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Part 1: The Huchiun Landscape Before Contact

For thousands of years the land between the Berkeley hills and the shore of San Francisco Bay was the home territory of Chochenyo-speaking Ohlone people. Their name for this place was xučyun, or Huchiun. The territory ran from the hills down to the bay and roughly from West Oakland north toward El Cerrito. Archaeological evidence shows human presence in the broader Bay Area stretching back at least 10,000 years, with intensified settlement along these particular shores beginning around 3700 BCE. By the time of European contact the region supported one of the denser populations on the West Coast, sustained by an unusually rich mix of estuarine, oak woodland, and grassland resources.

The Huchiun were hunter-gatherers who lived in semi-permanent villages and moved with the seasons. In the warmer months they kept villages close to the water, near the mouths of creeks such as Strawberry Creek and Temescal Creek. When the weather cooled they shifted inland toward the oak groves and meadows in the hills. The bay itself was not a barrier; it was the center of daily life, travel, and exchange. People crossed it in tule balsas—light reed boats—to fish, visit neighboring groups, and trade. The shoreline offered mussels and oysters that could be gathered with little more than a hand or a simple tool, clams dug from the mudflats, and an abundance of fish. Waterfowl filled the marshes. Farther inland, deer and elk moved through the grasslands, and the oak trees produced the acorns that formed a staple food once they were properly processed.

Villages were deliberately placed. Fresh water mattered, so sites clustered near reliable creeks. The ground also had to stay above the seasonal marshes that flooded in winter. Dome-shaped houses were framed with poles and thatched with tule, grass, or reeds. A central fire kept the interior warm. When a house became too infested with fleas it was burned and rebuilt. Larger communities included a roundhouse—a bigger, more permanent structure used for ceremony, gatherings, and instruction—and cleared dance areas enclosed by brush fences. Sweathouses were dug into stream banks. These were not temporary camps. They were established places that people returned to year after year, generation after generation.

The most visible markers of long occupation were the shellmounds. Along the East Bay shore, including at the mouth of Strawberry Creek, people built large, deliberately constructed mounds of shell, earth, ash, and organic material. The West Berkeley Shellmound, located near where Strawberry Creek once entered the bay, is among the earliest and most significant of these sites. Radiocarbon dates place its beginnings around 3700 BCE. Over the centuries it grew into an elliptical platform hundreds of feet long and more than a dozen feet high. It served as a raised village surface above the marsh, a burial ground, and a ceremonial center. Layers of mussel, oyster, and later clam shell mixed with tools, ornaments, and the remains of daily life. When the active village eventually shifted, the mound itself remained a place people returned to for burial and ceremony.

At the time of contact, estimates place at least 50,000 people living between the Carmel River and the northern reaches of San Francisco and San Pablo Bays, organized into roughly fifty small, related groups speaking mutually intelligible languages. The Huchiun were one of those groups. Their landscape had been shaped by human hands for millennia. Controlled burns kept undergrowth down, opened meadows, and encouraged the plants and animals people relied on. The result was a managed abundance: shellfish beds, acorn groves, and open country that supported permanent villages rather than constant wandering.

All of this existed under what are now the streets of Berkeley and the approaches to the bay. Strawberry Creek still ran open to the water. The shellmounds still stood above the marsh. Seasonal movement between shore and hills was ordinary. The later city grid, the filled shoreline, and the paved roads sit on top of that older pattern. The Huchiun landscape was not empty ground waiting for a city. It was a fully occupied, carefully used territory whose villages, mounds, and pathways had already been in place for thousands of years when the first European ships entered the bay.

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Part 2: Shellmounds on Strawberry Creek

The West Berkeley Shellmound stood near the mouth of Strawberry Creek where the creek once entered San Francisco Bay. It is one of the earliest known habitation sites in the Bay Area. Radiocarbon dates place the beginning of continuous use around 3700 BCE, making it older than many of the better-known shellmounds that once lined the East Bay shore. Archaeologists have identified it as CA-ALA-307. Early surveys, including work by Nels Nelson in the early twentieth century, recorded it as among the oldest of the roughly 425 shellmounds that once ringed the bay.

The mound was not an accidental pile of refuse. It was a deliberately constructed platform built up over centuries from layers of marine shell, earth, ash, and organic material. Estimates of its original size vary, but accounts describe an elliptical feature several hundred feet long—conservatively placed around 350 by 600 feet in some reports—and rising at least fifteen feet above the surrounding ground, with some descriptions suggesting it reached higher before later leveling. Its long axis followed the course of Strawberry Creek. The elevated surface kept living areas above the seasonal marshes that flooded the shoreline. It also provided a stable base for houses and a clear vantage over the bay.

