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The History of Women's History Classes at Napa Junior College

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 23:08:02 GMT

By Lauren Coodley

Originally posted March 7, 2025

I never planned to teach history, never planned to be a teacher, never heard of something called women’s history. I had no plans; I was a girl who grew up in the ‘50s, left home in the ‘60s, not planning a career. But by 1976 I was teaching at Napa Junior College, where Evie Trevethan, the counselor who ran the new Women’s Re-entry Program, suggested I create a class about women’s history.

Today, I take down from my shelf those dusty yellowed paperbacks that I turned to in the beginning: Sheila Rowbotham’s Hidden from History , Eve Merriam’s pioneering collection of short biographies Growing Up Female in America: Ten Lives , June Sochen’s Herstory . With these slim tools, at 26 years old, with no background in history–let alone women’s history–I began to teach. Because my students weren’t used to reading for pleasure, it was important to me to share the classics that writer Tillie Olsen had rediscovered: The Yellow Wallpaper , by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (whose utopian fiction we would discover later); Life in the Iron Mills by Rebecca Harding Davis; Kindred by Octavia Butler (which we only had in xerox form). We read Sister of the Road , a memoir of a woman hobo, as well as the letters of Calamity Jane, printed by “Shameless Hussy” Press. Students would write about the connection to their own lives. Andrea wrote: “Mary Wollstonecraft and her husband lived across the street from each other. Victoria Woodhull who believed in free love. All these women are inspirations because they show the messiness of life the way it truly is. These women show and prove by their lives that I can be me, live as I really am and be a success. They also prove to be wise warnings that sometimes there may be a price for a full throttle fight for the things you want.”

We would perform plays ourselves, using “readers theatre” where the students were given scripts the very day of the reading. We had mock debates and role playing. Students researched and wrote about their mothers’ or grandmothers’ lives, an end of class project that replaced exams and morphed into creating children’s books in homage to a female forebear.

Susan wrote: “I still can’t believe that Elizabeth Cady Stanton was not mentioned to me in all my years of school. I am 28 years old and I am sorry to say that I voted for the first time ever this year. I never realized the power I have as a voter and now that I have learned what it took to gain the right to vote I will never take my privilege for granted again.”

In the beginning, the classes were small, 15 or 20 students. The course was an elective, and no one knew what to expect. Every year, I asked the students to list the women from history that they knew of. After 35 years of teaching, the lists never varied: Rosa Parks or Harriet Tubman, Marilyn Monroe or Madonna, Hillary Clinton or Geraldine Ferraro. No suffragists, labor activists, or early women scientists, inventors, or artists.

Lisa wrote: “My new list would look like this: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mary Wollstonecraft, Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott, Sojourner Truth, The Grimke Sisters, Elizabeth Smith Miller (Bloomers). I have learned of so many great women in our history I never knew before… I try to teach my female friends of these great women in history."

Jamie wrote: “All these women were strong willed and devoted to what they stand for. Like me I will not stand by and let people take advantage of others. I want to make a change in the world. I want to make it better for people that are less fortunate than me. These women should have been my role models instead of great men of the world. I want my children to have women and men equally as their role models. So when I do have children be it boys or girls I will make sure that they know everything I
didn’t as a child.”

I wanted to recognize the crafts that women like my grandmother created. I gave students the option to create quilts, embroidery, clothing, and recipes to honor the past. Seeing the young men in the class proudly displaying their quilts is a memory I’ll never forget. By the end of my career, there were 3 classes of 50 students every semester, and the class met the U.S. History requirement for graduation. After I retired, the requirement was removed. The class is now taught by one of my former students.

Sandra wrote: “This is the story of my life and the struggle of a world that was ignorant of my needs, and of young women in general. I have learned so much through your class about the struggles women face on every level. I have begun to see my worth as a human being and as a woman. I have been equipped with the knowledge that we all face undeniable injustices and hardships as women.”

One semester, I taught the class at the local school for pregnant teens, Hill and Valley. Ms Magazine had published stories of colonial women who posted warnings on trees about cheating husbands. The teenagers wrote their own versions of such warnings about the men they knew. Incendiary and cathartic to read them aloud!

