trends in politics, lifestyles, and fashion are conceived and then, sometimes, carried to extremes.
Since the mid-19th century, the East Bay has been a place of farms, orchards, dairies, and cattle ranches, supporting a diverse population of laborers from around the globe, including China, Japan, the Philippines, India, Mexico, Hawaii, and Portugal. During the Gold Rush and the years that followed, the East Bay helped feed the rest of California with produce from large farms centered in Alameda County. (One of these, which belonged to George Washington Patterson and his family, can be visited at EBRPD’s Ardenwood Regional Preserve in Fremont.) Alameda County also became known for its wines, and in 1889 one of its winery owners, Charles Wetmore of Cresta Blanca, won a gold medal at the Paris Exposition. Hops and hay grown in the Livermore Valley gained world-wide reputations for quality.
Cattle ranching in the East Bay, which continues today on public lands under a multi-use policy, began in the 1820’s after Mexico overthrew Spanish rule and made California, then called Alta (Upper) California, part of its republic. The Spanish mission system, in place in California since the 1760s, was dismantled in the 1830s, and former mission lands in the East Bay became large Mexican ranchos, supplying cowhides for leather goods and tallow for candles to manufacturing plants in the northeastern United States. The ranchos and the rich lifestyle they supported lasted only until 1846, when war broke out between Mexico and the United States. At the war’s conclusion in 1848, Mexico signed the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and ceded California, which became a state two years later, to its increasingly powerful northern neighbor.
The first Europeans to explore California extensively by land were the Spanish, and in 1769 Gaspar de Portola led an expedition from Baja California to the San Francisco Peninsula. Members of a scouting party from this expedition, under Jose Ortega, were the first Europeans to gaze on San Francisco Bay, whose opening at the Golden Gate had eluded such 16th and 17th century maritime explorers as Juan Rodrigues Cabrillo, Francis Drake, Sebastian Rodrigues Cermeno, and Sebastian Vizcaino. Residents of the Bay’s east shore, the Ohlone Indians, met the Spanish with a combination of hostility and fear, but contact continued over the next few years, as more of the East Bay was explored. Native Americans, who had been here for thousands of years, lived in thatched houses framed with willow wood, depended on hunting and gathering for survival, and organized themselves into various towns and nations. It is estimated that 10,000 native people lived in the Bay Area when the Spanish arrived.
In 1776 the Spanish established their first mission in the Bay Area, Mission San Francisco de Assis (now called Mission Dolores) and built the Presidio of San Francisco. More missions and settlements soon followed, including Mission Santa Clara and Mission San Jose, and the Spanish began converting the Indians to Christianity and moving them onto the missions, where their freedom was curtailed. Resistance to the mission system came from some groups of native people who refused to give up their centuries-old way of life, but their efforts were overcome by Spanish military action, along with European diseases such as measles and small pox. (A cemetery near Mission San Jose holds 4000 Indian dead, the result of a 10-year epidemic. In 1971, descendants of the Ohlone people incorporated as the Ohlone Indian Tribe and received title to the cemetery.)
A reconstructed Coast Miwok village at Coyote Hills Regional park provides educational opportunities for visitors of all ages.
The dismantling of the Spanish mission system in the 1830s did nothing to improve conditions for the remaining native people; instead many of them became serfs and slaves on the new Mexican ranchos. When the cry of “Gold!” echoed from the Sierra foothills in 1848, what had been a trickle of immigration to California from the United States and other countries turned into a flood. During the Gold Rush, newcomers used dubious means to seize many of the ranchos, and then relied on Indians serfs and slaves to work the land. When California entered the Union in 1850, the California legislature initially denied its native people citizenship.
Despite hardship, disease, and efforts to exterminate them, the East Bay’s Indians clung to their cultural and spiritual values, and today Ohlone descendants work to keep alive their history, culture, religion, and language. You can learn more about this fascinating aspect of the East Bay by visiting Coyote Hills Regional Park, where there are displays, information, and interpretive programs about the Ohlone people, some presented by Ohlone descendants themselves.
East Bay Regional Park District
The agency responsible for overseeing most of the open space in the East Bay is the East Bay Regional Park District (EBRPD), governed by a publicly elected board of directors and headquartered in Oakland. With more than 95,000 acres of land under its jurisdiction, EBRPD administers 65 regional parklands and about 1150 miles of trails, including 29 regional inter-park trails. This extensive network of parks and trails, which has put regional park areas within 15 to 30 minutes of each and every resident of Alameda and Contra Costa County, had its genesis in 1928, when the East Bay Municipal Utility District (EBMUD) completed its consolidation of local water systems and declared surplus approximately 10,000 acres of former watershed land.
But the true beginning of the regional park system goes back another 60 years or so, to a suggestion by Frederick Law Olmsted, famed designer of New York’s Central Park, that “scenic lanes” be constructed in the Oakland and Berkeley Hills. In the years following the Civil War, however, the Bay Area was experiencing rapid growth, and Olmsted’s was an idea whose time had not yet come. After the turn of the century, two prominent city planners, Charles Mulford Robinson and Werner Hegemann, each called for the creation of East Bay parklands, but they too were ignored.
It took the threat of development—EBMUD’s 10,000 acres were up for grabs—to get the ball rolling. Prominent citizens like Robert Sibley, executive manager of the University of California Alumni Association, joined with outdoor groups like the Sierra Club to petition EBMUD to preserve its surplus land and open it to the public for recreation, but the District refused. In 1930, the landscape architecture firm Olmsted Brothers—run by the sons of Frederick Law Olmsted—and Ansel F. Hall of the National Park Service were hired to produce a survey of possible East Bay parks. Their 41-page report was far-sighted: It emphasized preserving easily accessible land for a variety of uses.
The Miwok Trail at Round Valley Regional Preserve traverses oak-studded hillsides where wildflowers bloom.
Supporters of parklands, now banded together in the East Bay Regional Park Association, used the Olmsted-Hall report to again petition EBMUD to open its surplus lands. When the District declined, the East Bay Regional Park Association called for the formation of a regional park district, unprecedented at the time, to include parklands in Alameda and Contra Costa counties. State Assemblyman Frank K. Mott, a former mayor of Oakland, drafted AB 1114, which was passed and signed into law in 1933, to authorizing the establishment in California of regional park districts, a new concept.
The next step, under California law, was to get approval from the voters in nine East Bay cities—Alameda, Albany, Berkeley, El Cerrito, Emeryville, Oakland, Piedmont, Richmond, and San Leandro—who would have to pay for the new parks. In response, some 14,000 people signed an initiative petition placing a measure on the November 1934 ballot to approve an East Bay Regional Park District, elect its board, and assess property owners five cents per $100, not an inconsiderable sum during the Depression, to pay for it all.
Now the plan hit a roadblock: the Contra Costa County Board of Supervisors decided against sanctioning the initiative, causing the cities of El Cerrito and Richmond to withdraw from the proposed district. The Supervisors were responding to concerns of farmers in the mostly rural county who did not see the need for additional taxes to acquire parklands when there was plenty of remaining open space at their doorsteps. The Supervisors were also concerned about taking too much land off the tax rolls,