Shellfish collecting was the constant foundation of life at the site. The earliest layers contain vast quantities of mussels and oysters, both available with relatively little specialized equipment. Mussels could be pulled from rocks; oysters could be gathered from gravel bars at low tide. Later deposits show a shift toward clams, which required more effort to dig from the mud and sand, while mussels remained important. Fish bones, including herring, appear in quantity. Bird and mammal remains indicate that waterfowl, deer, and other game supplemented the shellfish diet. Tools recovered from the deposits include mortars and pestles for processing acorns and other plant foods, projectile points, fishhooks, bone awls, shell beads, and charmstones. These objects, along with the shells themselves, accumulated in distinct cultural layers that record changes in technology and subsistence over thousands of years.

The mound also functioned as a burial ground and ceremonial place. Excavations over more than a century have documented hundreds of human burials associated with the site and its immediate surroundings. Some early accounts, including a 1876 newspaper report of work by Alphonse Pinart, described large numbers of skeletons uncovered in the mound. Later professional excavations by University of California archaeologists recovered additional remains and associated artifacts. Many of those collections remain at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology. Even after the active village relocated—sometime after roughly 800 CE according to some interpretations—the mound continued to be used for burial and ceremony. Ohlone oral tradition and contemporary tribal accounts describe these shellmounds as places where ancestors were laid to rest and where ceremonial life continued long after everyday residence shifted elsewhere.

Destruction of the aboveground mound began in the mid-nineteenth century. Settlers removed shell and earth for fertilizer, chicken feed, and grading material for roads and other construction. By the early twentieth century much of the visible mound had been scraped away. Archaeological excavations removed further material and hundreds of burials. By the 1950s the remaining above-ground portions had been leveled. A parking lot for Spenger’s Fish Grotto, a restaurant that operated nearby from the 1890s until 2018, was paved over part of the site. The creek itself had long since been culverted. What remained was largely subsurface.

In 2000 the City of Berkeley designated a three-block area encompassing the shellmound as a city landmark. Later evaluations found the site eligible for the National Register of Historic Places and the California Register. For years a 2.2-acre parcel at 1900 Fourth Street, the old Spenger’s parking lot, remained undeveloped. After extended legal and community efforts, the city acquired the parcel and in 2024 transferred it to the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, an Indigenous-led organization, for long-term stewardship. The transfer returned the last significant open piece of the site to Ohlone care.

The shellmound at Strawberry Creek records continuous human use of this shoreline for more than five thousand years. Its layers document shifts in shellfish species, tool technologies, and burial practices. Its removal supplied material for the roads and fill that later covered the same ground. The modern streets and the parking lot that once sat on the site rest on top of that accumulated history. The mound itself is no longer visible, but the archaeological record and the continued ceremonial importance of the place remain.

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Part 3: Spanish Arrival and the Mission Era

Spanish overland exploration reached the San Francisco Bay region in the late 1760s. The Portolá expedition of 1769, searching for Monterey Bay, became the first recorded European party to sight the larger bay from the peninsula side. Subsequent probes by Pedro Fages in 1770–1772 pushed farther north and east. In the spring of 1772 a Fages-Crespí party traveled along the east shore of the bay, passing through territory that included Huchiun lands. They encountered local people near the southeast shore of what is now San Pablo Bay and noted the open country and the creeks running to the water. Juan Bautista de Anza’s 1775–1776 colonizing expedition followed a similar East Bay route in March 1776, moving past the future sites of Oakland and Berkeley before continuing toward the Carquinez Strait. These passages marked the first sustained European observation of the shoreline villages and shellmounds that had stood for centuries.

Mission San Francisco de Asís, better known as Mission Dolores, was founded in 1776 on the peninsula. It quickly became the primary destination for people drawn or taken from the East Bay. Baptismal records show Huchiun and other Chochenyo-speaking groups appearing at Dolores in significant numbers during the late 1770s and 1780s. Some individuals and families moved voluntarily in response to new goods, alliances, or the disruption already spreading through neighboring territories. Others were brought under Spanish military pressure. Once at the mission they were baptized, lived in the mission community, and were subject to the labor and religious regimen the Franciscans imposed. Disease moved faster than conversion. Epidemics of smallpox, measles, and other illnesses reduced populations that had no prior exposure. The villages along Strawberry Creek, Temescal Creek, and the rest of the Huchiun shoreline did not empty overnight, but the steady transfer of people to Dolores thinned them year by year.

Mission San José, founded in 1797 in present-day Fremont by Father Fermín Francisco de Lasuén, extended the same system deeper into the East Bay. It drew additional Chochenyo speakers from the southern and central portions of the territory, including groups whose lands overlapped the broader Huchiun range. The mission’s baptismal registers document continued movement from East Bay villages through the early 1800s. By the first decade of the nineteenth century most of the remaining Huchiun population had been absorbed into one of the two missions. Resistance occurred—Saclan and Huchiun groups were involved in unrest in the mid-1790s—but it did not reverse the overall transfer. The shoreline settlements that had maintained the shellmounds and seasonal rounds for millennia were left largely unoccupied.

