Contra Costa County
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Contra Costa County
Albany
In 1908, a group of local women protested the dumping of Berkeley garbage in their community. Armed with two shotguns and a twenty-two-caliber rifle, they confronted the drivers of the wagons near what is now the corner of San Pablo Avenue and Buchanan Street. The ladies told the drivers of the horse-drawn garbage wagons to go home, which they did quickly and without complaint.
Shortly thereafter, the residents of the town voted to incorporate as the City of Ocean View. In 1909, voters changed the name of the city, primarily to distinguish the city from the adjacent section of Berkeley which had previously been named Ocean View. On a vote of 38 to 6 the city was renamed in honor of Albany, New York, the birthplace of the city's first mayor, Frank Roberts.
Crockett
Crockett is best known for being the corporate headquarters of C&H Sugar.
El Cerrito
El Cerrito was founded by refugees from the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake. They settled in a village in what was then Don Victór Castro's Rancho San Pablo. The settlers called their refugee camp Rust which later turned into a village. In 1917 it was eventually incorporated and named after founded by and named after Wilhelm F. Rust (a German immigrant) with 1,500 residents. Rust residents did not care for the name and later changed it to El Cerrito.
El Sobrante
El Sobrante literally translates to 'The Leftover' in Spanish.
Hercules
The town was established as company housing by the California Powder Works in 1881 when it relocated its operations from San Francisco. Hercules was named after the company's leading brand of explosive, in turn named after the mythical hero. Powder manufacturing was an extremely dangerous endeavor at the time, and uncontrolled explosions were frequent (indeed 59 workers died in the first 40 years of operation at this site). Hercules' isolated location at the time, plus its proximity to rail and water transportation along San Pablo Bay, made it an ideal choice.
Some time during the 1940's, long time employee William Darke was named sheriff, becoming Hercules' first law enforcement officer.
Considerable study has been made of the heavy metal lead accumulated as upper layer soil contamination from prior air pollution stack emissions from the California Powder Works operations.
By the Second World War, the plant had diversified to produce fertilizers and other chemical products. Eventually the facility was out-competed by foreign manufacturers, and the plant was closed in 1976. However, by this time the surrounding area was experiencing rapid growth as the commuter belt moved further outward from San Francisco. By the mid 1970’s Centex Homes and other developers began to build new subdivisions and transform Hercules into the residential suburb it is known as today.
Pinole
The name derives from "pinole", a Native American word for a kind of flour made from the seeds of maize, chia, and various other grasses and annual herbs. An expedition under Don Pedro Fages was said to have run out of provisions while exploring the area, and been fed pinole by a local village, and so the Spaniards named their camp "El Pinole". In 1823, Don Ignacio Martinez, commandant of the Presidio of San Francisco, received a land grant of more than 17,000 acres (69 km²) from the Mexican government. This land became known as "El Pinole". Don Ignacio Martinez built a hacienda in Pinole Valley at the present side of Pinole Valley Park. During the 1850s Bernardo Fernandez, a Portuguese immigrant, started a trading facility on the shores of San Pablo Bay and eventually built the historic Fernandez Mansion, which still stands today at the end of Tennent Avenue. From these early beginnings a small but thriving community grew into the city now known as Pinole.
The settlement grew with the coming of the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1878 and the establishment of the California Powder Works in nearby Hercules. During this period this city had an active waterfront and was a regional commercial and banking center. The City of Pinole was incorporated in 1903.
Pinole and the surrounding area grew rapidly during the post-World War II boom. With the coming of Interstate 80 in 1958, the town evolved in a suburban bedroom community within the San Francisco/Oakland commuter belt. Much of its original industry was displaced during this time, and the town became predominantly residential.
Today, the town is locally known for its "big box" shopping store district along Fitzgerald Ave. Pinole Vista Shopping Center which is continuous with Richmond's Hilltop Area. The downtown area still retains many turn-of-the-century building stock and is being preserved by the city’s development agency as a historic area.
Richmond
The name "Richmond" appears to predate actual incorporation by more than fifty years. Edmund Randolph, originally from Richmond, Virginia, represented the city of San Francisco when California's first legislature met in San Jose in December 1849, and he became state assemblyman from San Francisco. His loyalty to the town of his birth caused him to persuade a federal surveying party mapping the San Francisco Bay to place the names "Point Richmond" and "Richmond" on an 1854 geodetic coast map, which was the geodetic map at the terminal selected by the San Joaquin Valley Railroad; and by 1899 maps made by the railroad carried the name "Point Richmond Avenue," designating a county road that later became Barrett Avenue, a central street in Richmond.
Richmond was founded and incorporated in 1905, carved out of Rancho San Pablo, from which the nearby town of San Pablo inherited its name. Until 1919, the city had the largest winery in the world; the small abandoned village of Winehaven remains fenced off along Western Drive in the Point Molate Area. In the 1920s the Ku Klux Klan was active in the city. In 1930 the Ford Motor Company opened an assembly plant in the south side of town, which is now an abandoned industrial area (the plant moved to Milpitas in the 1970s). The city was a small town at that time, until the onset of World War II which brought on a rush of migrants and a boom in the industrial sector. Standard Oil set up operations here in 1901, including a refinery and tank farm, which are still operated by Chevron. There is a pier into San Francisco Bay south of Point Molate for oil tankers.
