How Glen Ellen Got Its Name: Scottish Roots in California Wine Country

A Reason to Look Closer

Every Clan MacFarlane World Gathering gives us a reason to look a little closer at the ground we’re standing on. This September, for example, the Clan gathers in the San Francisco Bay Area for our 2026 World Gathering & AGM, and our itinerary includes a winemaker’s lunch in the village of Glen Ellen. The story behind that name is a perfect example of something we love uncovering: the quiet, often-overlooked Scottish threads woven into American history.

Scots, after all, didn’t just visit California. Instead, they built ferries and cable cars, dug the water systems that made Gold Rush mining possible, founded towns, planted vineyards, and helped write the state’s laws. Long before any of us pack a kilt for the Bay Area, our people were already here, and so were countless other Scots and MacFarlane-name families who quietly shaped the American West. Because of that, this post is the first in a short series exploring those connections, starting with a valley whose name is a love letter written in Gaelic.

A Colonel’s Tribute, Written in Gaelic

A Long Road to Sonoma Valley

In 1859, a California pioneer named Colonel Charles V. Stuart bought land in Sonoma County’s Sonoma Valley. Before that, the land had passed through Mexican land grants and earlier owners following the Mexican-American War. Stuart himself had crossed the country in 1849 as part of the Gold Rush migration, then spent roughly a decade building a life in San Francisco before moving his family north to what the Pomo and Coast Miwok peoples had long called the “Valley of the Moon.”

Naming the Valley

By 1868, Stuart began building a home on the property, and he soon established what would become a 1,000-acre vineyard and ranch. Eventually, he named the property Glen Ellen, combining “glen,” the Scots Gaelic word for a secluded valley, with the name of his wife, Ellen Stuart, whom he had married back east in 1842.

As families settled around the Stuart estate, the growing community took the same name. However, when the local post office was officially established under the name “Glen Ellen” in the early 1870s, Stuart renamed his own ranch Glen Oaks to avoid confusing his private property with the public township. That distinction still holds today. Notably, the Stuart family home still stands near the intersection of Arnold Drive and Highway 12, and it’s now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

A Voice for Fairness

Stuart’s story carries a footnote worth remembering, too. When California held its second constitutional convention in 1878–79, Stuart was one of the few delegates to speak out publicly against discriminatory legislation targeting Chinese immigrants. In short, it’s a reminder that the people who shaped California’s landscape also shaped, in ways large and small, its conscience.

The Widow Who Kept the Vineyard Running

After Stuart’s death in 1880, Ellen Stuart didn’t step back from the vineyard; instead, she ran it herself. Alongside two other widows, she petitioned the Sonoma County Superior Court for status as a “sole trader,” the legal designation women needed at the time to operate a business independently in California. In other words, it’s a small but striking example of Scottish-American women shaping the region just as directly as their husbands did.

Glen Ellen Today

Today, Glen Ellen is known for its wineries, its ties to author Jack London, and its postcard-perfect Wine Country charm. Yet its name is, quite literally, a Scottish word for valley: a linguistic fingerprint left by one immigrant family that has outlasted the family itself by more than a century.

The MacFarlane Name, Written Across the American West

Glen Ellen isn’t the only place in California carrying Scottish roots in its name. In fact, some of that history belongs directly to our own name, in its many historic spellings.

From Stirlingshire to the Gold Fields

In Sacramento County, the town of Galt exists largely because of a Scottish-born MacFarlane. Specifically, John McFarland was born in Stirlingshire, Scotland, in 1823, and his parents spelled the family name “McFarlane” before it shifted in North America. Sadly, the family’s 1834 crossing to Canada was marked by tragedy: McFarland’s mother and two younger brothers died of cholera within days of arriving. Still, young John trained as a carpenter and machinist, then headed west in 1850 to try his luck in the Gold Rush.

According to family lore, he arrived in Placerville that August with two dollars in his pocket, and little more than tattered shoes and a worn pair of trousers to his name.

