Steamboats to San Francisco: The Ferry Years
Near Vallejo, California
Long before there was a bridge across San Francisco Bay, and long before there was a highway that made the drive practical, the connection between Vallejo and the city moved by water. The bay was the road.
By eighteen sixty-nine, the California Pacific Railroad had established a ferry terminal in South Vallejo linking rail lines all the way east to Sacramento. Ferry service between Vallejo and San Francisco existed in various forms from the eighteen eighties onward, though direct service came and went with competitive pressures and railroad politics. The Monticello Steamship Company, started by Captain Zephaniah Hatch in eighteen ninety-five, found its footing by being faster than the competition. Hatch and his brother Charles ran the route, ordered a second vessel called the General Frisbie, named for the same general who had laid out the city's streets, and built it into a lasting Vallejo business.
During World War One, additional ferries ran specifically to move workers from San Francisco to the booming Mare Island yard. A new electric rail line opened in the early nineteen hundreds, connecting the ferry terminal to the Napa Valley towns of Yountville, Saint Helena, and Calistoga. Vallejo was a hub in a network that made the upper bay livable.
The ferries stopped running from Vallejo to San Francisco in the late nineteen thirties, after the Bay Bridge made them economically unviable. The southern bridge crossings rendered the water routes obsolete overnight.
The ferry came back decades later. Today the crossing to San Francisco takes roughly an hour.
