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George Vincent
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By Jeff Rubin
President, Pinole Historical Society
It’s no stretch of the truth that there would be very
little recorded or written history of Pinole had George
Vincent not been born.
No one has done more to preserve and promote the
history of Pinole, through his writing,
teaching, and popular walking tours of
historic downtown Pinole.
A child of the noted, longtime Pinole
teacher Emily Scanlan Vincent,
who taught in the Pinole-Hercules
School District for 40+ years,
George followed his mother into her
profession and had a distinguished
teaching career in the three iterations
of the same school district — Pinole-
Hercules School District, Richmond
Unified School District, and West
Contra Costa Unified School District
— mostly at Ellerhorst Elementary
School, where a classroom is named in his honor.
George, who co-founded the Pinole Historical Society
with Dr. Joseph Mariotti in 1974, was honored
with the Pinole Historical Society’s LIFETIME
HISTORIAN AWARD at the Pinole History
Museum’s September 24 Fundraiser and Dinner at
Valley Bible Church in Hercules.
In the introduction to “Images of America: Pinole,”
the first book he wrote for the Pinole Historical
Society (2009), George penned these words about the
cycle of life in Pinole
George Vincent wrote in “Images of America: Pinole”
about the cycle of life in Pinole in the early part of the
20th century:
“A person was brought into the world by
Dr. Manuel Fernandez, attended Pinole-
Hercules School #1, married a local
sweetheart, worked at the Hercules Powder
Company or Union Oil Company, and left
the world via undertaker Charlie Ryan.”
A more complete cycle would include
that most people who lived in 20th
century Pinole — and for that matter,
many in the 21st century — were
taught by someone in the Vincent
family — first, his mother, Emily
Scanlan Vincent, who taught for 40plus
years, and by George for 42 years.
Emily was a childhood friend of Ramona Martinez,
the last generation of her family to live in the historic
Martinez Adobe in Pinole Valley, where Pinole Valley
park sits today. Ramona was the great-granddaughter of
Don Ygnacio Martinez, a Mexican Army commandant
of the San Francisco Presidio, who received the nearly
18,000acre El Pinole land grant as a retirement gift and
built his suite of adobe homes in Pinole Valley.
So, it was only natural for George to become Pinole’s
George Vincent
George at St. Joseph School George teaching at Ellerhorst Elementary School George walking tour at the Faria House