The missions operated as both religious and economic institutions. Neophytes worked mission fields, tended livestock, and constructed buildings. Traditional gathering and hunting continued in limited form on the margins, but the old pattern of semi-permanent villages tied to specific creeks and mounds could not be sustained once the majority of the population lived at Dolores or San José. The shellmounds themselves remained, still used at times for burial, but the communities that had built and maintained them no longer resided beside them year-round.

Mexican independence in 1821 and the subsequent secularization of the missions in the 1830s ended the Franciscan system. Mission lands and remaining neophyte communities were broken up. Some Ohlone families stayed near the former missions or moved to ranchos as laborers. Others dispersed. By the time large private land grants such as Rancho San Antonio were confirmed in the 1820s and 1830s, the Huchiun villages along the Berkeley and Oakland shoreline had already been empty for decades. The creeks still ran to the bay. The shellmounds still marked the older occupation. The people who had lived there for thousands of years were no longer present in the numbers or the settlements that had defined the landscape before 1776.

The Spanish and mission period therefore sits between the long pre-contact occupation of the East Bay shore and the Mexican rancho era that followed. It did not immediately replace one system of land use with another. It removed the population that had shaped the shoreline for millennia, leaving the ground open for the grants, cattle ranges, and later American claims that would cover the same creeks and mounds.

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Part 4: Rancho San Antonio

On August 3, 1820, Pablo Vicente de Solá, the last Spanish governor of Alta California, granted approximately 44,800 acres to Luís María Peralta. The grant, known as Rancho San Antonio or the Peralta Grant, recognized Peralta’s roughly forty years of military service. It was one of the largest awards made under Spanish authority. The land stretched along the east shore of San Francisco Bay from the area of present-day San Leandro northward through Oakland, Alameda, Emeryville, Piedmont, Berkeley, and Albany, reaching the Alameda–Contra Costa county line. Peralta never lived on the rancho. He remained in San José, where he served as commissioner of the pueblo, and directed his sons to occupy and manage the grant.

The four sons who received the land were José Domingo, José Vicente, Antonio María, and Hermenegildo Ignacio. Over the following decades the family constructed sixteen houses on the rancho—eleven of adobe, three of frame construction, one of brick, and one early structure of logs and dirt. Antonio María was the first to settle, building an adobe in what is now the Fruitvale district of Oakland. Ignacio established himself farther south near present-day San Leandro. Vicente built along Temescal Creek in North Oakland. Domingo, after living for a time on other family holdings, moved north in the 1830s and constructed an adobe in 1841 near Codornices Creek in the area that became Berkeley, close to the later site of St. Mary’s College High School. These adobes served as headquarters for managing cattle herds that ranged across the open grasslands and oak-dotted hills.

In 1842, near the end of his life, Luís María Peralta formally divided Rancho San Antonio among his four sons. Ignacio received roughly 9,400 acres in the southern portion, from the San Leandro area toward the later Oakland Coliseum. Antonio María was allotted about 16,000 acres that included the Lake Merritt vicinity and the Alameda peninsula. Vicente’s share ran from Lake Merritt northward through West Oakland and the Temescal district to the approximate Berkeley line. Domingo received the northernmost section—present-day Berkeley and Albany plus a strip of northern Oakland. The daughters received cattle and the family’s San José adobe and orchards rather than portions of the East Bay grant. The sons were instructed to work the land cooperatively for the benefit of the whole family. Later surveys and U.S. patents would record the combined Vicente and Domingo holdings at just over 19,000 acres.

The rancho operated as a classic Mexican-era cattle range. Hides and tallow were the principal commercial products, shipped through the bay to markets farther south or to trading vessels. The Peralta adobes sat near reliable water—Codornices Creek for Domingo, Temescal Creek for Vicente—while the herds moved seasonally across the larger tract. A practical track, later called the Temescal Road, connected the brothers’ homes and followed the general line of the creeks and higher ground between them. Early American maps still show traces of this route. The shoreline itself remained largely marsh and tidal flat; the shellmounds of the earlier Huchiun occupation were still visible but no longer maintained by resident villages.

Rancho San Antonio existed under three flags. It was granted while Alta California was Spanish territory, continued under Mexican rule after 1821, and fell under American jurisdiction after the 1846–1848 conquest. Luís María Peralta lived until 1851, long enough to see the beginning of the American period but not the full legal confirmation of the family’s title. The U.S. Land Commission and subsequent court cases would eventually patent the various portions to the sons or their heirs, with the northern Vicente–Domingo tract confirmed at 18,848.98 acres in a patent issued in 1877. By then the open range had already been broken by squatters, sales, and the pressure that followed the Gold Rush.

The grant covered the exact ground later traversed by the streets of Berkeley and the approaches to the bay. Domingo’s adobe stood on the northern section; Vicente’s on the Temescal side. The creeks that once defined village sites and shellmounds now marked the edges of family holdings. The rancho period replaced the long Indigenous occupation of the shoreline with a cattle economy managed from a handful of adobes, setting the boundaries and the family names that American claimants would confront in the 1850s.

