shade the grave. Houses sprang up nearby, partially obscuring the view of the San Francisco Bay. The cemetery where Brown's body lies merged with others and became Sunrise Memorial Cemetery. Conditions deteriorated, as happens with many old cemeteries. But in 2009, an employee of the company caring for the cemetery arrived to cut grass and weed around the graves. "I'd always been a Civil War buff," said Brian Pinarretta, that worker. Pinarretta discovered a granite marker that read: "Samuel Brown, Georgia, Pvt, CO K, 137 Regt Cld Inf, Confederate States Army." He became curious when he realized "Cld" meant "colored," as African American soldiers were called when the marker was made. "I thought, 'That's got to be ultra-rare,' " Pinarretta said. A few months later, he met Joe Marti, an Auburn member of the Sons of Union Veterans who used to live in Vallejo. Marti was there to look into the theft of an old cannon from the cemetery. Pinarretta thought he'd be interested in Brown's grave. "It looked a little fishy, what was on the stone," Marti said. He went home to do some computer research. "I realized it was completely in error," he said. He found that Samuel Brown was in the records as a private of Company K, but it was 137th Regiment United States Colored Troops. The Confederate army, Marti said, "had no colored regiment of any kind." He and the Sons of Union Veterans took it upon themselves to fix things. When he went to the Vallejo Naval and Historical Museum, one of its board members was there, working on an exhibit on local African American history. She knew Brown's descendants. There are literally hundreds still living in the area, mostly in Vallejo. Replacing the stone was tricky. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs won't touch stones more than 50 years old for any reason, Marti said. They found a way around that and dedicated the corrected marker Saturday. Among the attendees was Mary Johnson, a member of the oldest generation of Brown's descendants. "He was born in slavery," Johnson said of Brown, the grandfather she never knew. "He wasn't able to read." Much of what the family knows about Samuel Brown's war history comes from an obituary that clearly identified him as a Union veteran, and from a declaration he made in an unsuccessful attempt to get a veteran's pension. The declaration was dictated on Sept. 14, 1918. "It is signed with an X, his signature," said Marti. The declaration was read at the new stone's dedication by Joe Hodge, Brown's great-grandson. Brown revealed he enlisted after following Union Gen. William T. Sherman's army as it burned through Georgia in 1864 -- something common to many ex-slaves, Marti said. "I was a slave, and I was owned by Bill Brown," Hodge read. Samuel Brown's parents had different last names, as they were owned by different slaveholders. "I took my name from my mama," Brown said. The explanations stop short of answering one key thing: How did Brown come to be identified as a Confederate? Marti wonders whether those who created the original stone just guessed that a soldier who joined the Civil War in Georgia must have been a Confederate. Mary Johnson says that many in the South called the war the Confederate War, so even family members may have thought Confederate Army was the right thing. "I don't think we'll ever know," Marti said. What counts, family members said, is that the wrong has been righted. What's more, "this puts history into perspective," said Sharon McGriff-Payne, the historian who united Marti with Brown's descendants. It's one thing to know what happened 100 years ago, when Brown came to Vallejo, she said. It's another to see all the descendants still in Vallejo. "I had no idea of the history," said Troy Skillman, one of them. Skillman took a card from one of the Sons of Union Veterans, thinking he just might apply to join. After all, he too is a descendant of a member of the Grand Army of the Republic, as the Union veterans were known. "This is definitely a wonderful thing," Skillman said. [Sacramento Bee, Sunday, July 25, 2010. Transcribed by Kathie Marynik]