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Lafayette
Today's Lafayette is a modern East Bay suburb with a long and intriguing history of people, agriculture, and commerce. The story began in the summer of 1846, when Elam Brown and 13 families left St. Joseph, Missouri, in wagon trains and embarked on a sixmonth journey west to establish new homes and lives. By February 1848, Brown and his family had purchased the Rancho Acalanes in Contra Costa County from a San Francisco financier and had established the settlement that would later became Lafayette. Gradually Brown sold his land to other settlers, and the community began to grow. Eventually homes, stores, roads, schools, and churches were built. In these pages, the genesis of Lafayette, along with the story of its creators and early residents, is revealed in stirring early imagery.
Building the Caldecott Tunnel
Today, the Caldecott Tunnel connects Alameda and Contra Costa Counties, located in the San Francisco Bay Area. The original two bores of this tunnel opened in 1937, the same year as the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, and changed Contra Costa County from an area of small rural communities into one of growing suburbs. But this was not the first tunnel to connect these counties. The Kennedy Tunnel, opened in 1903, was accessed by steep and winding roads and located several hundred feet above today's tunnel. A third bore of the Caldecott Tunnel was opened in 1964 and a long-awaited fourth bore in late 2013. The tunnels have not been without disaster and tragedy over their hundred-plus years of existence, yet they remain an integral part of the commercial, social, and historic fabric of the region.
Orinda
In 1835, cousins Joaquin Moraga and Juan Bernal were granted 13,326 acres in present-day Lamorinda, California, in grateful thanks to their ancestor, Lt. José Joaquin Moraga, second in command during Mexico's 1776 Anza Expedition. By 1850, California had become America's 31st state, and squatters were overrunning the property. Within 34 years of receiving its land grant, the family had lost everything. But the house that Moraga built still remains--the oldest surviving adobe in the county. Over the years, land was bought and sold, fortunes made and lost, and a railroad, intended to go all the way from Emeryville to Utah, ran out of steam when it reached Orinda. Families, long gone now, gave their names to familiar landmarks, but it was not until the 1920s, when E.I. de Laveaga laid down the blueprint for this jewel in the East Bay's crown, that Orinda truly began to take shape. One hundred years later, Orinda, home to over 20,000 people within 13 square miles, has become the 299th largest city in California.