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Part 5: The Peralta Brothers and Their Homes

The four Peralta brothers who occupied Rancho San Antonio did not live in a single compound. They established separate households across the grant so that cattle, water, and the long shoreline could be managed in sections. José Domingo Peralta took the northernmost portion—present-day Berkeley and Albany together with a strip of northern Oakland. His adobe, built in 1841, stood near Codornices Creek, close to the later location of St. Mary’s College High School. The site gave him access to reliable water and a view across the open range toward the bay. From that house he oversaw the herds that grazed the grasslands and oak-dotted hills of the northern tract.

José Vicente Peralta settled farther south, along Temescal Creek in what is now the heart of North Oakland’s Temescal district. His adobe became the center of the middle portion of the rancho. Temescal Creek supplied water for the household and for the livestock that ranged between his land and Domingo’s. The two brothers’ homes were linked by a practical track that followed higher ground and the general line of the creeks. Early American maps record this route as the Temescal Road. It was not a surveyed highway; it was the path people actually used to move between the adobes, to reach the bay shore, and to travel south toward the other brothers’ holdings. A short remnant of the alignment survives today as Racine Street in North Oakland.

Antonio María Peralta was the first of the sons to move onto the grant. He built an adobe in the area that became the Fruitvale district of Oakland and later replaced it with a larger house. His portion included the land around Lake Merritt and the Alameda peninsula. Ignacio Peralta established himself still farther south, near present-day San Leandro, where he eventually constructed a brick house that survived the 1868 Hayward Fault earthquake. Together the four households—eleven adobes and several later frame or brick buildings—formed the only permanent European-style structures on the 44,800-acre grant for most of its Mexican-era existence.

Daily life on the rancho centered on cattle. The brothers and their families, assisted by a small number of laborers, managed herds whose hides and tallow were the main products sold to trading ships or sent south. The open range required constant movement. Riders checked the animals, moved them away from marsh edges in wet seasons, and protected them from predators and, later, from theft. The adobes themselves were modest. They provided shelter, storage, and a fixed point from which to direct the larger operation. Visitors and officials traveling the East Bay shore stopped at these houses; the Temescal Road and the tracks that connected the other brothers’ homes were the ordinary routes of the period.

The division formalized in 1842 kept the land inside the family but did not eliminate friction. The Peralta sisters, who had received cattle and the San José property rather than East Bay acreage, later contested the brothers’ exclusive claim in what became known as the Sisters Title case. The California Supreme Court ultimately ruled in the brothers’ favor in 1859, but the litigation added cost and uncertainty. By then American squatters were already on the ground. Domingo’s northern adobe and Vicente’s Temescal house sat on the exact tracts that Gold Rush claimants would target in the early 1850s.

These homes and the road that linked them mark the transition from the long Indigenous occupation of the shoreline to the rancho landscape that American surveyors and settlers encountered. The shellmounds near Strawberry Creek and Temescal Creek were still visible, but the villages that had maintained them were gone. In their place stood a handful of adobes and a cattle range whose boundaries would be redrawn, sold, and surveyed within a single generation. The Temescal Road that once connected Domingo’s house on Codornices Creek to Vicente’s house on Temescal Creek became one of the first alignments later incorporated into the American county road system. The ground under today’s Berkeley and North Oakland streets was, in the 1840s, still the working territory of those two Peralta households.

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Part 6: The Gold Rush Reaches the East Bay

Gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill on the American River in January 1848. News traveled slowly at first, then all at once. By the end of that year men were already leaving the small settlements around San Francisco Bay for the Sierra foothills. San Francisco itself, a village of a few hundred people in 1846, emptied as sailors abandoned their ships and residents headed for the diggings, then filled again with new arrivals who came by sea around Cape Horn or overland across the plains. The same pressure crossed the bay within months. The open cattle ranges of the East Bay, including the northern sections of Rancho San Antonio held by Domingo and Vicente Peralta, were no longer remote.

Squatters appeared on Peralta land almost as soon as the rush began. Some were former soldiers or discharged sailors who simply occupied unfenced ground and began to cut timber or run a few animals. Others were organized groups that filed informal claims and waited to see whether Mexican titles would be respected under American rule. Cattle disappeared. Contemporary accounts and later family testimony describe herds driven off or slaughtered. Redwood stands in the East Bay hills, which the Peraltas had used selectively, were cut by loggers supplying the sudden demand for lumber in San Francisco. The brothers posted notices and appealed to military and civil authorities, but enforcement was weak in the early years of American occupation.

Luís María Peralta, still living in San José, had warned his sons that the land itself was their real wealth and that they should avoid the gold fields. The advice proved only partly useful. The sons stayed on the rancho, but the rancho could not be defended against hundreds of new arrivals who treated the East Bay as open public domain. Domingo’s adobe near Codornices Creek and Vicente’s house on Temescal Creek became isolated points inside a landscape that was rapidly being occupied by others. Tracks that had once served only the family and their workers now carried strangers moving between the bay shore and the interior.

