BERKELEY HISTORY

Such a branch line was Francis Kittredge Shattuck's earnest hope and vision. We have already seen that Shattuck, along with his brother-in-law George Blake and partners William Hillegass and James Leonard, was one of the town's original Anglo landowners (and illegal squatters on Domingo Peralta's land). For many years, Shattuck, Blake and Hillegass lived in Oakland, while Leonard farmed the partners' Berkeley property.

Shattuck became an important business and political figure in Oakland, serving as mayor, city councilman and county supervisor. In 1868, however, he moved to Berkeley, building an impressive house with elaborate gardens on the site of today's Shattuck Plaza Hotel. He sold a plot of 40 acres south of his home to San Francisco hardware merchant J.L. Barker, and in the 1870s the two men worked together to develop their properties.

Their most ambitious scheme was to get the Southern Pacific to build a local line through the Shattuck and Barker land holdings. They offered to provide a free Berkeley right of way, twenty additional acres for a station and rail yard, and a $20,000 cash subsidy. The offer was sufficient to persuade the Southern Pacific to form a separate corporation, the Western Development Company, to build a steam line to Berkeley.

The line followed a route that today includes Stanford Avenue, named after railroad president Leland Stanford, Adeline Street and Shattuck Avenue. The odd angle of Adeline in South Berkeley is due to the alignment of the original rail right of way. At University Avenue, the route looped back so that the train could return to Oakland on the original single track. Inside that loop, now Shattuck Square, the railroad built its Berkeley station. That general location has been Berkeley's transit hub ever since.

The Downtown Berkeley BART station is just a few yards southwest of the original branch line depot, and the AC Transit F Bus still follows much of what was the original branch line route. The tracks to University Avenue were completed in 1876. In 1878 they were extended north to Vine Street, encouraging the initial commercial and residential development of what today is the North Shattuck neighborhood (and Gourmet Ghetto).

• Berkeley Historical Society
• Wikipedia - Berkeley, CA
• Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association