San Francisco streets and historic Santa Rosa buildings were made of stones from Annadel

They don't call it the Cobblestone Trail for nothing. Hikers puffing their way uphill into Annadel Park hop from stone to stone along the trail that leads into the heart of the 5,000-acre park near Santa Rosa. The name comes from basalt paving stones dug from these hillsides and shipped across the bay to pave the streets of San Francisco. Annadel hikers often come across abandoned heaps of quarried stone, especially along the park's western ridge overlooking the Santa Rosa plain. Italians who immigrated to Sonoma County in the 1880's often came to grow grapes. But a good number were stone masons from villages near Carrara, the quarry where Michelangelo got his marble, and when they saw the basalt deposits along the Annadel Ridge they knew just what to do. Blockmakers and their helpers -- called quarrymen and muckers -- blasted the stone from Annadel's hillsides. Gravity-run railroads took the stone blocks down to meet the train at Melitta and Annadel Stations and the Kenwood Depot, and Southern Pacific freight cars carried them away. Annadel was one of the prime sources of paving for San Francisco from the 1880's until automobiles began to be popular. Then drivers started to insist on paving that wouldn't destroy the suspension systems in their flivvers. (By the way, you can relive this jiggling effect by driving through Santa Rosa's Old Courthouse Square; the city repaved one block of Mendocino Avenue with trendy-looking tiles that jolt your suspension, just for old time's sake.) Some of the stone stayed in Sonoma County. Local evidence of the stone masons' art remains in the old part of Santa Rosa known as Railroad Square, where four legendary stone masons -- contractor Peter Maroni and partners Massimo Galeazzi, Angelo Sodini and Natale Forni -- built La Rose Hotel, the Western Hotel and Aroma Cafe with sturdy grey blocks from the quarry. Another stone creation, the old railroad depot, sits by the tracks nearby. The depot had a bit part in Alfred Hitchcock's 1943 thriller, Shadow of a Doubt; the City of Santa Rosa keeps promising to spruce it up for a visitors' center. The masons' handiwork is scattered elsewhere in Sonoma County: stately hop kilns, the Kenwood Depot, the stone ruins of Jack London's ill-fated Wolf House near Glen Ellen, and the 1909 "Stone House" on Highway 12 just east of Santa Rosa. Galeazzi built it for his family, and it became a boarding house for -- whose else? -- local stone masons themselves. -- Simone Wilson

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