The legal machinery of the new American government arrived more slowly than the squatters. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 promised to respect valid Mexican land grants, but the process of confirming those grants required claimants to appear before the U.S. Land Commission created in 1851. Vicente and Domingo Peralta filed their claim for the northern portion of Rancho San Antonio in January 1852. Confirmation by the commission came in 1854, followed by district-court affirmations, yet the final patent was not issued until 1877. In the intervening decades the brothers spent heavily on lawyers and surveys while squatters continued to occupy and improve parcels. Many of those occupants later purchased quitclaim deeds or simply remained until the Peraltas, short of cash, sold them clear title.

San Francisco’s explosive growth supplied both the market and the people. By 1850 the city had roughly 25,000 residents; two years later the number was higher still. Every new building, every ship fitting out for the return voyage, and every temporary camp needed food, lumber, and labor. The East Bay ranches were the nearest source. Hides and tallow, once the main products shipped from the Peralta grant, were suddenly less important than beef on the hoof and timber cut from the hills. The old Temescal Road and the informal tracks that crossed the northern rancho became routes for this new traffic. What had been a family cattle range managed from two adobes was, by the early 1850s, a contested zone of overlapping claims, cut-over woodland, and scattered American cabins.

The Gold Rush therefore did not merely add population to San Francisco. It ended the practical isolation of Rancho San Antonio within a few years of the first discoveries. The same creeks and shoreline that had supported Huchiun villages and later Peralta adobes were now crossed by squatters moving toward the diggings or settling permanently on the grant. The legal title would eventually be confirmed, but the open range and the uncontested family control that had defined the Mexican era were already gone.

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Part 7: Squatters, Courts, and the Breakup of the Rancho

The U.S. Land Commission created by Congress in 1851 required every holder of a Mexican or Spanish grant to file a claim and prove title. Vicente and Domingo Peralta submitted their petition for the northern portion of Rancho San Antonio on January 21, 1852. The commission confirmed the claim in February 1854. The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California affirmed the decision in 1855 and again in later proceedings. A final patent for 18,848.98 acres was not issued to the heirs of Vicente and Domingo until February 10, 1877. The twenty-five years between the first filing and the patent were filled with surveys, appeals, boundary disputes, and continuous occupation by people who did not wait for the courts.

Squatters did not treat the pending litigation as a reason to stay off the land. Cabins, fenced fields, and small commercial buildings appeared across the northern tract while the case moved through the commission and the courts. Some occupants were transient, cutting timber or grazing a few animals before moving on. Others improved the ground, planted crops, and opened roads, creating facts on the ground that later purchasers and judges had to confront. The Peralta brothers and their heirs responded with ejectment suits, but each lawsuit required money for lawyers and surveyors at a time when cattle income was falling and legal costs were rising. Many squatters eventually bought quitclaim deeds or reached private settlements; others simply remained until the family, short of cash, sold clear title to the parcels they already occupied.

Boundary questions added further expense. The original 1820 grant described the rancho in general terms—roughly ten leagues along the east shore of the bay. American surveyors working in the late 1850s produced detailed plats that fixed metes and bounds, but those plats also revealed overlaps with neighboring claims and uncertainties about the exact location of creeks and the shoreline. The northern Vicente–Domingo tract was surveyed by James T. Stratton in 1858–1859; the resulting map shows the adobes, the Temescal Road alignment, and the scattered improvements already present. Each clarification of a line could trigger a new objection from an adjacent claimant or from settlers who had built inside what they believed was public land.

The Peralta sisters’ separate challenge, known as the Sisters Title case, ran on a parallel track. Excluded from the 1842 division of the East Bay grant, the sisters contested their brothers’ exclusive ownership. The California Supreme Court ruled in the brothers’ favor in 1859, but the litigation consumed additional years and resources. By the time that decision was final, large portions of the original rancho had already passed out of family hands through sale or prolonged occupation.

Practical control therefore eroded faster than legal title. Domingo’s adobe near Codornices Creek and Vicente’s house on Temescal Creek remained, yet the open range around them filled with other people’s fences and structures. Timber continued to leave the hills. Cattle that had once moved freely were now confined or driven off. The brothers sold parcels piecemeal to cover court costs and to resolve the most pressing squatter conflicts. What had been a single family cattle operation managed from a handful of adobes became, by the late 1850s, a patchwork of small holdings whose new owners expected roads, surveys, and eventual town lots.

The same process repeated across the rest of Rancho San Antonio. Ignacio and Antonio María faced their own commissions, squatters, and sales. By the 1860s and 1870s the last large blocks were disappearing; Antonio’s remaining acreage had shrunk to a few dozen acres by the time of his death in 1879. The final patents confirmed the original grants on paper, yet the landscape those patents described no longer existed as open rancho land. The streets that would later cross Berkeley and North Oakland were already being laid out, in practice if not yet in name, across ground that squatters and purchasers had occupied while the courts were still deciding who held formal title.

