Quote:
Originally posted by Spanky
I heard that San Jose use to have a port, but that the all the runoff from the water hoses used to blast the mountains and hills looking for gold filled in the sourthern portion of the bay, creating the marshes and cutting off San Jose. Do you know if that is true?
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The port was
Alviso, which has always been a little ways inside the mouth of the Guadalupe River. (I had to look this up, Paigow --- will your Pub Quiz team have WiFi access?) It died more from the introduction of daily train service to SF, which killed the overnight steamboat service from Alviso, than from the silting up of the river mouth.
I have never heard of gold mining in San Jose. It seems unlikely, as there aren't many hills in the vicinity, and it would take a lot of water volume to get the silt all the way to the Bay.
I discovered on Google Earth that Alviso is quite near the Bay Area's only real ghost town,
Drawbridge, California. It's on land owned by Cargill Salt, so you can't visit. The entire bayshore to the south is now a protected national wildfowl refuge, so Alviso was doomed, 49ers or no.
