Walking Waterhoods: Temescal Creek — Bay Street/Shellmound Preview

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Prehistory at The Mouth of The Creek

Imagine standing in this spot 20,000 years ago when the marshy land extended 29 miles to the Farallon Islands. During the Ice Age, glaciers had retained much of the ocean in ice, and San Francisco Bay had little to no water. Close by, there might have been a saber-toothed tiger or a dire wolf may have been hunting pronghorn. Nearby may have been grazing a Columbian mammoth or a giant ground sloth. By the time the Spanish first stumbled upon the San Francisco Bay area in 1769, the bay shoreline ran close to what is now Shellmound Street. The prehistoric fauna had been replaced by Tule elk and the California grizzly bear.You can learn more about the species that the Ohlone both hunted and protected themselves against in our Mouth of the Creek tour.

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Current Mouth of Temescal Creek Ecology

What once would have seemed a wide, beautiful creek has been shaped, forced underground, routed through tunnels and become a route for run off. Despite stormwater pollution caused by cement and pavement surfaces, efforts to fill the bay with garbage and other human developments, and the eradication of species through mining and overhunting, one can still see a variety of species at the current mouth of Temescal Creek. The creek now enters the San Francisco Bay through a piped culvert on the west side of Highway 580/80. Huge varieties of migrating shorebirds still migrate through on the Pacific Flyway. Beaver were hunted out and salmon eradicated when the creeks were first turned into open sewers and later buried for the same reason. The mouth of the creek tour will lead you through many of the shoreline species still present.

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Shellmound Memorial -- Ohlone Memorial Walkway Entrance

A granite structure and sign greets visitors at the entrance to the Ohlone Memorial Walkway.

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Shellmound Memorial - Ohlone Memorial Walkway Map

The map on the granite entrance to the Ohlone Memorial Walkway shows the Emeryville coastline. The red dots on the map indicate the locations of the more than 425 shellmounds located around the bay at the time of the arrival of Spanish colonizers. The largest shellmound was located here at the mouth of Temescal Creek, the site of a seasonal Huichin Ohlone village.

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Shellmound Memorial - Ohlone Memorial Walkway -- Ohlone settlement

The Ohlone people made their home in this area tor thousands of years, living, fishing, and hunting along the shores of Temescal Creek where it flowed into San Francisco Bay. Ohlone shellmounds were massive mounds of shells, tools, bowls, animal bones, and sacred burials. The shellmounds tell the rich history of the daily life of the Ohlone people as they demonstrate the diet, size, population, and function of the village. When out on the bay, the Ohlone used the shellmounds as navigational points. They also used the mounds to communicate with other tribes; fires were lit a top the mounds to warn others when red tide entered the bay. The Emeryville shellmound was over three stories high and 350 feet in diameter.The top was first sheared in the late 1800’s to create a dance pavilion where people literally danced on Ohlone graves. An amusement park was then built at the base of the mound. Decades later, the city of Emeryville agreed to level the shellmound to make way for a paint factory. Today, an outdoor shopping center sits on what used to be the biggest shellmound in the region. Residents of the area used the rich soil from above-ground shellmounds to pave roads, fill in parts of the bay, and fertilize gardens. This kind of destruction occurred all over the San Francisco Bay Area.

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Oak Trees Along Ohlone Memorial Walkway

Part of the memorialization of the Emeryville shellmound includes facilitating the growth of native flora along Temescal Creek. You can see native oaks growing in this area. The Ohlone people used every part of the oak tree, from the acorns for food to the wood tannins for dye. Some anthropologists estimate that 75% of native Californians incorporated acorns into their diet.

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Shellmound Memorial - Ohlone Memorial Walkway -- Plague

Colonizers and settlers who came to California in the 1700s and 1800s devastated the native population by bringing diseases which had never affected their communities before. After witnessing the death of their loved ones, many remaining Ohlone people fled the area, leaving behind the shellmounds that marked the place where thriving villages had once stood. The Spanish who settled in the area, also made sport of the local bears and chained them and forced them to fight.

