Angel Island’s long, varied story
Angel Island received its name in 1775 when Juan Manuel de Ayala of the Royal Spanish Navy sailed into the San Francisco
Bay and anchored on the large island that he would name Isla de Los Angeles. The cove where his ship berthed now bears his name, Ayala Cove.
The uninhabited island had been a hunting and fishing ground for the Coast Miwok tribe for many generations. In 1814, the British sloop HMS Raccoon was repaired on the beach at Ayala Cove and the deep-water channel between the island and Tiburon became known as Raccoon Strait.
For much of the first half of the 19th century, Angel Island was used for cattle ranching, but in 1850, shortly after the Mexican War, the island became a military preserve.
During the Civil War, soldiers from nearby
Fort Point constructed Camp Reynolds, the first permanent military installation on the island. In addition to providing troops to guard the entrance of the bay from Confederate naval raiders, the garrison also took part in campaigns against Native American tribes in the Western United States.
In 1891, the Army changed the name of the post to Fort McDowell and a quarantine station for ships entering the San Francisco Bay was built. By 1910, due to the racistand isolationist-inspired Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Chinese immigrants to San Francisco were interred there for quarantine purposes and to prove to customs officials that they had certificates from the Chinese government allowing them entry into the United States.
The act specifically prohibited Chinese who were “both skilled and unskilled laborers and Chinese employed in mining.”
The Immigration Station became known as “The Ellis Island of the West” and more than 175,000 Chinese and Asian immigrants were interred there from a few weeks to more than two years before immigrating or being deported. The Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed in 1943 but it was not until the 1950s and early 1960s that all racial and country-of-origin barriers were removed from United States law. Today, the Angel Island Immigration Station is a federally designated national historic landmark.
During both World War I and II, Fort McDowell served as a recruiting and training depot for men entering the Army, as a processing center for German, Japanese and Italian prisoner of wars and a decommissioning station for U. S. soldiers coming home from the Pacific in 1945. The last military use of the island was short-lived when, during the 1950s Cold War, the army built a Nike Missile base on the island that was operational for only eight years.
In 1955, Ayala Cove was purchased by the California State Park System and by 1962 all military operations ended, and the entire island was given over to the state of California.