HIDDEN HISTORY OF NAPA VALLEY - Alexandria Brown

Underneath our feet as we wend our way from winery to vineyard to coffee shop in Napa Valley is thousands of years of untold history. Alexandria Brown brings to light some of the stories, critical to understanding why the town appears as it does today. According to archeological surveys, the land beneath the vineyards has been continuously inhabited for ~10,000 years.

“Alexandria’s work has reopened chapters of Napa history long forgotten, and already resulted in two books published by The History Press. “Hidden History of Napa Valley,” published a year ago to interest from locals with long personal histories in Napa, as well as to visitors who have never been here before.

The book highlights the many minority communities that were an integral part of Napa Valley, but whose histories have largely been ignored. The documents, newspaper articles, and property records Alexandria found allow her to see some interesting common threads between Napa’s history and its current cultural makeup, like the constant presence of immigration and its effect on the diversity of the county.

Alexandria’s second book, “The Lost Restaurants of Napa Valley and Their Recipes,” is in many ways a “part 2” to her work. When The History Press asked her to write another book about Napa history and mentioned that the topic of restaurants is always a good bet, Alexandria started thinking about the history of who makes our food, how it’s been prepared, and how it changed Napa.” - excerpted from Elayna Trucker’s review in the Napa Register