Tuleburg to Stockton, The First English Name in California
Near Stockton, California
The man who founded this city came to California overland in eighteen forty-one, part of the first emigrant party to reach the territory by the overland route. His name was Charles Weber, and he was German-born, in his late twenties, and looking for something the old world had not provided.
Weber arrived in time for the Mexican period, converted to Catholicism, took the name Don Carlos Maria Weber to satisfy Mexican land-grant requirements, and acquired a large rancho on the San Joaquin River by eighteen forty-five. He called his early settlement Tuleburg, for the tule reeds that choked every channel in sight.
When gold was discovered at Sutter's Mill in January of eighteen forty-eight, Weber understood immediately what Tuleburg was about to become. The southern mines, the diggings in Tuolumne, Calaveras, and Amador counties, lay almost due east. Any miner heading for those fields from San Francisco Bay needed to travel up the San Joaquin River, and the farthest inland point a ship could reach on that river was Weber's doorstep.
He renamed the settlement in eighteen forty-nine in honor of Commodore Robert Stockton, the naval officer who had taken California for the United States during the Mexican-American War three years earlier. That name, Stockton, made history of a particular kind. It was among the first communities in California to be given a name that was neither Spanish nor Native American in origin. The state's cities, from San Jose to Santa Barbara to Sacramento, all carried older names. Stockton was new, and its name announced the fact.
Weber built one of the first permanent residences in the San Joaquin Valley on the point of land where the channel was deepest. That point still carries his name today.
