ALAMEDA COUNTY Transcribed by: Linda Jackson 5/20/2008
The Ideal Place for Your California Home
by Henry Anderson Lafler
For long before European civilization had set a mark upon the great mid-sections of the continent, California was the scene of a great and courageous effort by faithful priests to establish a permanent and enduring civilization and evidence of this still meets the eye in the vine-clad missions and crumbling adobes that are to be found throughout a great part of the State, and nowhere more strikingly than in Alameda County. In some parts of California, water for irrigation still flows through ditches dug while George Washington was President.
Services are still held in the ancient Mission San Jose, but gone are its days of power and splendor, when the good fathers taught their flocks of thousands of natives and the Mission counted its cattle and sheep by the tens of thousands.
ST.
PAUL'S CHURCH, OAKLAND, TYPICAL IN THE BEAUTY OF
ITS SURROUNDINGS OF THE SACRED EDIFICES
OF ALAMEDA COUNTY
Still in the towns and villages of the county are hundreds of Spanish names and swarthy visages proclaim their descent from Castillian or Indian forebears. There are many who still remember when there were no fences in the county; when the cattle, herded in common, were gathered at the yearly rodeo and each man took his brand; and when a good horse could be bought for a dollar and a half.
Over the fertile coastal plain from Mission San Jose white macadam roads lead to many towns and villages lying to the west toward the Bay. But rather than traverse them all, let us turn and climb the high rounded mountain that towers behind the Mission and is known as Mission Peak.
From its summit what a panorama is spread out! Far to the northwest, a haze of smoke and the dim shapes of tall white buildings declare the location of the East Shore Cities--Oakland, Berkeley and Alameda. Southward the coastal plain extends into Santa Clara County, as far as the eye can reach. At your feet, west and northwest, is the coastal plain of Alameda County, its fields a many-colored checker-board--yellow for the grains; light green for the vineyards; a darker tint for the apricot orchards. Beyond the plain, with a narrow, deep-green rim of sloughs and marshes, is the great Bay of San Francisco, shining like a sea of gold in the afternoon sun. Beyond the Bay, a smudge of smoke tells where San Francisco lies and southward from San Francisco, parallel with the Bay's farther shore, the high violet-colored range of the Santa Cruz mountains extends southward till the eye can no longer follow it. And standing on the crest of Mission Peak, you perceive that you are on one of the very highest of hills packed close together like a flock of sheep that, beginning, as far as you can see, just back of Berkeley, sweep in a great semi-circle to where you stand, enclosing the plain and the Bay like the rim of a shallow, flat-bottomed bowl, and extend southward twenty miles from Mission Peak to where Mt. Hamilton lifts its rocky head.
On the plain below you, among the cultivated fields, you can count the church spires of a dozen towns and villages--Milpitas, Alvarado, Newark, Centerville, and Irvington, while close to the hills are Niles and Decoto. With a powerful glass you can make out the inevitable tall green palms in the grounds of the farmhouses or even see the yellow glint of oranges on the trees in every dooryard. For in this part of the country, as in nearly all, the palm and the orange are the favorite ornamental trees. Turn now and look east and northeast from Mission Peak. Hills, hills, hills, as far as the eye can reach. And what a contrast to the level fertility of the western view. For among the hills, only here and there are there fields and habitations. For the most part, the hills are grazing land.
A GLIMPSE OF HIGHLAND DRIVE
OF THE CITIES OF OAKLAND,
PIEDMONT AND BERKELEY
But what scenery! What a paradise for the huntsman! There are roads among the hills where you look down hundreds of feet to the bushy tops of evergreen trees that line the streams. There are remote canyons of wild grandeur. In these hills, it is estimated that there are 5,000 wild deer, literally only a few miles from the three-quarters of a million people who reside in the cities of San Francisco Bay. About 400 deer are bagged by hunters every year in Alameda County. So here in the dooryard, as it were, of the Ideal Home, is some of the finest hunting to be had anywhere.
A
WATERFALL IN PIEDMONT PARK
BORDERED BY BANANA PALMS
HUNDREDS
OF DEER ARE KILLED ANNUALLY
IN THE HILLS OF ALAMEDA COUNTY, FRE-
QUENTLY WITHIN TWENTY-FIVE OR THIRTY
MILES OF THE TEEMING CITIES