Contra Costa County, CA History

Transcribed by Sally  Kaleta

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SOURCE:  The History of Contra Costa County, California
Edited by: Frederick J. Hulaniski
Publisher: Elms Pub. Co., Berkley, CA 1917
 
INTRODUCTORY
   BY THE EDITOR
 
 
     I came to California  the first time many years ago, before the 
transcontinental railroads had laid their span across the Great American Desert, 
coming from New York to San Francisco by way of the Isthmus of Panama.  there is 
as great a difference between the California of today and the California of the 
days of ox-teams and "prairie schooners" as there is between the aforenamed 
desert and the Garden of Eden as allegorically described.
     Contra Costa County was at that time composed in the main of several large 
cattle ranches, owned by Spaniards, Mexicans, and Portuguese, with here and 
there a tiny country crossroads village.  It shipped a little wheat and barley 
to San Francisco in a primitive way, by small sailboats;  but agriculture was 
secondary to the live-stock interests.  A cattle ranch in the olden days 
consisted generally of what might be considered now a fair-sized township, or 
even a county.  There were miles upon miles of as good and fair land as ever lay 
out of doors then only a barren waste.
     People came clear around the Horn in sailing-ships, taking months for the 
journey, or took a short cut across the Isthmus, as I did, to get here quickly - 
in about two months.  It was at the end of the earth - "No Man's Land," the 
jumping-off place of creation.  Only those who were seeking adventure, or those 
who joined the gold rush of 1849 and came via ox-team, or those who health and 
longevity might be promoted by an exile from civilization and a change of name 
as well as environment and climate, ventured to where the sun went to bed in 
effulgent splendor in or apparently near the Golden Gate.  I was not actuated, I 
desire to add by way of parenthesis, by the latter reason.
     My second journey th\o the then famous though still more or less mysterious 
land of the setting sun, the yellow poppy, the luscious fruits and myriad 
flowers was six years ago, in search of health, climate, and sea-level, and I 
found them all here in Contra Costa County, where anybody may find them, with 
long life, happiness, and comparative riches thrown in for good measure.
 
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     Because it was so far west of the center of the country's population, for 
half a century or more California and Contra Costa County lay basking in 
sunshine and soft sea-breezes, almost unknown, comparatively speaking, to the 
outside world.  Nearly all the immigrants from over the Atlantic poured  through 
Castle Garden into New York, and from there a few of them gradually drifted 
westward;  but the West of former days was in Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri.  
Beyond that was a trackless waste ranged by buffalo and  peopled by Indians, 
across which the pony express dashed its perilous way.  
     When it is considered that two thousand miles of barren mountains, plains, 
and deserts lay between California and the States east of the Mississippi, not 
even a railroad crossing them until the rest of the country began to get thickly 
populated, there should be little wonder that this region was slow in gaining 
settlers.  All that vast domain had to be populated before the restless tide of 
immigration reached the Pacific Coast.  Years passed, new generations grew up, 
and still this great region, as large as an empire in itself, was sparsely 
inhabited, its matchless climate and wonderful resources neglected save by the 
natives and practically unknown to mankind.  The rush of the gold-seekers in 
1849 started the tide in this direction;  then came the railroads, then the 
people, slowly but surely, when the history of this peerless climate and these 
heretofore unheard-of natural resources began to leak out to a small extent in 
the outside world.
     Nevertheless, the flow of immigration for a time came at a slow pace.  In 
recent years, however, a great change has taken place, the result of conditions 
in the crowded East and the rapid settling of the Middle West.  A telegram is 
now delivered in an hour;  a letter in three or four days, instead of a month or 
longer.  New York and San Francisco business men visit one another personally 
every day in the year, and think no more of it than the former did in going out 
west to Chicago.
     In noting the wonderous changes which have taken place even within my own 
memory, which in matters historical includes comparatively but a fleeting second 
of time, I feel that it is quite reasonable, and even conservative, to predict 
that in another such  "second of time,"  during the lives of our children 
of today, as great changes, or even greater, because this is a more 
 
