The dark, silly, twisted side of Healdsburg’s history

When you walk into the Healdsburg Museum to visit the new
“Twisted History: Bizarre but True” exhibit, you will be greeted by
what appears to be a headless horseman. Rather than the classic
pumpkin, his head is a cabbage. And he’s actually one of the few
figures on display who didn’t meet an untimely end.
“For fifteen years, I had a file, and the label on it was just
‘twisted,’” said Museum Curator Holly Hoods, explaining the
exhibit’s origin. “Our last exhibit was about fun on the Russian
River. This is much more the dark side of history.”
The man with the cabbage head is Andy Knowlin, editor of the
Windsor Herald, who made the unfortunate move of using the word
“swarthy” to denigrate a Healdsburg beauty queen in 1904.
Healdsburg, rallying around their princess, unofficially
declared war on Knowlin. The townspeople made a cabbage head effigy
of the editor, burned it, put the ashes in a coffin, and buried it.
Knowlin apparently enjoyed negative attention and is said to have
cheerfully attended his own funeral.
Meanwhile, he was taunted in the pages of the Healdsburg
Tribune: “It has become necessary to award the title ‘King of
Knockers’ to… the poor, weak-minded knocker who runs the Windsor
Herald. This poor excuse for a newspaperman has cast insults and
slurs upon the people of Healdsburg and the Carnival. The citizens
of Healdsburg cordially invite the Knocker to attend an Egg Social,
which will be held any time he informs them he will be visiting the
town. Tar and feathers will also be much in evidence.”
This tale of journalistic jousting is among the lighter elements
of a dark display which includes unsolved murders, lynchings,
beatings, and tar-and-featherings: the skeletons in the closet that
one doesn’t often get to read about in history class.
“The crimes of the century are over here on this side,” Hoods
said, gesturing to the right hand side of the museum. On display
are the nooses used to kill three men in the notorious 1920 triple
lynching. (While the lynching took place in Santa Rosa, residents
of Healdsburg orchestrated and executed the hanging.)
But the exhibit also includes historical oddities and
curiosities. Some are silly or bizarre traditions that have since
gone the way of the dodo or have been, thankfully, updated. To wit:
corsets which rearranged the internal organs of the female body;
Victorian hair wreaths wrought from the hair of a dead relative,
with live family members’ hair woven in; a “vibrator/massager” from
1902 that contained five different attachments; the first permanent
wave machine, a contraption that wouldn’t have looked out of place
in Frankenstein’s lab.
Also featured are unusual groups of people, such as the women of
the Albanian Literary and Military Society, who were not
particularly Albanian but did enjoy poetry and guns. Or the
Squeedunks, who were as curious as their name.
“They tried to be creepy and funny at the same time. Parents
would say, ‘If you didn’t eat your peas, the Squeedunks will get
you,’” Hoods said. “They also called themselves the horribles. They
were a lot silly and a little bit scary.”
The exhibit will be open starting Thursday, and by mid-September
the museum expects to release an audio tour to accompany the visual
displays.
Lynda Hopkins can be reached at [email protected].