Petaluma's vintage houses
Petaluma's vintage houses
Like its historic downtown commercial buildings, Petaluma has an abundance of historic private homes dating as far back as 1850. And like the downtown, the majority of historic homes are from the 1890-1920 era, during Petaluma's poultry boom. These are the homes that survived the 1906 earthquake, then survived an even greater threat: changing times that deemed the old Victorian homes to be outdated and obsolete. As the poultry business wound down in the 1950s, the economic fortunes in town changed, and suddenly nobody had enough money to modernize their old residential relics. So Petaluma sat out the next couple of decades like an open-air museum. Suddenly in the 1970s with the rediscovery and new appreciation of old buildings, Petaluma was ready to restore its many old treasures. As a result, the town now has some of the best examples of early California architecture, both residential and commercial, in the entire state.