Part 8: Francis Shattuck and the First American Claims

Francis Kittredge Shattuck arrived in California with his brother-in-law George Blake after news of the gold discoveries reached the East. Born in New York in 1824, Shattuck had worked as a teacher and store clerk before heading west. In 1852, together with Blake and two other partners, William Hillegass and James Leonard, he claimed four adjoining 160-acre strips in the area that is now central Berkeley. The land lay inside the northern portion of Rancho San Antonio still held, on paper, by Domingo Peralta. The claim followed the common pattern of the early 1850s: American arrivals treated unfenced rancho ground as open for settlement and filed informal or preemption-style assertions while Mexican titles remained unconfirmed.

The first filing did not survive. Domingo Peralta and his family continued to assert their rights, and the overlapping American claims created immediate conflict. Shattuck did not abandon the location. He remained in the East Bay, entered local politics, and in 1860 purchased clear title to his 160-acre tract from a French-born banker who had acquired it through earlier transactions. The parcel, known in later records as Plot 68, was bounded by the lines of present-day Addison Street on the north, Russell Street on the south, Shattuck Avenue on the east, and what is now Martin Luther King Jr. Way on the west. At the time of purchase none of those streets existed. The tract was still open ground crossed by the older tracks that connected the Peralta adobes.

Shattuck’s political positions gave him direct influence over how that ground would be organized. He served as mayor of Oakland from 1859 to 1860, sat on the Alameda County Board of Supervisors, and later held seats in the state assembly and on Berkeley’s board of town trustees. As a county supervisor he was assigned responsibility for constructing a new public road along the dividing line between his own parcel and the adjoining strip claimed by George Blake. The road was laid out from the point where Strawberry Creek crossed the older Temescal track, then ran southward to a junction with the Telegraph Road. Local usage quickly named it Shattuck’s Road. By the time the Town of Berkeley incorporated in 1878 the name had become Shattuck Avenue, and the alignment had been extended northward to Rose Street.

The same corridor attracted the railroad. Shattuck and his neighbor James Barker negotiated with the Central Pacific to extend a branch line into the area. The Berkeley Branch Railroad opened in 1876, with its early stations and yards located along the wide right-of-way that Shattuck Avenue still occupies between Center Street and University Avenue. Shattuck donated land for the station grounds and used the new rail connection to encourage commercial development on his holdings. He built Berkeley’s first substantial commercial block near the Shattuck-Addison intersection and established a bank that later became the First National Bank of Berkeley. His own residence, a mansard-roofed house set back from the street between Allston and Bancroft, stood on the tract he had secured in 1860.

These actions converted an informal 1852 claim into the central spine of a new town. The road Shattuck was ordered to build followed, in part, the line of earlier tracks, but it was surveyed, graded, and maintained as a county highway. The rail spur reinforced the same alignment. Settlers who had occupied other portions of the old Peralta grant now oriented their own improvements toward Shattuck’s Road and the branch line. What had been contested rancho land in the early 1850s was, by the late 1870s, a platted street grid whose principal avenue carried the name of the man who had both claimed the ground and supervised the construction of the road that crossed it.

Part 9: Temescal Road

Before any American county survey existed, a practical track already linked the Peralta households on the northern half of Rancho San Antonio. Domingo Peralta’s adobe stood near Codornices Creek in the area that became Berkeley. Vicente Peralta’s adobe stood farther south along Temescal Creek in present-day North Oakland. The path that connected them followed higher ground between the two creeks, avoided the worst of the shoreline marsh, and continued southward toward the other brothers’ holdings and the older routes that led to San José. Early residents and later mapmakers called it the Temescal Road. It was not a single engineered line; it was the route people actually used, shifting slightly with seasonal flooding, fallen trees, or the placement of ranch gates.

Kellersberger’s map, one of the first official American plats of the region, records the general alignment. A short surviving fragment appears today as Racine Street in North Oakland, preserving the angle where the older track met later street grids. Other portions were absorbed into subsequent roads or disappeared under fill and pavement. The road’s usefulness was simple: it joined the two active adobes, gave access to the bay shore, and connected the northern rancho to the Telegraph Road and the tracks that ran south through Oakland. Travelers, vaqueros moving cattle, and, after 1848, an increasing number of American newcomers all used the same corridor.

After the Gold Rush the Temescal Road was gradually converted from a private ranch track into a public county road. Alameda County supervisors, including Francis Shattuck, ordered surveys and improvements along existing alignments rather than cutting entirely new lines across open country. The Temescal route supplied one of those ready-made alignments. Where it crossed Strawberry Creek it intersected the new road Shattuck was directed to build; that junction helped fix the southern end of what became Shattuck Avenue. Farther south the same corridor influenced the placement of later streets through the Temescal district. The road was never paved in its original form, yet its line determined where fences, culverts, and eventually house lots would be laid out.