The western terminus of the Santa Fe Railroad was established in Richmond with ferry connections at Ferry Point in the Brickyard Cove area of Point Richmond to San Francisco.
At the outset of World War II, the four Richmond Shipyards were built along the Richmond waterfront, employing thousands of workers, many recruited from all over the United States, including many African-Americans and women entering the workforce for the first time. Many of these workers lived in specially-constructed houses scattered throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, including Richmond, Berkeley and Albany. A specially-built rail line, the Shipyard Railway, transported workers to the shipyards. Kaiser's Richmond shipyards built 747 Victory and Liberty ships for the war effort, more than any other site in the U.S. The city broke many records and even built one Liberty ship in a record five days. On average the yards could build a ship in thirty days. The medical system established for the shipyard workers eventually became today's Kaiser Permanente HMO. One of Kaiser's medical centers is located in Richmond.
By 1960 much of the temporary housing built for the shipyard workers was torn down, and the population dropped to about 71,000. Many of the people who moved to Richmond were black and came from the Midwest and South. Most of the white men were overseas at war, and this opened up new opportunities for ethnic minorities and women. This era also brought with it the innovation of daycare for children, as a few women could care for several dozen women's children, while most of the mothers went off to work in the factories and shipyards.
In the early 1900s, the Santa Fe railroad established a major rail yard adjacent to Point Richmond. The railroad constructed a tunnel through the Potrero San Pablo ridge to run a track from their yard to a ferry landing from which freight cars could be transshipped to San Francisco. Where this track crosses the main street in Point Richmond, there remain two of the last operational wigwag grade crossing signals in the United States, and the only surviving examples of the "upside-down" type. The wigwag is an antiquated type of railroad crossing signal which was phased out in the 1970s and 80s across the country. There was controversy in 2005 when the State Transportation Authority ordered the BNSF railroad company to upgrade the railroad crossing signs. A compromise was achieved that included installing new modern crossing equipment while not removing, but simply shutting off the historic ones and preserving their functionality for special events.
The Pullman Company also established a major facility in Richmond in the early 20th century. The facility connected with both the Santa Fe and Southern Pacific and serviced their passenger coach equipment. The Pullman Company was a large employer of African American men, who worked mainly as porters on the Pullman cars. Many of them settled in the East Bay, from Richmond to Oakland, prior to World War II.
Rodeo
Rodeo owes much of its history to brothers John and Patrick Tormey, who purchased tracts of land from the Martinez estate (also called the Rinole Grant or Rancho El Pinole) in 1865 and 1867.
Becoming successful ranchers and businessmen, they would amass sizable fortunes and eventually hold public office. Patrick Tormey (for whom the nearby town of Tormey, California is named) had visions of this area of Contra Costa County becoming the meatpacking and canning center of the Pacific coast. In partnership with the Union Stockyard Co. in 1890, he sold some of the land to them and began to lay out plans and make large investments for the stockyard facilities. Eventually, streets were graded and lots were prepared for homesteads, thus creating the town of Rodeo.
Patrick Tormey also sold land in the nearby town of Oleum, California, to the California Lumber Co. for use as a lumberyard (which eventually would be sold to the Union Oil Co. for an oil refinery site). He also sold land in nearby Selby, California, which was used by the Selby Smelting & Lead Co. He also personally funded the meatpacking plant, corrals and the Rodeo Hotel.
After recession in 1893, Patrick Tormey struggled to keep finances going as business began to close, culminating with the bankruptcy of the Union Stockyard Co. Patrick Tormey would be plagued with lawsuits over the bankruptcy for the remainder of his life. Residents were able to continue to find work in nearby towns of Crockett (C&H Sugar), Vallejo (the Mare Island Naval Shipyard), Hercules (Hercules Powder Co.), and the aforementioned Union Oil Co. in Oleum.
Rodeo as a community managed to continue on, but was devastated in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. In the aftermath, the town would rebuild much like other communities in and around the greater San Francisco Bay area. Today there is a large oil refinery adjacent to Rodeo, currently operated by ConocoPhillips.
San Pablo
The area in which today's San Pablo is situated was originally occupied by the Cuchiyun band of the Ohlone indigenous people. The area was claimed for the king of Spain in the late 18th century and was granted for grazing purposes to the Mission Dolores located in today's San Francisco. Upon Mexico's independence from Spain, church properties were secularized and in 1823, the area became part of a large grant to an ex-soldier stationed at the San Francisco Presidio, Francisco María Castro. The grant was given the name Rancho San Pablo, thus originating the name for today's city as well as for one of the East Bay's oldest principal roads, today's San Pablo Avenue (known during the Spanish colonial era as El Camino Real de la Contra Costa).
San Pablo is nearly surrounded by the city of Richmond, and is the home of the Casino San Pablo.
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