PETALUMA RIVER

        The Turning Basin
[River]

The Petaluma River is located at the heart of the city. The "river" is actually a tidal estuary linking San Pablo Bay and San Francisco Bay..

Petaluma has seen a lot of ebb and flow in its 150-year history, mostly because the town itself is a legacy of the sleepy estuary that wriggles up here from San Francisco Bay.

A walk along waterfront Petaluma uncovers the origins of the town and reveals a neighborhood tourists don't usually see. You wouldn't know it from the shopping centers and recent sprawl east of Highway 101, but Petaluma is here because of the river.

When the Gold Rush hit California in 1849, a hundred thousand hungry miners spilled into San Francisco, and they all clamored for something to eat as soon as they landed. Food prices skyrocketed in the city by the bay; enterprising hunters, looking for deer and bear to send back to the city, sailed up this lazy river, and when they had gone upriver as far as a small boat would they got out and made camp. That camp became the nucleus of the town.

Soon farmers and ranchers moved in, and warehouses and wharves sprang up along the bank between First Street and the river, with paddlewheelers chugging upstream at high tide to take produce and eggs to the markets of San Francisco. Petaluma had its own special boat specially designed with the smokestack in the stern instead of towards the bow, so heat from the engines wouldn't poach the eggs before they got down the river.

[Turning Basin]
The River House restaurant faces the Turning Basin


[Ship]" Find out about the latest in Petaluma Yacht Club activities here


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