Portals of the Past:
San Francisco Bay is home to about four dozen islands, and each has a story.
Mention the islands of San Francisco Bay, and most people can name just five: Angel, Alcatraz, Alameda, Yerba Buena and Treasure. But that quintet is just the tip of the archipelago. Depending on how you count, there are no less than 48 islands in San Francisco Bay, each with its own remarkable story. As related in “The Islands of San Francisco Bay,” edited by James A. Martin and Michael T. Lee, the bay’s islands have served as hideouts for Indian chiefs, Huck Finn-like escapes for 49ers, quarries, quarantine stations, prisons, shrimp camps and repositories of world-class collections of stained glass.
One of the most intriguing isles is Station Island, home of the Bay Area’s only ghost town. Located at the sluggish southern end of the bay within the city limits of Fremont, Station Island was uninhab- ited until 1876, when the Southern Pacific Coast Railroad built a narrow-gauge line through it. To allow scow schooners to cross the tracks, two drawbridges were constructed on the little island. When a single cabin was built for the drawbridge’s
operator, the town of Drawbridge, population one, came into existence. The drawbridge operator, George Mundersheitz, opened and closed the drawbridges with a hand crank when trains came through.
As Jonah Owen Lamb notes in his essay on Station Island in Martin and Lee’s book, Mundersheitz began inviting friends to stay the night in his cabin when they visited the island to go duck hunting. Word spread and duck hunters erected a cabin called the Gordon Gun Club on the little island, the first of many duck hunting clubs. Two hotels followed. In the 1880s, nearly a thousand visitors were coming on weekends. The railroad added stops at the island to accommodate the new visitors.
1 phone line on island
By the 1920s, there were 90 private homes on Drawbridge (but no streets). The island had its own aquifer and one telephone line. In possibly the most obscure example of religious sectarianism in world history, the north side of Drawbridge was predominantly Protestant (and was regarded as stuck up), while the south was Catholic (and disparaged as wild).
The boom times sank along with the island itself, which began subsiding in the 1930s. The raw sewage that the city of San Jose began dumping into the bay did not increase the site’s allure. Most of the remaining inhabitants moved out. When local newspapers began running stories about the “Ghost Town on the Bay,” scavengers began ransacking the cabins — including ones that were still inhabited. The last train stopped in Drawbridge in 1955; the last resident left in 1979.
Today, trains still hurtle past the deserted town’s 24 decaying cabins. The Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge, which owns the now-offlimits island, plans to let it decay back into its primordial state.
Another island with a fascinating past is Red Rock, the steep, barren island 200 yards south of the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge. Red Rock has the dual distinction of being the boundary corner for three counties (San Francisco, Marin and Contra Costa) and being the only privately owned island in the bay. The 5.8-acre, 172-foot-high island was first mentioned by Russian fur hunters who camped on it in 1812. It was charted by the British sea captain Frederick Beechey in 1826 and first inhabited in 1851 by a well-known early San Francisco merchant named Selim Woodworth, who built a cabin and had a hunting preserve there.
In the 1860s, manganese ore was discovered on Red Rock and prospectors dug tunnels into the island, some of which are still visible on the island’s southwestern side. Scandinavian ships would remove the ore under the guise of acquiring ballast and sell it in Europe, where it was used to make paint.
A weird episode
The island’s mineral deposits inspired a weird episode described by Harold Gilliam in his 1957 book “San Francisco Bay.” During the trial of labor leader Tom Mooney, who had been falsely accused of the 1916 Preparedness Day bombing, “a police inspector became convinced that Mooney had hidden quantities of dynamite on Red Rock for later use.” The inspector’s search of the island turned up no dynamite, but in the course of his investigation he learned about the manganese deposits, which had been mined in the 19th century and then forgotten.
The inspector filed a claim on the island and boasted to the press that he was about to get rich. It was only after he had spent considerable money tunneling through the rock that he realized the ore was not of commercial grade and abandoned his claim to the island.
The island was acquired by a San Francisco attorney in 1964 for less than $50,000. The present owner acquired it in the 1970s and has been unsuccessfully trying to sell it for years, dropping the price from $22 million to $5 million. The listing on a website called Private Islands Online boasts, “It’s rare to find something so truly unique in the world … the only private island in the bay is now available for your purchase.” Unless Red Rock sells, its only occupants will continue to be flocks of Western gulls, night herons and hauled- out harbor seals, which also frequent tiny, nearby Castro Rocks.
Brooks Island, just half a mile from the Richmond Marina, has had a much longer human history. The 75-acre island has a good year-round spring, which led the Huichin Ohlone to inhabit it for almost 2,000 years, leaving shell mounds and burial sites as evidence. It is said that some of the Ohlone spent their entire lives on the island.
From 1892 to 1938, Brooks was heavily quarried. Today, it’s owned by the East Bay Regional Park District and has 2½ miles of walking trails. Caspian terns, the largest tern in North America, nest on Brooks from April to August, feeding their fledglings small fish. It’s also a breeding ground for numerous shorebirds, including curlews, godwits, whimbrels and three types of gulls.
Tiny Bird Island
Just to the west of Brooks sits tiny Bird Island, so close that the mudflats surrounding Brooks extend out to it at low tide. The guanocovered rock is closed to the public to protect the many birds that rest and roost there — just one of the many roles played by the little-known islands of San Francisco Bay. Next week: Islands of the bay, part two