The name itself records the creek and the district. Temescal Creek, which rises in the hills and once reached the bay near the large Emeryville shellmound, gave both the watercourse and the road their common designation. Mexican-era documents and early American accounts use the term for the creek, the nearby settlement, and the track that followed it. When the Peralta brothers managed the range, the road was simply the way from one adobe to the other. When American settlers arrived, it became the most direct existing path across the contested northern grant. Surveyors straightening it for county use still had to respect the creeks, the remaining marsh edges, and the improvements squatters had already made along its sides.

By the 1860s and 1870s the Temescal Road had been partly superseded by the newer, wider county roads and by the rail line that arrived in 1876, yet its influence remained. Property descriptions continued to refer to it. Short segments kept their old orientation inside the emerging street grid. The modern streets of North Oakland and South Berkeley therefore overlie both the later American surveys and the earlier track that once connected Domingo Peralta’s house on Codornices Creek with Vicente Peralta’s house on Temescal Creek. The shellmounds near both creeks, the rancho adobes, and the first county roads all occupied the same narrow band of higher ground between the hills and the bay. The Temescal Road was the ordinary path that tied those successive uses together.

Part 10: Shattuck’s Road and the County Survey

The road that became Shattuck Avenue began as a county project assigned to Francis Kittredge Shattuck in his role as an Alameda County supervisor. The Board of Supervisors directed him to open a public highway along the boundary between his own 160-acre tract and the adjoining parcel held by his brother-in-law George Blake. The chosen line started at the point where Strawberry Creek crossed the older Temescal Road and ran southward to a junction with the Telegraph Road, the existing route that already linked Oakland with points farther south. Construction followed the common practice of the 1850s and 1860s: the county ordered the work, the adjacent landowners supplied labor or paid assessments, and the resulting track was declared a public road.

Local usage named it Shattuck’s Road almost at once. The alignment was wider than most ranch tracks because it was intended from the start to serve through traffic and, later, a railroad. By the late 1860s the road had been extended northward beyond its original segment, reaching Rose Street. When the Town of Berkeley incorporated in 1878 the name was formalized as Shattuck Avenue. The same corridor determined the placement of the Central Pacific’s Berkeley Branch Railroad, which opened in 1876. Shattuck and James Barker had negotiated the spur line; the railroad’s early stations, sidings, and yards occupied the broad right-of-way between Center Street and University Avenue. The two “islands” that still interrupt Shattuck Avenue in downtown Berkeley—Shattuck Square and Berkeley Square—are remnants of that railroad reservation.

The county survey did more than fix a single road. It established the principal north-south axis for the emerging town grid. Cross streets were laid out to meet Shattuck Avenue at regular intervals. Commercial buildings rose first along the new road because it offered the most direct connection to Oakland, to the rail line, and to the ferries that carried passengers to San Francisco. Shattuck himself built the town’s earliest substantial business block near the intersection with Addison Street and located his own residence a short distance south, between Allston and Bancroft. The width of the avenue, preserved in part because of the railroad, later allowed streetcars, utility lines, and still heavier automobile traffic without the immediate need to widen the right-of-way.

Earlier features were not entirely erased. The southern end of Shattuck’s Road met the Temescal track at Strawberry Creek, so the new county highway incorporated rather than ignored the older alignment. Strawberry Creek itself was progressively culverted through the downtown section as buildings and pavement advanced, yet its former course still influenced lot lines and the slight irregularities that appear in the oldest blocks. Property deeds from the 1860s and 1870s continue to describe parcels by reference to Shattuck’s Road, the Temescal Road, and the creek crossings, showing how the successive surveys layered on top of one another.

By the 1880s Shattuck Avenue was the recognized spine of Berkeley. The rail connection, the commercial frontage, and the county-road status had turned an 1850s boundary line between two American claims into the main street of a growing town. The shellmounds and Peralta adobes that had once defined the same ground were already gone or reduced to subsurface traces. In their place stood a surveyed, graded, and increasingly paved avenue whose name and alignment recorded the precise moment when county authority and private land claims replaced the rancho tracks. The modern street that carries traffic through downtown Berkeley follows that nineteenth-century county survey more closely than any earlier path.

Part 11: Early Connections to the Bay

The roads that crossed the old Peralta grant did not end at the Oakland or Berkeley street grids. They continued, in one form or another, to the shoreline, because the bay remained the fastest route to San Francisco. Before any bridge existed, passengers, mail, and freight moved by ferry. The earliest regular services operated from wharves in Oakland and from smaller landings farther north. Tracks such as the Temescal Road and the later county highways funneled traffic toward these landings. A traveler leaving the Berkeley area in the 1850s or 1860s followed the improving roads south or west until reaching a dock where a steam ferry or sailboat made the crossing.

