Thomas Fallon (1825-1885) came west with John C. Frémont. In July 1846 he led a group of volunteers from Santa Cruz over the mountains and took the Pueblo de San José without bloodshed on July 11. On July 14 he raised an American flag over the juzgado, the pueblo’s administrative building.
Fallon and his wife, María del Carmen Cota, later settled in San Jose, where he built the house that still stands across from the Peralta Adobe in 1855. He served one year as mayor in 1859. In the 1980s the city commissioned a statue of him raising the flag; local groups, including Hispanic Americans, protested that Fallon stood for conquest, and it was stored until 2002. After it was vandalized and set on fire during protests in 2020, it was removed in April 2023.