A Grapvine Grows Amid the Other Crops at Cloverfield AGRICULTURE LINGERS IN
WEST CONTRA COSTA
By: Jason Tilley
El Sobrante Homeowner, Gardener, and a Member of Citizens for a Greener El Sborante
My wife and I were married in 1990 at a charming,
privately-owned event venue called the Rockefeller
Lodge. It’s located about a block from San Pablo
City Hall, and was once owned by oil magnate John D.
Rockefeller for use as a hunting lodge.
If the phrases “hunting lodge” and “a block from San Pablo
City Hall” don’t seem like they belong in the same sentence,
that illustrates just how much western Contra Costa County
has changed in the past century or so. Ironically, Rockerfeller
himself played a large role in industrializing the area, since his
Standard Oil Company (the predecessor of Chevron) built
the refinery that is still Richmond’s largest employer. Most of
the area remained wilderness and farmland, however, until the
second World War.
Thanks to the East Bay Regional Park District, there’s still
plenty of wilderness area, though the flora now features many
introduced species. Agriculture, however, is hard to find in
west Contra Costa these days. Hard, but not impossible. Little
reminders of the area’s farming past are still around, if you
know where to look.
Though the process started early in the twentieth century,
urbanization was supercharged by World War II. The Kaiser
shipyards sprung up as part of the war effort and attracted
thousands of workers from the south and other economically
deprived regions. At the end of the war, most of them stayed,
32 MARKETPLACECONTRACOSTA.COM DECEMBER 2019
seeing better opportunities in the Bay Area than in the places
they’d left. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers, sailors, and
marines who’d served in the Pacific theater streamed back
through Treasure Island, and some of them looked around
and decided to stay, too. All this created a huge demand for
housing, and with the support of the federal government
and GI bill, developers built it. The City of Richmond, in
particular, grew dramatically in the postwar decades. What
was once farmland was annexed and converted to suburban
subdivisions.
This was hardly unique to Richmond, of course. The
conversion of farmland to suburban housing occurred on a
massive scale all across America in the last half of the previous
century. What distinguishes Richmond is the weird, haphazard
way it was done. Look at the city on a map sometime. The
outline of Richmond looks like a giant crab which crawled
out of the bay to attack a ferret that was devouring a lizard.
The city limits splay out seemingly at random, subsuming
territory with odd tentacles and appendages.
Consider my daughter’s good friend Madison, whose family
has a home in Richmond’s Carriage Hills neighborhood,
the city’s most far flung outpost. If Madison wants to visit
the main library at Richmond’s civic center, he must travel
down Castro Ranch Road, leaving the city and entering
unincorporated Contra Costa. Turning right on San Pablo
Dam Road, he’ll then re-enter Richmond, leave it again