Historic Ramblings

Mission Creek

The twelve mile journey of Mission Creek from it’s headwaters to the bay began as a small trickle from a fresh water spring on the north slope of Mount Allison and followed natural faults and crevices as it made it’s way down the Laguna Creek watershed. At the base of Mission Peak the creek meandered through the fertile fields of Mission Valley, creating marshes and two freshwater lakes along the east side of the Hayward fault. Overflow from the marshy lagoon made it’s way to the Bay slough by way of Laguna and Irvington Creeks. 

The native Ohlone people established villages near free flowing creeks and lakes that attracted game and where they could collect acorns and gather tules for baskets, mats and woven boats. Water was first diverted from Mission Creek with the founding of Mission San Jose in the late 1700’s when reservoirs were created to irrigate crops using a system clay pipes. As the region prospered with the availability of creek and well water to nourish acres of grapes and other crops the Mission San Jose Water Company sold a portion of the precious resource to Oakland and San Francisco.

In the early 1900’s Centerville dentist Lorenzo Yates collected fossil bones along Mission Creek and speculated that horses, large cats, camels and elephants had lived in the region more than a million years earlier. UC Berkeley Paleontologist Rubin Stirton, visited the Yates site in 1936 and uncovered fossils including a four pronged antelope species that he named Tetramerx irvingtonensis and named the new newly discovered age it represented “Irvingtonian of the early Pleistocene Epoch”. In 1944 Hayward teacher Wesley Gordon took a group of school aged boys on a collecting trip to the Bell Quarry gravel pit off of Osgood Road in Irvington also known to have fossils. On the first day of digging they found the lower jaw of a camelops, an ancient ancestor to the modern camel and beginning a fossil dig lasting fifteen years. The twelve boys dubbed The Boy Paleontologists of Hayward retrieved over 150,000 animal and plant specimens and were featured in a1945 issue of Life Magazine.

Now days Mission Creek flows through a series of pipes, culverts and restored wetlands during wet season passing under Mission Blvd. near the old Mission, travels through Palmdale in a cement channel and through residential neighborhoods of Mission San Jose. It passes behind Mission San Jose High School, Chadbourne Elementary School and Hopkins Middle School on it’s way to Gomes Park. Tule Lake and most of Stivers Lagoon were excavated in the 1960’s to create Central Park’s Lake Elizabeth while Clear Lake near the Fremont BART Station has been restored. The Bell Quarry fossil site, refuted to be as rich with specimens as Southern California’s La Brea Tar Pits, was paved over in 1959 by the construction of the 680 freeway through Fremont. Fossil specimens of dozens mammal species from the Irvington gravel pit can be found at Ohlone College, The Fremont History Museum, and at the Children’s Natural History Museum. A walking trail along a restored section Mission Creek between Palm Avenue, Driscoll Road, Gomes Park and Lake Elizabeth recalls a time when the gentle sound of flowing water could be heard in Mission Valley.

-Bill  5/23