NATHAN COOMBS (1826-1877), founder of the city of Napa, began pioneering as a teenager and managed to participate in the Bear Flag Revolt, amass huge landholding, become an influential community leader, and win election to the State Assembly–all before he turned 30!
Coombs crossed the country from Massachusetts to Oregon when he was 16 years old. He came down on his own to northern California in 1843 as a 17 year old, working first in Bodega Bay then at Rancho Quesesoni (now along Cache Creek in Yolo County). After marrying the rancho owners’ (former trapper William Gordon and his wife Maria Lucero) 14-year-old daughter, Maria Isabel Gordon, in 1845, Nathan and new wife Maria Isabel set out for nearby Napa Valley. Here they bought land east of the Napa River from Juarez Cayetano, a portion of his Rancho Tulucay.
Coombs was all of 20 when he participated in the Bear Flag Revolt of 1846, and the following year added another 325 acres to his holdings, this time from Salvador Vallejo’s Rancho Napa (around today’s Salvador Avenue, 1½ miles north of downtown). Coombs built the family home there but kept adding property, including the 80 acres in 1847 purchased from Nicolas Higuera’s Rancho Entre Napa where the now-22-year-old laid out and thus founded the city of Napa in 1848.
EARLY NAPA: “Nappa City” (as it was originally spelled) was situated at the confluence of Napa River and Napa Creek (“entre Napa”), a convenient location and transportation crossroads, with a river ford on the route between the older towns of Benicia and Sonoma, the most important towns in the North Bay of Mexican Alta California. It grew quickly in the 1850s and 60s and even faster after the railroad came in 1868 connecting Vallejo to Calistoga through Napa.
STATEHOOD AND AFTER: In the first decade of statehood, and before he turned 30, Nathan Coombs served in the state assembly for two terms. (His son Frank later was elected congressional representative.) Also after statehood, in 1851 Coombs and his father-in-law William Gordon purchased a big chunk of land–almost 18,000 acres (4 leagues) between their holdings in Napa and Cache Creek/Woodland/Yolo County–the Berreyessa family’s Rancho Chimiles. This is the area now known as Gordon Valley and Wooden Valley–named for the very tall (6’7”) John Wooden (1801-1887) who settled there in 1847 after crossing overland from Michigan with the George Harlan Party.
BERRYESSA-NAPA CONNECTIONS: Yes, there are lots of Berreyessas in Californio-era Napa County history, including owners of three core land grants. In addition to the areas now known as Wooden Valley and Mayacamas/Calistoga, the name survives most famously from a very large land grant (8 leagues) to brothers Sisto and Jose Antonio Berreyesa, Rancho Las Putas. The 10-mile long Berryessa Valley neighboring Rancho Chimiles, is now mostly submerged beneath the 1950s dam project that formed Lake Berryessa.
With all the turmoil of sorting out land ownership in the transition into statehood, where non-Anglo Californio owners often got the short end of the deal, you have to wonder if that Rancho Chimiles sale might have been under some duress or at least distaste. After all, Coombs had played a role just five years before in the Bear Flag Revolt during which three of owner Jose Ygnacio Mariano Berreyessa’s brothers were taken prisoner (including Sonoma’s alcalde, Jose de los Santos, the owner of Rancho Mallacomes land grant now Calistoga) and, most shockingly, their 61-year-old father, along with two cousins, were shot and murdered by Kit Carson in San Rafael (under orders, he later said, from John Fremont) when they came to inquire after the safety of the prisoners.