My students wrote letters to the authors of the books they read. Neil wrote: “Being a man, I am thankful to have attended this class… I feel that I now have a new closeness with women that most men do not possess. There is a bond I have formed with the opposite sex that cannot be broken… I would have been right there beside some of the great women. Trying my best to fight for the better of humanity and mankind.”

In teaching “women’s history,” I realized there was a powerful common history of both women and men struggling to improve conditions in America and in the world. I became a teacher of United States, California, and even Napa history, finding and placing in those fields many of the inspirational figures that most of us have never heard about. The way I taught women’s history, as the pioneers of the field had created it, was a working-class and multicultural story about women’s lives and the social movements that brought changes in America.

I think there was a moment in time when a hunger for stories about women began. That was when women’s history was celebrated in the K-12 system; a group of us organized students to visit classes, dressed in period clothes. There are many children’s and young adult books now available about women in history, more biopics about women on television, and at the same time, a general lack of knowledge among the public. Museum exhibits and social media can help make up the loss of what is no longer taught in school.

Notable Jewish Founders in Napa Valley

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 22:10:06 GMT

By Ashlee Wilson

Jewish people have lived in the Napa Valley since the California Gold Rush of the 1840s. From 1849-1860, thousands of Jewish families came to the Napa Valley to seek their fortune by mining for gold. One such family was Freedman Levinson and his wife Dora, Prussian Jews who moved to the small Gold Rush settlement of Napa due to its mild climate, compared to San Francisco. The Levinsons opened a general store on Main Street in Napa, catering to potential gold miners. The store even featured a canary in a cage to attract customers. Freedman and Dora had six children, who would go on to become notable members of the Napa community.

One of their sons, Joseph Levinson, opened Levinson’s Pharmacy on the corner of Main and First Street, where it became a fixture of downtown for decades. It sported the first and only X-ray machine in Napa County for years. Another son, Charlie Levinson, opened his own ready-to-wear clothing store and became a founding member of the Native Sons of the Golden West. He was an active member of the Unity Volunteer Hose Company, a volunteer firefighter organization that served the city of Napa in its early years. Because of his involvement with the Unity Volunteer Hose Company, Charlie Levinson secured a place for Jewish services and ceremonies for Shabbat and the High Holy Days, at the top floor of the fire department.

Another prominent family in the city of Napa was the Shwarz family. Herman Shwarz arrived in Napa in 1871 and married Elizabeth Fleishman shortly after. Together they opened the Shwarz Hardware Store, which soon became the largest hardware store in the Bay Area. It served Napa, Sonoma, and Solano Counties. Eventually, their three sons, William, David, and Max Shwarz, took over the store. Herman and Elizabeth’s daughter Minnie was given an ornate Queen Anne-style home at 1386 Calistoga Ave in Napa as a wedding present. The beautiful home can still be seen today and has been renovated into La Belle Epoque Inn.

For further information, see Freedman & Dora Levinson: Early Pioneers of Napa, California and Herman Shwarz and Elizabeth Fleishman Shwarz: Early Jewish Pioneers of Napa, California , from the Jewish Museum of the American West, or Images of America: Napa Valley’s Jewish Heritage (Arcadia Publishing, 2012), by Henry Michalski and Donna Mendelsohn for the Jewish Historical Society of Napa Valley.

Napa County Place Names: Ned Soderholm, 1995

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 19:28:35 GMT

Manuscript: "Napa County Place Names" by Ned Soderholm

The following manuscript is an index of Napa County Place Names compiled by Ned Soderholm in 1995, including maps and brief descriptions of each name's location on the map. It was originally published in affiliation with the Napa County Historical Society, Object ID 2017.7.12.

NCHS makes this manuscript available for download for reference and research purposes only. Please contact info@napahistory.org for any questions regarding access.

Suggested citation, Chicago: Soderholm, E. P. "Napa County Place Names." Unpublished manuscript, 1995. Napa County Historical Society, Napa, California.

