Foster City: Bay Mud and Ohlone Shores to a City Built from Scratch
Near San Francisco, California
Foster City sits on land that did not exist in its current form until the nineteen sixties. The Ramaytush Ohlone lived for thousands of years along these San Francisco Bay shores, harvesting shellfish and tule from the wetland edge, leaving shell mounds that still survive in fragments along the peninsula. Spanish colonization folded the land into mission territory, then Mexican ranchos claimed the tidal flats.
By the twentieth century the area was known as Brewers Island, a low marshy peninsula jutting into San Mateo Bay, used for hunting and little else. In nineteen fifty-eight, developer T. Jack Foster paid two hundred thousand dollars for an option on this island and committed to something extraordinary: he would pump fourteen million cubic yards of bay mud up from the bottom of San Francisco Bay to raise the island four to seven feet above sea level, then build a city on it.
By the end of nineteen sixty-four the first two hundred families had moved in. Foster City incorporated in nineteen seventy-one. It is a city literally manufactured from the bay floor, on ground the Ohlone once fished by canoe.