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progressive age, are sure to take place, and just as large and important cities 
as New York and Chicago will be builded here in California, at least one of them 
right here in Contra Costa County - at Richmond, which has grown from a dozen 
years ago to a city of 23,000 inhabitants as this book is written.
     I lived in Chicago before its great fire, and in San Francisco before the 
railroads crossed the country intervening, and neither of them was very much in 
the way of a city then.  Both these cities had street-cars drawn by horses with 
bells tinkling on their necks;  both had men carrying little ladders which they 
climbed and lighted with sulphur matches the gas-lamps on the street corners;  
the telegrapher printed his messages on a long roll of white paper in dots and 
dashes;  of telephones there were none;  a bathtub was a luxury of the rich;  
and if you had as much as five thousand dollars you were in the plutocratic 
class.  And all that was merely as of yesterday, as time is considered, and yet 
the onward march of civilization has removed all of these difficulties and many 
more.  Now one can buy a ticket to San Francisco from Chicago or other common 
points for about fifty dollars and roll in here in a palace car containing bath, 
barber-shop, dining-car, library-car, and brunette porters with blonde 
whisk-brooms to brush you off at "two-bits" per.
     Now the farmers and fruit-growers of Contra Costa County are riding around 
in two automobiles, one to take the family to the moving-picture show in town 
and the other for the hired man to honk-honk the butter and eggs and turnips and 
baled hay and strawberries and several hundred other nice things in and exchange 
them for bank stock, mortgages on brick blocks, and machines which cut the 
wheat, thresh it, and sack it ready for market all at the same time - and 
probably for the next generation they will also grind it into flour, bake it 
into biscuits, and spread thereon the butter and jam.
     In Contra Costa County, California, there is no winter, unless one climbs a 
high mountain in search of it - just a nice, equitable, refreshing rainy season 
in the so-called winter months to give old Mother Nature a bath and make the 
hills and valleys still greener.  The only way one can tell it is Christmas-time 
here is when the merchants make a noise about it in the advertising columns of 
the newspapers and admonish all to do their Christmas shopping early.
 
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     Here one works out of doors every day in the year, if one wants to, in 
shirt-sleeves, and the markets abound with luscious fruits and vegetables fresh 
out of the garden 365 days of the year.  One can get a big mess of strawberries 
almost any day, winter or summer, grown in this county and as fine as were ever 
embellished by cream and sugar, for ten cents a box on an average.
     Summer is just the same - bracing breezes from the Pacific come just strong 
enough to wave the grass and grain and flowers and keep away malaria, the 
blistering hot winds of the Middle West plains, and the sunstroke and 
prostration of the Far East.  Roses and millions of other beautiful flowers give 
their beauty to the scene and their fragrance to the breeze.  Pick a ripe orange 
off the tree in your back yard and the blossoms for others are right there at 
the same time.  Times are good, work is plentiful for all who desire work, and 
good wages are paid.  Surely it is a favored land!
     It is a fair land, also, this county of Contra Costa, California.  It 
signifies "Across the Coast," and  so it is - across the coast one way from the 
world-famous cosmopolitan city of San Francisco, and across the coast in another 
way from a goodly country stretching out toward the north to Oregon, famous also 
for its apples and umbrellas.  I have traveled much and far and for many years, 
searching always for the country that combined the ideals, and if I have not 
found it here, then I at least have the satisfaction of knowing that it does not 
exist on this mundane sphere, but that it is on beyond the clouds, where gold is 
used for street-paving, where the graphophone is succeeded by harps and horns, 
where Paris does not set the fashion of crowns and gowns, and where one has to 
die to get a one-way ticket in Charon's boat thereto.
     And after reaching such a land as this golden and glorious California, 
still I traveled, searching out its most favored spot, and found it, too, right 
here in the county of Contra Costa, a veritable Western empire in itself, as the 
reader may judge by a perusal of the succeeding pages of its history.  One must 
travel, even after reaching California, to find the combination of ideals he may 
have in mind, for this state is approximately four hundred miles wide and seven 
hundred miles long, and embraces every type of scenery, climate, altitude, and 
condition imaginable, all within its own boundaries.  
 