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Shellmound Memorial - Ohlone Memorial Walkway -- Gold Discovered

The discovery of gold in the California foothills drastically changed the colonial presence in the area. A sudden influx of tens of thousands of people to the area created a huge pressure to divide and utilize land that the Ohlone had lived on for thousands of years. The colonists brought with them their systems of ownership and laws, and very quickly the system of government, making California part of the United States. Native American activists are fighting to acquire the land where the West Berkeley shellmound was located. The land is privately owned and currently covered by an asphalt parking lot. The city of Berkeley gave the area historic landmark status in 2000 and has not approved any of the submitted housing proposals.

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Shellmound Memorial - Ohlone Memorial Walkway -- End of Ohlone Presence

In the late 20th century, activists began working to protect the remaining shellmounds. In 2005, organizers sponsored a 280-mile shellmound prayer walk, lasting two weeks, that visited shellmound sites in the nine counties of the San Francisco Bay Area.

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Shellmound Memorial - Ohlone Memorial Walkway -- Exit Arch

A second granite arch marks the exit of the Ohlone Memorial walkway.

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Shellmound Memorial -- Sculpture

The metal sculpture found here shows a rendition of a typical Ohlone basket used to store food. Baskets were traditionally made with tule reeds, willow sticks, sedge roots, feathers and shell beads.The Ohlone tradition of burning all of one's possessions at death, along with the destruction of the Ohlone's lives by Spanish colonizers and missionaries sadly leaves us with few examples of these baskets. Present-day Ohlone are reviving the traditional art form.

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Shellmound Memorial

The Emeryville Shellmound Memorial marks the site of a former Ohlone village and burial ground. The native Ohlone constructed the shellmound to keep villages above high tides and serve as long-term repositories for the dead. Shellmounds are not specific to the Ohlone, but are found all over the planet where people lived by shorelines full of shellfish. The 40-foot shellmound was made mostly of clams, mussels, and oyster shells. For the Ohlone, this shellmound is not just a midden or refuse heap as described by archaeologists but a sacred burial site. Partially leveled in 1874 to make way for an amusement park, archaeologists excavated the site and discovered more than 700 indigenous graves. The site was razed in the 1990s to make way for a paint plant. In 2002, Emeryville built the Bay Street Shopping mall on this location. More remains were found throughout these phases of development and taken to landfills, incinerated, or reburied. Every year on the Friday after Thanksgiving, activists gather at the Emeryville shellmound to protest and create awareness about the burial ground underneath.

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Shellmound Memorial Creek Representation

Temescal Creek is represented in the memorial since the shellmound bordered on the original path of the creek. The mouth of the creek and the shoreline of Emeryville was about 100 feet south of the monument, between where you are now and Barnes and Noble.

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Shellmound Memorial "Layers"

The layers can tell many parts of a story. While the layers and character of this shellmound are often referrred to as "midden", that isn't wholly accurate. Archeologically, middens are how we refer to waste piles that are the product of human habitation. In the case of the Ohlone shellmounds, these depositories also served as a burial place, festival ground, and people lived upon them. It is thought that the burial of ancestors was part of how land claims were established amoung the community. In the case of this shellmound, you can see that there are layers of soil shells. Many of the shells would have been fragments. What is missing from this representation is the human fragments. When the shellmound got larger, a village was built on top (that gives you the sense of how large they were).

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Nineteenth Century Shoreline of Emeryville

The position of the shoreline where Emeryville met the San Francisco Bay is shown here on this map overlay from 1878. The coastline ran roughly along existing Shellmound Street. This entire area along the street was covered with a beautiful willow grove that was considered one of the finest recreation areas in the East Bay at the turn of the Twentieth Century. The willow trees were also an important part of why the Ohlone settled in the area — the branches of the trees were how they framed their homes, as they provided both strength and flexibility.After the the dam was added upstream to create Lake Temescal to provide water for the growing region, the stream stopped delivering silt — a major constituent of soil — to the shoreline, and there began to be costal erosion in the area. Silt deposits at the mouth of streams provide a great deal of nutrients and ground for plants, building a wetland ecosystem. The destruction of such ecosystems is a regular byproduct of damming waterways.

