What Was Here Before: Hercules

The shore of San Pablo Bay here was Ohlone territory for thousands of years. Ohlone peoples fished the bay, gathered shellfish, and burned the grasslands in seasonal cycles. Spanish missionaries absorbed most Ohlone communities into the mission system by the early eighteen hundreds, and Mexican rancho grants divided the land into cattle country.

In eighteen seventy-nine the California Powder Works bought forty-five acres along this shore for a purpose no rancho neighbor would welcome: manufacturing dynamite. They chose the isolation deliberately. By eighteen eighty-one they were in production, and for the next two decades Hercules was the largest dynamite plant in the world, a company town named after the firm's signature brand, a name chosen as a boast over their rival Giant Powder Company. Managers incorporated the town in nineteen hundred and staffed the first city council themselves. Fifty-nine workers died in plant explosions in the first thirty-eight years. Manufacturing continued through two world wars before closing in nineteen sixty-four. The land sat idle until the nineteen eighties, when the old company town was redeveloped into the bedroom community you see today. Some original powder-works manager cottages still stand, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, a few quiet blocks from streets that remember nothing of the dynamite.