Name Brian Petersen
Age 40
Vocation Entrepreneur: Runs a local
car wash, fabricates signs, grinds stumps, manufactures plastic
trays for bed-bound laptop users, and silk-screens T-shirts for
local soccer teams. He recently bought a $30,000 laser-engraver
whose commercial potential, he says, is untapped; he’s still
dreaming up ways to use it.
Known for Promoting the State of Jefferson
He says “California is too big to
govern, and I’m not the first to say that.”
Brian
Petersen hates to wear a suit. He last sported one in 1998, when he
tried his hand at selling real estate along the Klamath River in
California. He lasted six months before ditching both the job and
the outfit.
“It just wasn’t me,” he says. “This is
me.” He’s wearing a baseball cap, worn jeans, wet boots and a
deep tan. On a crisp day in October, he’s driving a
decommissioned Forest Service rig, still painted a telltale shade
of green but bearing, in its second life, an advertisement for his
stump-grinding and tractor service. We have just fetched his
tractor from a work site, and as darkness falls we return it to a
warehouse at the edge of town.
Yreka is an old
gold-mining settlement that sits in a wide valley west of Mount
Shasta. It is also the Interim Capital of the State of Jefferson.
The warehouse we’re headed for is Petersen’s office and
his shop; it is also what he jokingly calls the World Headquarters
of the State of Jefferson. Petersen is the interim governor.
The State of Jefferson is a dream that’s been
around since 1941, when the mayor of Port Orford, Ore., proposed
that the counties of Northern California and southern Oregon secede
from their respective states and form a 49th state. Gilbert
Gable’s intent was to draw attention to the region’s
roads, whose poor condition discouraged development of timber and
minerals. The plan struck a chord among rural residents who felt
ignored by politicians in faraway Salem, Ore., and Sacramento,
Calif.
On Nov. 27, 1941, the 20/30 Club — which
Petersen describes fondly as “a group of guys in their 20s and 30s
with a sense of humor and nothing to do” — took up arms and
blockaded traffic near Yreka on Highway 99. Tongues at least partly
in cheek, they passed out copies of Jefferson’s Proclamation
of Independence, announcing that “Patriotic Jeffersonians intend to
secede each Thursday until further notice.”
Alas, that
was the height of Jefferson fever. Gable died suddenly on Dec. 2.
Five days later, Pearl Harbor was attacked, and any thoughts of
secession were lost in the subsequent swirl of nationalism.
Decades later, however, in the late 1990s, the Klamath
water war galvanized local property-rights proponents. The
now-legendary conflict fueled residents’ feeling that the
region was a place apart, misrepresented by urban lawmakers who
threatened a way of life with their environmental regulations and
bureaucratic ineptitude.
Around the same time, Petersen,
then in the midst of his short-lived real estate career, stumbled
across the State of Jefferson. He saw it as a great marketing tool
— and a way to reach people sympathetic to the
limited-government, property-rights cause he espouses. He teamed up
with another modern-day Jefferson booster to half-seriously revive
Gilbert Gable’s half-serious proposal. He co-authored a book
on Jefferson’s history; organized a Jefferson State Fair that
featured property-rights guru Wayne Hage; and launched
jeffersonstate.com, the 51st state’s official Web presence.
Petersen’s zeal for property-rights reform has
since taken a backseat to his 6-year-old daughter, Molly. “My free
time is saved for her,” he says. But he has no plans to abdicate
the governorship, a position that entails maintaining the Web site,
writing a monthly blog, selling Jefferson hats, T-shirts, and
license-plate wraps, and keeping the official archives — two
cardboard boxes full of newspaper clippings, correspondence,
photographs and Jefferson paraphernalia ranging from keychain
prototypes to bumper stickers.
Although Petersen is
realistic about Jefferson’s future — secession, which
requires the approval of both states’ legislatures and the
United States Congress, is “a losing battle” whose likelihood is
“close to nil”— he remains hooked on the undying spirit of
the would-be state. He treats questions about his vision for an
acceptable government with a little impatience, as if they miss the
point entirely: “See, that’s the State of Jefferson, right
there!” he exclaims when a driver in a green truck waves at us on
our way through downtown Yreka. “Friendly people, small-town
living.”
The author writes from a cabin on the
Rogue River, in the heart of Jefferson
State.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline State of Jefferson: A place apart.
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