History
In 1769, the expedition embarked from San Diego to establish a base in the Port of Monterey, but not recognizing Monterey, they overshot and headed further northwards up the seacoast. California Historical Marker No. 24, located at the southeast corner of Crespi Drive and State Highway 1, states that "The Portolá Expedition of 1769 camped near the San Pedro Creek, where there was an Indian village, from October 31 to November 3. To that camp scouting parties brought news of a body of water to the east." That Indian village was the Ohlone village of Pruristac. Marching up the San Pedro Valley and crossing Sweeney Ridge, Portola was the first European explorer to discover San Francisco Bay as the entrance to the Bay is difficult to ascertain from sailing ships and had been missed by many earlier sailors. The San Pedro y San Pablo Asistencia was established in 1786 at the site of Pruristac, as a "sub-mission" to Mission San Francisco de Asís because the sunny San Pedro Valley produced wheat, fruits, and vegetables which could not be grown in San Francisco. The site is located within the bounds of the historic Rancho San Pedro (home to the Sánchez Adobe) located at 1000 Linda Mar Boulevard, on the north bank of San Pedro Creek. Rancho San Pedro was one of the first California land grants, and the first to win a patent from the United States. More recently, the Middle Valley was used for grazing on its hillsides and commercial farming in the meadows, with crops of pumpkins and artichokes. The south fork of San Pedro Creek became a trout farm, operated by John Gay, until 1962, when storm rains washed out the entire operation. The south fork is a seasonal water source for the City of Pacifica.
Read more about this topic: San Pedro Creek
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“A great proportion of the inhabitants of the Cape are always thus abroad about their teaming on some ocean highway or other, and the history of one of their ordinary trips would cast the Argonautic expedition into the shade.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)