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Shell Mound Park

Shell Mound Park was a year-round picnic and pleasure grounds from the 1870’s through the early 20th Century. The park was founded along the mouth of Temescal Creek and what was the coastline at the time. The owner built a pavilion atop the shellmound, and had picnic tables, dancing floors, a dining hall, and a shooting range among the willow grove that the park encompassed.Considered a particularly beautiful, windless site, news stories and pictures of the time paint it as an idyllic place to enjoy nature — in sharp contrast to how the area later morphed into an area for industry and transportation.

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Ohlone Village

Ohlone peoples and their ancestors occupied this area since at least 800 BC. Over time, the site developed into one of the largest villages in the San Francisco Bay Area, due to the wealth of Temescal Creek and its outpouring into the Bay where mudflats reached far out into the Bay. The Ohlone diet was rich in shellfish, the remnants of which formed the shellmound which grew to 40 feet high and 350 feet around. Attached is a wonderful in depth presentation made by a third grader at Highland Elementary School with more information on what life in an Ohlone village was like.

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Top of The Shellmound

Consider the distance you just walked from the Shellmound Monument. Then look up 40 feet to the second floor of the apartments above you. (You can also see approximately 40 feet marked on one of the photos included here.) Now, hopefully, you can begin to understand just how large this shellmound was. You're standing in what is roughly the center of the mound, and the location of it's highest peak before it was partially leveled to 36' to build the pavilion for Shell Mound Park. Centuries of Ohlone habitation built what was not just a place for eaten shellfish, but also the site of burials, ceremonies, and housing. The shellmound was so large and extended so far from this center, that it couldn't begin to be leveled until automotive technology created tractors and trucks to cart the sediment away for factories to be built.

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Bay Street Construction and Recent Shellmound Removal

After the last of the paint and pesticide factories closed in this area, the buildings were removed and the site was purchased by mall developers. Because the previous excavation was performed with 1920s machinery, the job was not thorough. It turned out that almost eight feet of shellmound still existed. Despite protests, hundreds of bodies were dug up. Some of them were relocated, but because of the toxic nature of the factories in the area, many of the remains had to be taken with the soil to Texas and were incinerated as chemical waste. The only concession granted to the Ohlone was the construction of the shellmound memorial you just visited. It is likely that many more bodies remain under most of this mall, the streets, and the sidewalk you are currently standing on.

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Bay Street Shopping Mall

The current group of buildings covering this area were completed between 2002 and 2006 at a cost of $296 million. The group of apartments you see on the other side of the pedestrian bridge could only be finished after the certification of the toxic clean up in that area.

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Concrete Creek

The size of this concrete stream bed tells a story. When you take the headwaters tour, you'll notice that creeks often begin with small flows from rainfall or a spring up in the hills. But here you see a large space that allows a great volume of water. Before colonization, this creek mouth was massive — so big that it could support a village that created the largest shellmound of the 425+ in the San Francisco Bay Area. Early Spanish explorers and missionaries described the mouth of the creek as lush and thriving with exceptional levels of animal life, especially bears.

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Pedestrian Overpass

What luck! Now there is a bridge that connects the walk along Temescal Creek from the east side of the train tracks to the west. This bridge was 35 years in the making— laying low in the city's general plan until Bay Street's popularity inspired the city to complete the bridge in 2021 to the tune of $21.4 million.

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Railroad Yard

You're currently standing over the Union Pacific (formerly Southern Pacific) railroad yard. It was positioned here to meet the transportation needs of the many factories that used to surround the area. Emeryville has a long history as a transportation and railway hub, and even gets it’s name from the railroad magnate, Joseph Stickney Emery, who was a major landholder in the city.

