Rancho San Antonio 1852 detail

Description:
Map of Rancho San Antonio (detail), east shore of San Francisco Bay, Calif. Shows portion of 1820 Spanish land grant (of 44,688.75 acres) to Jose Maria Peralta; the locations of his youngest son Vicente's adobe compound, Temescal Creek, and the willow grove at the mouth of Temescal Creek.

Date of Document:
1852

Document Author:
A.W. Von Schmidt

Geographic Location:
Vicente Way and 55th Street, Oakland, Calif.

Context:
For his years of military service in Alta California, Luis Maria Peralta in 1820 received from the Spanish crown a land grant of nearly 45,000 acres in Contra Costa the east side of the bay. His Rancho de San Antonio encompassed the present-day cities of Oakland, Alameda, Piedmont, Emeryville, Berkeley and Albany. The next year, Antonio Peralta, one of Luis Peralta s sons, erected an adobe in what is today Oakland s Fruitvale district and began to graze cattle on the rancho. In 1834, Jose Vicente Peralta (1801-1871), Luis Maria Peralta s youngest son, and Domingo Peralta, joined their brother on the rancho. In 1836, Vicente became the first person of European descent to reside in what is now North Oakland when he built a modest adobe near Temescal Creek on what is today the block bounded by Vicente Street, 55th Street, Telegraph Avenue and Highway 24. Over the next several years, Vicente and his wife, Maria Encarnación (neé Galindo), established orchards, gardens, an extensive herd of cattle, and a thriving hide and tallow trade. In 1847, Vicente built a second adobe, which he expanded in the 1850s to one that measured approximately forty feet on a side and with a central courtyard. It sat at the rear of what is now 5527 Vicente Street. The discovery of gold in the Sierra foothills, brought an influx of settlers to the East Bay, including those who squatted on Vicente s land and stole his cattle. Recognizing that the tide of illegal squatters was irreversible, and to cover taxes and the cost of both his legal battles to retain title to his land and corrupt dealings by his lawyers, Vicente sold off all but 700 acres of his Rancho Encinal de Temescal (his portion of the original land grant that he had inherited from his father). His home and the other adobe structures he had built, including a small chapel, were all removed by the 1880s. A two-story frame house built in 1867 for the Vicente and Encarnación spanned the current addresses of 5511 to 5521 Vicente Street.