“Plot 6” Tract – Emery Title Search
The problem of conflicting land claims was one of the most disruptive and volatile issues facing property owners and would-be owners in the East Bay throughout the 1850s and into the 1860s. It was not unusual for one piece of land to be claimed by two or even three parties at one time, and armed skirmishes occasionally erupted. The land bought by Joseph Emery in 1859–land which now forms the southern portion of the City of Emeryville–had already gone through a succession of previous owners and counterclaimants in the scant five and a half years since it had left the hands of Vicente Peralta in 1853 (Emery also bought other pieces of property, but this summary concerns only that tract known as “Plot 6” and referred to above).
Rancho San Antonio
To trace any land title in the City of Emeryville, we must go back to the original Peralta land grant. In 1820, Luis Maria Peralta was given a land grant by the King of Spain upon Peralta’s retirement from military service in Mission-era California. (In 1822, Mexico won its independence from Spain, and California history shifts from the “Spanish Period” to the “Mexican Period. “) Peralta’s grant, known as “Rancho San Antonio,” extended from the top of the East Bay hills down to the bay shore, and from San Leandro Creek in the south up to Albany H1l1 in the north. Today, the cities of Oakland, Emeryville, Piedmont, Berkeley, Alameda, Albany and part of San Leandro are built on land that once belonged to the Peralta estate. (And, previously, though not encumbered or formalized by our system of private title deeds, this same land was home to Costanoan-speaking Indians–the true native Californians–for over two thousand years.) Luis Peralta, residing in the pueblo of San Jose, never came to live on his land grant which was considered far out in the hinterland. However, cattle ranching was carried out on Rancho San Antonio by the four Peralta sons who had survived to adulthood: Antonio, Vicente, Ignacio and Domingo. In 1842, Luis Peralta divided the ranch land among his four sons, with Vicente receiving that portion which would later include all of Emeryville, part of Oakland, part of Berkeley, and all or part of Piedmont.
Gold Rush
The Gold Rush of 1848 triggered a huge influx. of fortune hunters and settlers into the Bay Area. Many of them. whether knowing better or not, treated rancho properties as “public lands” ripe for the taking. As on many other ranchos of that period, Rancho San Antonio was soon overrun by squatters who not only laid claim to the land but who also slaughtered and sold the Peralta cattle. The Peraltas themselves were forced to rent grazing land in other areas in order to protect what little cattle remained to them or rent land back from the very squatters imposing upon them. The U.S. Land Commission was established in 1851 to confirm or deny the land claims of rancho owners throughout the state. The Peralta title to Rancho San Antonio was confirmed in late 1856 but had to withstand several more years of legal challenges until ultimately patented in 1877; Meanwhile, before the confirmation process had gone very far, the Peralta sons were forced to sell the greater portions of their land’ in order to pay property taxes and meet the legal costs incurred in sustaining their claims through the various courts. Vicente Peralta sold almost all of his land in 1852 and 1853. The largest sale occurred on August 1, 1853, when a group of four San Francisco investors-speculators, moneyed venturers, call them what you will–paid Vicente Peralta $100,000 for all of his land with the exception of: the original town site of Oakland, which had been sold off the year before, and two smaller parcels, one of which was Peralta’s own homestead. . Over the next few years, the investment group expanded as some of the original investors sold all, or portions of, their interest to others. Also, in 1853, the investment group which had bought most of Domingo Peralta’s land merged their holdings with the group which had bought from Vicente Peralta. Then, the combined land was surveyed, mapped and divided into 96 numbered “plots” by Julius Kellersberger. On July I, 1856, the interest shares of each investor were translated into actual property by the assignment of plots. Plot 6, the land later purchased by Emery, was among the properties portioned out to two partners, William M. Gwin (and wife) and Henry B. Truett. When these two men then divided up their properties, Truett came away with Plot 6, among other tracts.
Plot 6 Sold
On July 21, 1857, Truett sold a portion of his holdings, including Plot 6, to M. George Read, of San Francisco, for $12,323. Two days later, Read also paid $622 to Nathaniel Chittenden, Robert Simson and Charles H. S. Williams, for exactly the same pieces of land. Chittenden et al. claimed that Luis Peralta’s will had wrongly excluded Peralta’s female heirs from inheriting rancho land. (They had inherited, instead, real and personal property at Luis Peralta’s San Jose home site.) Having first obtained “power of attorney” from the various female heirs, and then having the heirs relinquish land title to them as payment for prosecuting the claim in court, the Chittenden gang popped up like bad pennies to demand payment whenever pieces of ranch land were bought. (This challenge to the title of the four Peralta sons was known as “The Sisters’ Title” suit and was ultimately unsuccessful) Prospective buyers, of course, only wanted to buy land with a clear title. Without knowing the final disposition of the many land suits pending in the courts, and perhaps for the sake of expediency, buyers often agreed to purchase land from as many parties as laid claim to it. This effectively “quieted” the title, unless, of course, a new challenger materialized later. Thus, Read paid off Chittenden et al., as well as purchasing the land from Truett. Ten days after buying from Truett and seven days after paying off the Chittenden faction, Read turned around and sold the land to John F. Cobb for exactly the same amount that he had paid Truett. Not quite three months later, Cobb sold Plot 6 alone to Joseph Black of Alameda County for $3,298. It’s possible that Cobb had caught wind of conflicting titles to the land and sold to an unwitting buyer in order to get his own money out.
John A. Hobart
Cobb had sold Plot 6 to Black on October 26, 1857. However, several months earlier, on July 28, John A. Hobart and his wife had sold the same plot, minus 10 acres in the northeast corner that the Hobarts reserved for themselves, to Caleb Burbank of San Francisco for $3,200. The Hobarts claimed title to Plot 6 vis-a-vis their actual possession of the land. It appears that they had been living on the land at least since 1855, and, as no record exists in the Alameda County Record of Deeds for their purchase of the land from a previous owner, they may have been the original “squatters.” At any rate, Burbank purchased Plot 6 again, this time from Black, for $4,500, on May 17, 1858. The title to Plot 6 was finally “quieted.” Incidentally, the titles stemming from the Peralta sale and based on the Kellersberger survey, assigned Plot 6 an area of 153.76 acres; the Hobarts sold it as 185 acres, and it continued to be assigned 185 acres thereafter. This discrepancy may simply reflect the difficulty of measuring land that has a border on the shoreline. Finally, we come to Joseph Emery who purchased Plot 6 on February 28, 1859 from Caleb Burbank and his wife. Emery paid $8,000 for the 185 acres, with the same 10 acres reserved in the northeast corner (then occupied by a Joseph Smith in place of the Hobarts). Emery later built his residence within Plot 6, on the northwest comer of San Pablo and Park avenues.
This story originally published in 1996 for the Emeryville Centennial Celebration and compiled into the ‘Early Emeryville Remembered’ historical essays book.