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     In the high Sierras are the snow, the towering mighty mountains, the rocks 
and altitudes, and the gold, silver, lead, copper, zinc, tungsten, and other 
precious minerals which pour out their  constant stream to enrich the world and 
all mankind.  To the south stretches hundreds of miles of yellow oranges, 
lemons, and other semi-tropical fruits in orchards laden with a lusciousness 
known wherever in the world man dwells in civilization.  Between are more 
hundreds of miles of melons, of grapes, of nuts, of vegetables, and of fruitage 
and flowers such as no other country on the globe produces.  And here in Contra 
Costa they all are combined and rolled into one glorious whole!
     Here is gold in the sands of the streams, silver and lead and other metals 
in the hills, coal beds rich in bitumen, oranges a-plenty for home consumption, 
grapes that excel the vineyards of Italy, and in such profusion that here is 
located the largest winery in the world, besides many smaller ones.  Here one 
looks down from the hills at the clouds and mists of the bay below, and then 
comes down into eternal summer and perennial sunshine and genial warmth.  Here 
the walnut and the almond grow in such profusion that hundreds of carloads of 
them are shipped  to the markets of the world every season, with a growth of 
almost every known vegetable so plentiful that they go out by trainloads and 
shiploads far and near.  In the Antioch section of this history it will be noted 
that celery and asparagus are shipped to the Atlantic seaboard, not by the 
carload but by the trainload, and that the trains are many and long.  This 
county has seventy miles of water-front, on the San Francisco Bay, the San Pablo 
Bay, the Carquinez Straits, and the Sacramento River, and at Pittsburg and Bay 
Point the fisheries maintained are so immense in their output and value as to 
rival the countries of the North or East, the large cities being supplied with 
fresh fish every day in the year, and the canneries there employing hundreds of 
men and women.  Richmond is known far and wide as "the Pittsburg of the West," 
because of its great manufacturing interests, where such industries as the 
Standard Oil works, with the second largest oil refinery in the world, the 
Pullman car-shops, the great pipe and steel works, porcelain factories, and 
dozens of others pour out to ports all over the world a continual stream of 
manufactured products, have hundreds of millions invested, employ thousands of 
skilled artizans, and maintain pay-rolls aggregating close to a million a month. 
 
     So, it will be seen, this marvelous county not only combines a vast 
 
xii
 
diversity of industries and opportunities, but a diversity of products and 
vocations, a diversity of hill and dale, of orange groves and mines, of ocean, 
bay, and river, of agriculture, viniculture, and live-stock, almost anything on 
earth one may be looking for or desirous of obtaining.  And above all and over 
all floats serene and ever joyful and salubrious a climate made to order for the 
enjoyment of mankind by some higher power than we know of save by tradition and 
intuition.
      Now, just a few words about scenery, for scenery is always interesting.  
There is more scenery here in this county of Contra Costa than in any other one 
spot of equal area this writer has ever visited, and the great Yosemite, the 
Grand Canon, and the Garden of the Gods are all old acquaintances.  Here the 
scenery of mountain, of valley, and of sea are all rolled together in one 
brain-tangling profusion and immensity like some vast scroll, until one becomes 
lost in the labyrinth of kaleidoscopic vistas spread out to view from all points 
of the compass - and it is, like the climate, all free!
      And speaking of "The Garden of the Gods," it shall here be asserted and 
set down as a fact that Contra Costa County, California, is more entitled to 
that name than any spot in Colorado or elsewhere.  For that reason, and because 
of its entire appropriateness to this favored section, I shall appropriate it 
here and now, and trust that succeeding generations and other historians who 
shall come upon the scene when we of today have earned and gone to eternal rest, 
may hand it down to other generations and historians - The Garden of the Gods!
      At Colorado Springs they have a Garden of the Gods, composed of a "cave of 
the winds," a balancing rock, and several other freaks of nature hewn out of red 
sandstone by the waters of early ages, and these they capitalized for many 
thousands, and got the money, and will get more thousands, but the gods have 
moved away.  And no one could blame the gods, after comparing that garden with 
this one, from the viewpoint of gods and men, as near as mere man can make such 
a calculation.  You cannot see the gods here in their new abiding-place;  but if 
you are in touch with Nature and nature's wondrous and beautiful things, you can 
feel their presence and talk to them, and hear them talk to you, in the same 
language that the little pink mystery murmurs to you out of the whispering 
depths of the seashell;  the same language as the twang on the harp of godlike 
inspiration which comes to you out of the 
 