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Size of Original Shellmound

As you stand here, look back toward where you were on Bay Street when we showed you the peak of the mound. Then imagine it extending north for about the size of a football field. Then turn completely around and look toward the parking lot you see to the southeast bordering on Horton Street. Now imagine it as high as you are here on the bridge. Now you can begin to get a sense of how massive this Ohlone structure was!

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Sherwin-Williams "Cover The Earth"

Looking to the vast area south and east of where you're standing is the former site of the Sherwin-Williams factory. After the Oakland Trotting Park closed in 1915, a huge track of land opened up for manufacturers to develop in business-friendly Emeryville. Railroad and Bay access combined with favorable tax incentives transformed Emeryville into the “Little Giant” of industry in the 1920s.This 8.5-acre plot became the site of the Sherman-Williams west coast factory for lead-based paints and Dry Lime Sulfur pesticides. The company’s Cover The Earth logo has evolved to embody ironic overtones in the modern era. During the beginning of the environmental movement in the 1970s the company decided to retire its sign over the factory. The logo was briefly retired, then brought back in recent years.The paint plant ceased operations in 2006, and the value of such a large plot of land couldn’t be ignored. The toxic land took almost seven years to rehabilitate, and the development of 500 apartments has yet to be completed.

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Stormwater Management

These are rain gardens, a key element of stormwater management. Thanks to Peter Schulze-Allen, Emeryville is on the map for early adoption of stormwater management. Stormwater is rainwater that has hit the ground level and is running across primarily impervious surfaces, such as pavement and concrete. It becomes highly polluted with car oils, animal feces, and trash, and drops through storm drains untreated into creeks and the San Francisco Bay. Rain gardens, serve to filter the water and infiltrate it into the soils, where it can be cleaned by soil microbes and plant roots. Wide swaths of concrete paths are flanked with rain gardens here to treat stormwater and reduce stormwater flows.

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Purple Pipe Covers

As you walk through this area, notice the purple covers throughout the planted areas. Purple is the color used to indicate that the water is recycled. The truth is all water on the planet is recycled, as it is the same water moving through the water cycle for the last 4.5 billion years. Human water recycling includes treating "wastewater" or sewage to nearly potable (drinkable) standards and then using that water for landscaping. This results in enormous savings in water imported from the Mokelumne River, ninety miles away, the source for potable water throughout the Temescal Creek watershed. The City of Emeryville was an early adopter of recycled water in 2009, thanks to the heroic efforts of Peter Schultz-Allen, a one-time staff member for the city's environmental department. His efforts prove that one person can impact an entire city, starting new trends for others to follow, as has been the case around the San Francisco Bay Area with recycled water.

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Open Culvert of Temescal Creek

This is the beginning of the open culvert of Temescal Creek. Look to the side to see a storm runoff valve. Since Temescal Creek is dry for most of the year, these channels serve mostly to control stormwater runoff that flows through the creek. Lake Temescal Reservoir partially regulates the creek level. Follow the interpretive path on the channel's south side to learn about the history of the Ohlone, who have lived in this area for thousands of years.

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Oakland Trotting Park

In many ways, the Oakland Trotting Park (later the New California Jockey Club) was the reason for forming the tiny city of Emeryville. The racetrack opened in 1871 in unincorporated Alameda County. As Oakland grew, it threatened to annex the racetrack in the 1890s, which would have shut down gambling. So, in 1896, residents of the area voted to incorporate 150-27, and Emeryville was born.The mile-long track brought a large Black population into the region from Kentucky both to care for the horses and jockey them. In the late 1890s, Jess “Long Shot” Conley became a famed local character for his behavior on and off the track.The State of California would later outlaw horse racing in 1911, shutting off the track’s main source of revenue. It limped along the next few years with racing cars and even airplanes, but eventually was closed in 1915.Originally a good portion of this site was covered by the lower part of the shellmound. Much of the initial material excavated was used to pave streets and sidewalks, build tennis courts, or for use as fertilizer. There are also stories of children playing with the found skulls of those formerly interred in the shellmounds.