Napa's First People

Fri, 13 Feb 2026 19:57:17 GMT

The first settlers came to Napa County about 10,000-12,000 years ago. The Southern Patwin, so-called for their word pat-win, meaning “people," were a southern branch of the Wintun (or Wintu) that occupied most of the land around Suisun, Vacaville, and Putah Creek. [1] Named for the Americanized version of the Spanish word guapo in reference to their brave resistance against the Mexican conquest, the Wappo lived throughout the Sonoma and Napa Valleys.[2]

The Wappo spoke a unique dialect of the Yukian language, a group they split off from about 500 or so years prior to white contact. Like the Patwin, the Wappo were hunter-gatherers, consuming local seafood, deer, rabbit, fowl, acorns, and roots. They were famed for their basket-making. “Wappo villages were led by a chief, male or female, who was chosen for life. The villages were usually located along creeks, and were composed of oval grass-thatched houses... [They] were generally very peaceful, except for occasional warfare with the Pomo and
struggles against Spanish incursions in the Napa Valley.”[3]

The Patwin spoke a dialect of the Penutian language family. Like the Wappo, Patwin men generally wore no clothing and women typically an apron or skirt of shredded bark, tule, or animal skin. “There were numerous Patwin tribelets, consisting usually of a village with several satellite villages...dwellings, sweathouses and dance houses were all semi-subterranean, earth-covered structures.”[4]

Many places in Napa County derive their names from Native American words. Suskol and Tulukai were Patwin villages near the Napa River. Suskol became Soscol, and Cayetano Juarez named his rancho Tulucay which Americanos later converted to “Tulocay.” The Wappo villages of Kaimus became George Yount’s Rancho Caymus and the Maiya’kma became Serro de los Mallacomes or the Mayacamas Mountains on the western side of the county. Even the word “Napa” may have come from the Napatos Patwin village. Dr. Edward Bale, who owned Rancho Carne Humana in the upper valley, may have given his land grant that name as a pun on his profession because it translates to “Ranch of Human Flesh.” However, there are two other possible origin theories: it might have referred to the erroneous belief that the local Wappo were cannibals; or it might have been a failed attempt by Bale to write down the pronunciation of the name of the nearby Wappo settlement Colijomanoc or Callajomanas.

Anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber estimated that prior to the incursion of white settlers there may have been nearly 1,000 Wappo in the Napa Valley and more than 12,000 Wintu state-wide. By 1843 there were fewer than 3,000 Wappo and Patwin combined in Napa County, though in 1851 there were nearly 8,000 Wappo throughout Northern California. By the 1970s it was believed that there were only about 50 Wappo left in California.[5] Kroeber reported that there were 22-150 Patwin left in California in 1924, although none were believed to be Southern Patwin; it is unknown how many Southern Patwin are around today.[6] Today the Mishewal Wappo Tribe of Alexander Valley has over 300 members and is the last extant band of Wappo in the area. Most of the 2,500 Wintun now live on rancherias in the North Central Valley.

Originally published October 12, 2015

Sources

Patti J. Johnson, “Patwin,” in Handbook of North American Indians vol 8, ed. Robert F. Heizer (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1978).
Robert F. Heizer, ed., “The Archaeology of the Napa Region,” Anthropological Records 12, no. 6 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953).
B. A. Leitch, A Concise Dictionary of Indian Tribes of North America 1st ed., (Algonac, MI: Reference Publications, Inc., 1979).
W. C. McKern, Functional Families of the Patwin, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1922).
Alfred L. Kroeber, Handbook of the Indians of California, (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1925).; Leitch, 1979.
Kroeber, 1925.

If you have the opportunity, stop by the old county courthouse in Napa to see the Wappo Grinding Stone at the corner of Third and Brown. Wappo traditionally used portable mortars and pestles for grinding acorns and other foodstuffs. That this grinding stone is so massive and has so many holes makes it very unusual. The amount and depth of the holes indicate it was likely in use for at least 1,000 years. Perhaps it, or its original location in the Dry Creek area, held some ceremonial or cultural significance? The stone was sold to the City of Napa and relocated to its current site in the 1940s.

