Oakland, CA news and local guide

After California became part of the United States, the Peraltas lost their land. The historian Albert Camarillo writes that squatters cut down their trees, killed their cattle and fenced off their roads, and that the attorney Horace Carpentier tricked Vicente Peralta into signing what turned out to be a mortgage on the 19,000-acre rancho. In 1851 Carpentier, Edson Adams and Andrew Moon began developing what is now downtown. The Town of Oakland was incorporated in 1852, when it had 75 to 100 people, two hotels and a wharf, and it became the City of Oakland on March 25, 1854, with Carpentier as its first mayor. A scandal ended his term in less than a year. A preparatory academy founded in 1853 became the College of California and in 1869 the first campus of the University of California, which moved to Berkeley in the 1870s. Chinese immigrants, many recruited for railroad work, came in the 1850s and faced discrimination, and their homes were burned more than once. Oakland grew into a major rail terminal in the late 1860s and 1870s. In 1868 the Central Pacific built the Oakland Long Wharf at Oakland Point, the site of today's Port of Oakland. Sources Wikipedia: Oakland, California