Gurdwara Sahib Stockton

Who: The Pacific Coast Khalsa Diwan Society, with Sant Teja Singh as its president (the Assembly's 2014 resolution calls him Professor Teja Singh). The UC Davis Punjabi Diaspora archive names Jawala Singh and Wasakha Singh as the two founders. Both had reached California through Angel Island in 1908 and served as the gurdwara's first granthis. Jawala Singh was known as the "Potato King" and was the first vice president of the Ghadar Party.

What: The Society founded Gurdwara Sahib Stockton in 1912, the first Sikh house of worship in the United States. The California Senate's 2012 resolution dates the founding to 24 October 1912; the Assembly's 2014 resolution says 14 October. The first Sikh congregational prayer in the country had been held on 1 November 1911 at Nand Singh's camp near Stockton. Jawala Singh and Wasakha Singh leased a 500-acre ranch at Holtville where one room held Sri Guru Granth Sahib. The Society bought a lot on Grant Street. A wooden building was finished in 1915 and dedicated to Guru Nanak Dev Ji on 21 November 1915, and a brick building replaced it in 1929.

Where: Stockton, California, on Grant Street.

Why it mattered: The gurdwara was a community centre as much as a place of worship. Its elected leaders told the Stockton Record in 1915 that their people would not become a burden on public charity, and the hungry were fed whatever their background. In 1912 Jawala Singh sponsored scholarships for students from India of every religion to attend UC Berkeley (the Senate resolution records the first awards on 1 January 1912, to a Christian, a Sikh, a Muslim and three Hindus), and in 1921 the gurdwara opened the Guru Nanak Khalsa Hostel at Berkeley. It funded a 1914 delegation to a congressional hearing in Washington on citizenship rights for Indians and other Asians.

The gurdwara also became a centre of Ghadar Party activity. It helped finance The Ghadar, first issued in Urdu on 1 November 1913, in Punjabi on 9 December. The party's programme was passed at Astoria, Oregon, in May 1913; on 31 December 1913 Jawala Singh and Wasakha Singh arranged a second conference at Sacramento, which the Assembly's 2014 resolution says was held to form the Ghadar Party. In 1914 Jawala Singh helped recruit Punjabi farmworkers to return to India to fight British rule, and he and Wasakha Singh eventually gave their farm to the party. The party sent 616 members to India, 527 of them Sikhs. The Ghadar press is now housed in the gurdwara. Dalip Singh Saund, later the first Sikh elected to the US House of Representatives (1956), was its general secretary from 1948 to 1950.