Napa County was also home to the Lake Miwok in the Pope Valley and Clear Lake areas. The Pomo in the north and western areas of the present county borders, the Coast Miwok in the south, and the Patwin in the east and north surrounded the Wappo, making the region very culturally diverse.

Rough Rider Manufacturing

Tue, 03 Feb 2026 22:07:46 GMT

Contributed by Lauren Coodley

"My grandma worked there when she was 16. Her maiden name was Marie Bonifacio and she lied about her age in order to work on the machines. I think she said you had to be 18. She was paid by the number of pieces she would complete. She said she was really fast and was usually the top producer.” –Kellie Fuller

Napa’s story was literally knitted together by people's experiences working at the State Hospital, at Mare Island and in factories like Rough Rider. Julian Weidler vividly recounted how he came to Napa to found the company. In 2025 there are still Napans who remember how their families worked there, when Napa produced clothes for the whole country. It seems like another world. Let's visit...

“I used to go see my mom and dad while they worked there, my dad Ed Gulke was a presser there for about 50 years in Rough Riders on Soscol Ave until they closed. I remember my dad being sent home on very hot days. that building had no air conditioner.” -Judy Gulke

Julian Weidler recalled, “I became associated with Rough Rider in 1932 while attending UC Berkeley and living in San Francisco.” He paid for his education by working at the Rough Rider plant in San Francisco where he was paid $40 a month for a 7-day work week. “The Chamber of Commerce told us that if we moved the factory to Napa they would eventually give them this 5000 sq. ft. of land, a lot between the river and the train tracks, on Soscol, half a mile south of Third Street. The chamber raised $40,000 to buy the land and within a couple of years they gave the land to Rough Rider.”

Raw materials were delivered by steamboat to the factory, fashioned into shirts, pants, and skirts, loaded onto freight cars—the Depot was at 3rd and Soscol—and sent across the country. The railroad was connected to the Southern Pacific Railroad; it would take corduroy fabric from Lowell, Massachusetts to the Rough Rider plant. Shipments from Lowell also traveled through the Panama Canal to the San Francisco docks, then up the Napa River on barges to the Rough Rider dock.

Rough Rider arrived in a town of 10,000 people. The company specialized in corduroy pants, and later sport coats and slacks. Weidler became the chairman and spent his whole life at the factory until it closed in 1977. As he recalled, “The first 35 to 40 people that they brought to Napa thought it was too boring and left. So, they started teaching people how to use sewing machines at the high school and hired right out of school, paying minimum wage for doing what is called piecework. Boys who graduated from Napa High could become apprentices of the trades at Mare Island. Girls were not allowed to do that, so making clothes was a good job for them.”

Eventually, hundreds of workers, mostly women, went on to employment at Rough Rider.

"My Gramma, Ruth Stukey worked there for 35+ years. She worked in the factory sewing as well as a treasurer for the Garment Workers Union. My Dad, Ron Stukey worked there from his early 20s, 1953-ish, till it closed in the ‘70s. [I have] fond memories of exploring the factory as a child. My dad was a shipping clerk. I remember the very tall stacks of slacks. I would go in the area where the ’cutters’ would be cutting many layers of fabric. The ‘pressers’ with giant steam machines. And then all the women, including my Gramma, sewing very fast.” -Stacey Flukey

Weidler explained: “In the 1930’s, a lot of customers couldn’t pay their bills and were able to run a bill for a year. Thus no banks were closed in Napa, people lived off the land and the plant became unionized in the 40s with the ILGWU (International Ladies Garment Workers Union) and we had a cordial relationship.” The Rough Rider Cookbook was published by the United Garment Workers. Along with recipes, this cookbook offers a list of unionized occupations in Napa, which included bartenders, retail clerks, musicians, dried fruit packers, barbers, cleaners, carpet layers, and grain processors.

