It must have been quite a sight to see fifty or more boats fishing commercially for salmon off the Benicia shore, as was common in the early 1880’s before they overfished that waterway and screwed it up. According to one observer, the entire fleet usually numbered three times that amount! Since most of the salmon in California needed to pass through the Carquinez Straits to get to their home rivers, it was easy for these boats to haul them in like crazy. Right on shore were large cannery buildings to process the catch. All very convenient in a Benicia sort [...]

In the Capitol Building on West G Street you can see the original city map from 1847 showing how the streets were originally envisioned for the city of Benicia. Only slightly faded with time, it is a glimpse into the unbridled optimism of the city’s founders Robert Semple and Thomas Larkin for a place that was then just empty fields with some marshy creeks along a coastline. Over the rolling hills and even out into the water they planned a vast array of city blocks with wide streets. Less than a third of these planned streets came into being. Almost [...]