Image: Hoag House

Description: Built in 1856 and purchased in 1875 by Obediah Hoag, who came to California by way of Cape Horn during the Gold Rush and served in the 1860s as a state assemblyman. When he bought the house near First and B streets, Hoag was a lawyer living in Bloomfield, and was moving his family to Santa Rosa after being elected Sonoma County recorder and auditor. Hoag and his wife, who came across the plains from Missouri in a covered wagon, had 11 children. Several of their sons and daughters never left the house. That included two of the sisters, Lorena and Althea, who lived there into the 1960s. The butterscotch-colored home festooned with wisteria was sometimes called the “Witch's Cottage” for its similarity to an illustration from Hansel and Gretel by the Brothers Grimm. As the city changed around the house and urban redevelopment took hold with a Sears department store built across the street, a surviving niece of the Hoag sisters sold the property in 1982 to Home Federal Savings for construction of an office complex. Preservationist architect Dan Peterson proposed moving the Hoag House to the city's old Corporation Yard next to the 1890s DeTurk Round Barn on Donahue Street, where he planned to restore it and make it a residence as part of a historic housing enclave. Before he could get approval for the move, the boarded-up Hoag House, which had become a haven for street people, caught fire in 1983. Most of the seconstory burned and the rest was badly damaged. Peterson chastised the city for dragging its feet. The next year, the historic structure was put on a flatbed truck and moved 10 blocks to the Corporation Yard. But Peterson's project never materialized amid a dispute with the city over responsibility for cleaning up underground oil and gasoline contamination there. In 1995, the Hoag House was moved 7 miles to its final resting place off Channel Drive after Pacific Lifecare Corp. promised to restore it, converting it to an interpretive center as part of a senior citizen's development. But the project never went forward. For years the Hoag House sat in a field falling into total disrepair until just a door was salvagable. That door is now part of the Sonoma County Museum College. (Source: Santa Rosa Press Democrat newspaper - 2017
Title: Hoag House
Credit: Calisphere.org. Rights are owned by Tom Heuser. Copyright Holder has given Sonoma County Library permission to provide access to the digitized work online.
Author: Tom Heuser