Lake Merritt: The First Wildlife Refuge in the United States

The tidal lagoon at the center of Oakland was a place where Chochenyo Ohlone people fished and gathered shellfish for millennia before the city was built around it. The California History journal and the Online Archive of California document this history in regional collections. The shellmounds that accumulated along the Bay shore near here were among the largest on the West Coast. The lagoon itself was a productive estuary, shallow, saltwater, connected to the Bay by a narrow channel.

In eighteen seventy, an Oakland physician named Samuel Merritt persuaded the California legislature to designate the lagoon a wildlife sanctuary. This was four years before Yellowstone became the first national park in eighteen seventy-four. Lake Merritt was the first wildlife refuge in the United States, a state designation that predated the federal refuge system by decades. The California History journal and the Online Archive of California confirm both the date and the designation.

In the late nineteenth century the lake also, for a period, hosted a floating casino. The city had a complicated relationship with the space it had just designated a sanctuary.

Today Lake Merritt is a city park, an urban saltwater lagoon surrounded by some of Oakland's densest neighborhoods. The water is shallow and greenish and alive. The original ecology of the estuary is compromised but not gone. Herons stand on the margin in the morning. The birds have been using this tidal margin for considerably longer than the city around it has existed.