"I remember going there for a tour when I was in the Girl Scouts. We saw the cutting and sewing. There was also a book binding area in the building. They showed us how books were restored and re-bound. An amazing place to visit.” -Valerie Exum

In 1955, Rough Rider bought the Cameron shirt company on Oak Street and made shirts for the military. Stephanie Vatz writes: “In 1960, an average American household spent over 10 percent of its income on clothing and shoes—equivalent to roughly $4,000 today. The average person bought fewer than 25 garments each year. And about 95 percent of those clothes were made in the United States.” Donald Grassman remembers that “as a Napan in the ‘60s it was the place to go for a beautifully fitted suit at a fair price.” Vera Gilpin adds: “As contestants in the Miss Napa County pageant in 1967, we received tailored pant suits to wear for various pageant functions. Green plaid, if I remember correctly.”

Sydney Allen wrote an article about Rough Rider for the San Francisco Chronicle in the 1960s where he described the employees as “casual and friendly” and cited “the revolution in male apparel. Rough Rider grasped the technology of tailoring knits and was into the fray all the way. ‘We can't keep up with the present demand,’ says Weidler. ‘We're exploring the question of expanding the factory right now. Our business this year is up 40%.’” The author concluded that “Rough Rider is shooting for $10 million volume this year, enough to rationalize any little spread of Napa fever.” By 1970, Rough Rider was one of the four largest private industries in the valley.

“I worked at the coat factory on Oak St. in the ‘70s. I started out as a ’bundle boy’ where I worked in the sewing area of around 20 sewing ladies and would walk around and pick up and move bundles of coats from one seamstress to the next. Then was moved to ’presser’ where I pressed the completed coat shoulders in steam presses. That position was ’piece work,’ where the more coats I could press, the more money I would make. I also worked briefly in the ‘cutting room,’ where I laid out stacks of coat material from rolls of material then cut out different parts of a coat with a pattern laid on top using a tool kind of like a jigsaw with a 9-inch razor sharp blade on it.” –Larry Scott, Jr.

Rough Rider still employed more than seven hundred people. Barry Nelson recalls: “My dad and grandma worked there! I used to go visit my dad and was amazed at the process—he was a cutter—cut scraps of fabric into a pattern, which was then sent over to the gals on the sewing machine.” But the mid-1970s saw the emergence of large textile mills and factories in China and other developing countries in Asia and Latin America. These operations offered cheap labor and raw materials, as well as the capacity to quickly manufacture huge orders.

By the late ‘70s, women's and men's garment industries had begun to shrink. By 1980, even though about 70% of the clothing Americans bought was still made domestically, a handful of big retail chains like Gap, Inc. and J.C. Penney began transitioning away from making their own clothes. Instead, they increasingly designed and marketed them, but outsourced production factories overseas, where the work was done at a tiny fraction of the cost.

“I inherited 5 of my uncle's Rough Rider shirts that he bought in the 1950s and wore to death, the shirts are still flawless.” -Frank Murphy

After 1977 when Rough Rider closed its Napa operations entirely, other Napa factories shut down one by one: Kaiser Steel’s Napa plant was sold in 1987, and Sawyer Tannery closed permanently in 1990. With the clanging shut of the great doors, the leveling of the buildings, and the transition of blue-collar workplaces to art galleries and tourist centers, scores of workers were displaced-- and young high school graduates lost the opportunity to work at manufacturing jobs.

The Rough Rider building was leveled in August 2002 so the eastern bank of the Napa River could be widened with marsh and terraces.

Sources:

Vatz, S. (May 24, 2013). Why America Stopped Making Its Own Clothes - The Lowdown. KQED (Online). https://www.kqed.org/lowdown/7939/madeinamerica

Lauren Coodley Interview with Julian Weidler (2003), included in Napa: the Transformation of an American Town by Lauren Coodley with Paula Amen Schmitt, Foreword by Carol Kammen, (2007).

Social Media posts courtesy of their authors; many thanks!

Napa History Articles

duda@neonone.com — Mon, 15 Apr 2019 17:23:24 GMT

Napa History briefs

Check out our articles below and stay tuned for more contributions! These articles have been previously published in our Tidings publication for members and are made available for free online for researchers, students, and other interested history enthusiasts. Please stay tuned as we continue to migrate these blog posts from our former website.

If you would like to contribute an article, please reach out to us at info@napahistory.org and we will be happy to discuss publishing your article.