In 1883 a girl was born in Benicia, grew up there, and came to make sense of the world from what she saw. At age nineteen she moved to Vermont to marry into a family of strict puritans and years later returned to the West to barely make a living digging underground in a gold mine. Faced with exhaustion, hunger and despair, she willed herself to try to find a way out. At age fifty she wrote about it all, and wrote well. Elsie Robinson was her name. Her book was published in 1934. After hearing about it from my [...]

 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 [...]

I recently had the chance to read a source for interesting stories about the history of Benicia and I’m quite certain that almost none of you have seen it. I plan on sharing the best stories from it with you here. This history is actually less a book and more a large “document” that was recently commissioned by the city especially for use by the Historic Preservation Review Commission in order to help provide historical background information that may aid with preservation decisions. I’m currently serving on that commission which is why I had access to the early drafts of [...]