University Avenue became the principal east-west corridor linking the growing settlement around Shattuck Avenue to the water. In the Mexican era the avenue’s line did not exist as a formal road; it developed in the American period as lots were sold and the town grid extended westward. By the 1870s and 1880s it carried horse-car and later electric streetcar lines that connected downtown Berkeley with the rail stations and, ultimately, with the ferry slips. The same avenue pointed directly at the place where Strawberry Creek had once entered the bay, the site of the West Berkeley Shellmound. Fill, culverts, and later industrial uses gradually altered the shoreline, but the avenue’s alignment preserved the logic of the older path from the hills to the water.

A more ambitious connection appeared in the 1920s. The Golden Gate Ferry Company constructed a pier at the foot of University Avenue that extended roughly three and a half miles into the bay, reaching water deep enough for automobile ferries. The pier opened in 1926–1927 and carried cars as well as passengers between Berkeley and San Francisco. For a few years it formed part of the transcontinental Lincoln Highway and U.S. Route 40. Drivers coming from the east could cross the bay without entering Oakland. The structure rested in part on earlier fill and on the remains of still older wharves. Its eastern end sat near the mouth of the long-culverted Strawberry Creek.

The opening of the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge in 1936 ended most of this ferry traffic. The Key System and the Southern Pacific abandoned their transbay ferry routes within a few years. The long Berkeley pier continued in reduced use for a short time, then closed to automobiles. Its pilings remained, a visible remnant of the last major ferry landing on the Berkeley shore. The roads that had fed the ferries—University Avenue, the improved county highways, and the connecting streetcar lines—stayed in place. They simply delivered traffic to the new bridge approaches instead of to the docks.

These successive connections record the same geographic fact: the East Bay communities that grew on the old Rancho San Antonio needed a reliable way across the water. The Temescal Road and Shattuck’s Road organized movement on land. University Avenue extended that movement to the shore. The ferry pier of the 1920s represented the final elaboration of the pre-bridge system. When the bridge opened, the function remained; only the vehicle changed. The streets that now carry traffic from Berkeley toward the bay still follow, in their broad lines, the corridors first established to reach the ferries.

Part 12: San Francisco After the Rush and What the Streets Cover

San Francisco on the opposite shore of the bay expanded under the same Gold Rush pressure that broke up the East Bay ranchos. In 1846 the settlement at Yerba Buena held only a few hundred people. By 1849–1850 the population had jumped into the tens of thousands. Ships abandoned by crews who left for the mines filled the harbor; many were dragged ashore or sunk and used as foundations for wharves and buildings. Tents and rough wooden structures covered the slopes nearest the water. The street grid that still organizes downtown was surveyed and imposed on this chaotic ground within a few years, often before the lots themselves were solid.

Much of the early commercial city stood on filled land. Promoters sold “water lots”—parcels staked out in the shallow bay—with the understanding that owners would later dump sand, rock, and rubble until the surface rose above high tide. Entire blocks of the present Financial District, Jackson Square, and the Embarcadero rest on such fill. The original shoreline lay farther inland; today’s Embarcadero and the streets immediately behind it occupy ground that was open water or tidal marsh in the late 1840s. Wharves pushed outward, ships were scuttled alongside them, and the space between was packed with debris from the frequent fires that swept the wooden city. The 1906 earthquake and fire destroyed most of the surface buildings, yet the filled lots and the older wharf lines remained underneath the rebuilt streets.

The same process that created Shattuck Avenue and the Berkeley grid occurred here on a larger and faster scale. American surveyors laid out straight streets across dunes, marshes, and newly filled water lots. Property changed hands repeatedly in the first years of the rush. Titles were clouded, boundaries disputed, and improvements made by people who expected the city to ratify their occupation. By the mid-1850s the principal downtown streets—Montgomery, Kearny, Sacramento, Clay—were already established corridors carrying wagons, pedestrians, and, later, horse cars. The bay remained the highway that connected this new city to the East Bay landings. Ferries departed from wharves at the foot of the north-south streets and delivered passengers to Oakland and, eventually, to the Berkeley shore.

What the modern pavement covers on the San Francisco side is therefore a compressed sequence of the same changes visible in Berkeley. The pre-contact shoreline and its shellmounds or village sites lie deepest, in most places now well below street level or removed entirely. Above them sit the Mexican-era and early American waterfront structures, the abandoned ships, and the vast quantities of fill dumped in the 1850s. The street grid surveyed during the Gold Rush occupies the top layer. After dark the lights and traffic move across this accumulated ground exactly as they move across the culverted creeks and former rancho tracks on the Berkeley side. The crossing itself—once accomplished by ferry from the foot of University Avenue or from Oakland wharves, later by bridge—simply joins two cities built, within the same decade, on land that had supported Indigenous villages and then Mexican ranchos only a few years earlier.

The streets the drive follows after dark in San Francisco are the current surface of that rapid transformation. They overlie filled water lots, older wharf lines, and the first American surveys of the 1850s. The history recorded in the East Bay sections—the Huchiun shellmounds, the Peralta adobes, the Temescal Road, Shattuck’s Road—has its counterpart here in the buried ships, the water-lot fill, and the Gold Rush street grid. Both sides of the bay carry the same sequence under their pavement.