Fortune in Water, Not Gold

McFarland never struck it rich panning for gold. Instead, he spotted an opportunity that Gold Rush California desperately needed: water. So, he organised a crew to dig a sixteen-mile water ditch through rugged terrain, supplying mining claims and charging miners for access. Later, he built even larger water systems, including a fifty-mile ditch from Mokelumne Hill to Placerville. In the end, it was the water business, not gold itself, that made his fortune.

Founding Galt

With that fortune, McFarland bought roughly 3,500 acres in the Sacramento Valley during the 1850s. When the railroad came through, town officials asked him to name the new stop, and he chose Galt, after a town in Canada where his family had once lived. Afterwards, McFarland funded the town’s first church and store, served two decades as a school trustee, and built the two-storey ranch home that still stands today as a living history museum run by the Galt Area Historical Society.

A Second McFarland Town

Further south in Kern County, another McFarland put down roots of his own. Namely, James Boyd McFarland, an Ohio schoolteacher turned California land developer, founded the agricultural town that still bears the family name: McFarland, California, laying out the townsite in the years just before 1910. Between them, these two unrelated McFarland families put the name on the map twice over in a single state, a reminder of just how many branches of our clan’s name spread out across the American frontier, often independently of one another and long before anyone was tracing genealogy for a Highland Games tent.

Scots All Along the Bay: The Threads Beneath Our 2026 Gathering

Zoom out from Sonoma and Sacramento, and the same pattern holds across the very ground our 2026 World Gathering will cover.

The Cable Car Connection

San Francisco’s cable cars, the ones we’ll ride during our self-guided waterfront tour, exist because of Andrew Smith Hallidie. His father, for instance, was born in Dumfriesshire, Scotland, and the family came west during the Gold Rush to work mining claims. While hauling ore out of California mines, Hallidie developed cable-and-wire-rope expertise that later became the technology behind San Francisco’s famous cable cars, letting them climb hills horses simply couldn’t manage. As a result, those cars are protected today as National Historic Landmarks.

John Muir’s California

A short drive north, meanwhile, the Muir House in Martinez preserves the legacy of John Muir. Born in Dunbar, Scotland, in 1838, Muir emigrated to Wisconsin as a boy and later made California, and its wild places, his life’s work. Thanks to his advocacy, Yosemite became a national park, and the Sierra Club was founded soon after — work that still shapes how the whole country thinks about conservation.

A Pattern Worth Noticing

None of these men knew each other, and none of them set out to “represent” Scotland in California. Instead, they were immigrants building lives, solving practical problems, and, once in a while, naming a town after someone they loved. Taken together, though, their stories tell us something important: Scottish immigrants weren’t a footnote in the settling of California and the American West. Rather, they were engineers of it, quite literally, through wire rope, water ditches, vineyards, and place names that survive to this day.

Why This Matters for Clan MacFarlane

An American Half of Our Story

Our Society exists to preserve Gaelic-Scottish history and heritage, and increasingly, that means telling the American half of that story, not just the Highland half. When we gather in the Bay Area this September for the 2026 Clan MacFarlane World Gathering & AGM, we won’t just be visiting California. Rather, we’ll be walking through places our extended Scottish family, including MacFarlanes and McFarlands under a dozen different spellings, helped build.

A Toast to a Small Story

So, when the group settles in for the winemaker’s lunch at Poppy in Glen Ellen this September, paired with hand-selected MacLaren wines, take a moment to consider the valley’s name. It’s a nineteenth-century husband’s tribute to his wife, written in the language of the old country, still marking the land more than 165 years later. On its own, admittedly, it’s a small story. Multiplied across a continent, though, it’s exactly the kind of story that shows how deeply Scotland is stitched into the fabric of the American West.

Ready to be part of it? Learn more about the 2026 Clan MacFarlane World Gathering or join Clan MacFarlane to register.