xiii
 
panorama of a scenic magnificence and grandeur spread out to view like a leaf 
torn from one of Milton's great epic poems, or the sighing of the pines and 
redwoods on the high hilltops in the soft breezes of the sea.
     If you would view this Garden of the Gods, go high up on the serpentine 
boulevard around and on top of the Sobrante hills, overlooking the bays and 
ocean, high above Oakland, above Berkeley, Piedmont, and Richmond, or on over 
the Pinole hills to Martinez, or to Mount Diablo in the Concord and Walnut  
Creek sections of the county, and there eight or nine great California counties 
lift up their scenic marvels of beauteous splendour for a mixture of awe and 
admiration - surely a fit habitation for the gods.  And there the nodding palms 
and pines and myriads of sweet-faced poppies and other flowers say that the gods 
are at home and bid you welcome.
     A magnificent boulevard, costing the capitalists who built it something 
like thirty thousand dollars a mile, winds around, through, and over most of 
these hills now, from Oakland to and beyond Richmond.  The builders of this 
boulevard have not only opened the most startling vista to the public view;  
they have caused thousands of trees and millions of shrubs to grow where none 
grew before, and pink and red and white and yellow flowers, and green bond 
coupons, to blossom where erst-while only the sad refrain of the lonely coyote 
was heard screaming to its mate that it had been three days and a hundred miles 
between meals.  This boulevard rises to imposing summits and there spreads out 
to view a scene that would take poets, painters, and musicians, as well as 
writers, to adequately portray.
     This scribe put in years in the Rocky Mountains, and viewed much wondrous 
scenery, but out here by the placid Pacific, in Contra Costa County, California, 
I have seen the Royal Gorge, Marshall Pass. the Grand Canon of the Colorado, 
Eagle Pass, Toltic Gorge, and all the other marvels of the Rockies rolled into 
one, and then excelled!  Why should I not maintain that the name, "The Garden of 
the Gods," belongs to it?  
     From the view spread out from any of these Contra Costa hills, over the 
placid bosom of the bay, lies San Francisco, risen Phoenix-like from its ashes, 
with its half-million people running a Marathon race of commercial activity.  
Laving its feet are the waters of the Golden Gate, and far out beyond
 
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is the blue sky-line coming down to kiss the bluer ocean somewhere toward 
Hawaii, Yerba Buena, Alcatraz, Mare Island, San Quentin, the Sonoma hiss, 
college-gowned Berkeley in the foot-hills below - Oakland, with madding marts of 
men rife with tremendous traffic, and the white pinnacle of its municipal tower 
piercing the haze, a monument to man's ambition - Richmond, with two deep-water 
bays embracing it, belching smoke from a thousand factory furnaces along the 
water-front and then stretching out in peaceful homelike serenity towards the 
hills to the east and north!  Miles and miles of stately hills and fertile 
valleys, trees and shrubs and flowers on beyond.  If old Satan should take me up 
there and say, as he is quoted as saying once before, "Fall down and worship me 
and all you see shall be yours," I am afraid there would be a loud bump heard 
upon the salty, fragrant air, which would be that of my falling down!
    The time is near, and already approaching, when much of this startling 
grandeur will be marred, from a natural standpoint, by the inroads upon it of 
commercial activity, for the rapid growth of the near-by cities is reaching out 
to the hills and hill-surrounded vales, and spreading out to still more hills 
and vales, and the honk of the automobile, the clank of the trolley-car, and the 
pop and whang of the street-macadamizing machine will soon drive the gods on 
over into other gardens as yet untrodden by even the moccasin of the aborigine.
     But for ages in the past, at present, and for a few years yet into the 
future, the roads and trails lead up and up and around among Nature's fairest 
spots on earth, up over cities, villages, hills, valleys, bays, the ocean - up 
almost to the clouds, where Nature speaks a language of her own, and where is 
spread out to view hundreds of miles of this fair Contra Costa County, 
California, a veritable Garden of the Gods.