The Forgotten Redwoods of the East Bay
By Sherwood D. Burgess
HISTORIES of the Oakland area often begin in 1850 with the realestate manipulations of Horace W. Carpentier, E. Adams and A. J. Moon and with only brief mention of logging operations in the redwoods of the East Bay hills. In general, local historians assumed that the Oakland area's original purpose was to be a vast realty tract which would serve as bedroom to San Francisco. This puts the emphasis in the wrong place. At least ten years before the advent of the realty speculators, loggers were hauling their loads from the East Bay hills to the embarcadero of San Antonio, in what is now East Oakland. Except for short periods, this logging business increased, until, about the period of the gold rush, we find San Antonio a busy lumber port. In the decade of the 184o's, such names as John Sutter, Nathan Spear, William LeidesdorrT, Elam Brown, and Harry Meiggs were associated with East Bay lumbering, and for nearly a decade after 1850 the economic life of the area centered in the hills. The smoke from steam sawmills shrouded the skyline and drifted through the canyons, and the roads which were built from mill to market constituted a major segment of the road-network of the East Bay. Lumber passed over them to every section of present Alameda and Contra Costa counties, the surplus being shipped through San Antonio and Oakland at least as far as Sacramento.
As one views the rather small second-growth redwoods in the Oakland hills of today, it is difficult to imagine the extent of the, presumably, original forest. It covered an irregularly shaped area about three and a half miles long and from one-half to two miles wide, from the western slopes of the East Oakland hills almost to Moraga Valley.<r1> In this small but dense grove stood redwoods as large, or larger, than any in the Coast Range. Some of the trees measured 32 ft. in diameter and were over 300 ft. tall, while the average diameter was from 12 to 20 ft.<r2> Dr. William Gibbons, who had been in the redwoods as a youth, wrote in 1893:
. . . the Oakland Hills being exposed immediately to the influences of the sea winds and fogs, bear—or at least once bore—a group of redwood trees about five miles square. . . . This isolated group at one time included some of the most gigantic trees of the species. But for the sad havoc wrought there forty years ago by lumbermen and wood choppers, these Oakland Hills at the point indicated might still have presented one of the noblest natural parks conceivable. . . .
As to nomenclature, before 1849 the entire forest was known as the San Antonio redwoods, deriving its name from the Peralta brothers' Rancho San Antonio. During the American period, three distinct areas were recognized: the designation "San Antonio redwoods" became limited to the section of the forest on the skyline and western slopes of the hills; the area in the can-
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