107 6th Street, Petaluma CA 94952

FROM PIONEER HOMESTEAD TO MODERN RETREAT IN 190 YEARS

If you moved to Petaluma in the 1800’s, you were a pioneer. Moving west before 1869 meant a dangerous four to six-month trip by land or a harrowing “around the horn” trip by sea. Perils were assured along the way. In 1869, the last spike was put into the Transcontinental Railroad, changing the equation immensely.
But the people who made San Francisco and Petaluma their home were encouraged by promises of a better life, gold, silver, fertile land, and temperate weather. James McNear convinced his family to move west from Boston. And he was not alone.

Petaluma was the breadbasket, providing food to growing San Francisco and Oakland. Through a combination of trains and barge, milk, eggs, chickens, and vegetables moved from Petaluma to the cities.
The response to the 1906 earthquake was staged from Petaluma.

The Victorian farmhouse at 107 6th St appears to have been built in the early 1880s, and the Sanborn maps of 1883, 1894, and 1906 show the house. Louis Antonio Capucetti arrived in Petaluma from Switzerland in 1886 and bought the 6th Street cottage in 1895. He was one of Petaluma’s earliest, best-known pioneers, the proprietor of the French-Italian Restaurant on Main Street. His wife, Marie Capucetti, was a known gardener who won prizes for her mammoth chrysanthemums and raised canaries. They married in the cottage on 6th Street.

In the 1940’s, the city editor for the Argus Courier, Harry J. Olberg Jr., owned the house.

Today, the home was spectacularly remodeled by an architect to bring the home into the modern world. A fabulous three-stage great room greets you, with a bay window and fireplace, a dining room with a piano window, and a modern kitchen with ceramic waterfall counters and too many features to mention. Updated bathrooms, a separate laundry, a new garage with a permitted early-stage ADU that you can impose your dreams onto.

From the front porch to the veggie beds, this house is from the past but is informed by the present.