The Deep-Water Channel Opens
Near Stockton, California
On February second, nineteen thirty-three, a ship named the Daisy Grey came up from the Oregon coast with a hold full of lumber and tied up at a dock in Stockton. The timber trade was not unusual. What was unusual was the channel she had navigated to get there.
The Army Corps of Engineers had spent the previous three years dredging the San Joaquin River shipping lane to a depth of thirty-five feet, deep enough to accommodate ocean-going freighters that had never been able to reach this far inland. The first dredging contracts were let in nineteen thirty, in the depths of the Depression, when federal public works money was among the few economic instruments still functioning.
The result was one of the most improbable facts in California geography: an inland city, more than seventy nautical miles from the ocean, with a port capable of handling ships up to nine hundred feet long and sixty thousand tons. Stockton was now, by a matter of engineering rather than nature, a deep-water seaport.
The timing was not accidental. California's Central Valley was producing agricultural surpluses on a scale that demanded efficient export routes. The new channel meant that a cargo of canned tomatoes or a shipment of cotton bales did not need to be transloaded to a San Francisco Bay terminal, it could go directly into an ocean-going hull in Stockton and sail to Asia or South America without touching another dock.
Stockton would eventually become the second-largest port in California by land acreage. The Daisy Grey arrived with lumber. She left with the future.
