Pleasant Hill Annexed to Lafayette! Part II

>>> Pleasant Hill Annexed to Lafayette! Part I

This is Pleasant Hill – Guillermo’s viewpoint, 1832. (Pleasant Hill is in the foreground, the intersection of Withers and Taylor is beyond at left.)
Photo March 1961 courtesy of Kirk Patterson

When we left Guillermo in July he was married to Maria Antonia Galinda and had a growing family in San Jose. He also had a growing herd of cattle in Pinole and was “commuting” between the two. He needed to solve this dilemma, by getting his own rancho!

He submitted a petition to Governor Figueroa on June 2, 1835 for Rancho las Juntas, built a corral there, and started an adobe house. Since the Welch family still lived in San José, he hired a majordomo to look after the cattle when he was away. One night the Indians burned the house, stole the horses and scattered the cattle. The majordomo fled. Guillermo abandoned his petition.

He petitioned again in 1844. This time, in a surprising burst of speed, the new Governor Micheltorena formally made the grant for three leagues on February 21. Guillermo finally moved onto his very own Rancho in 1845, but sadly he died in 1846.

A lawsuit filed in Federal Court by Guillermo’s son-in-law, the administrator of his estate, (United States v Swanson, et al) caused the western boundary of Rancho las Juntas to be shifted easterly sufficiently far to exclude the hill on which Guillermo had stood to draw his petition map. (The trial began September 12, 1854 and raged until September 15, 1864, when Judge Ogden Hoffman finally gaveled the case to a close.)

At the trial, Alcalde José Ygnacio Sibrian y Pacheco testified: “…the lagoons are on top of a hill from which the waters run on either side of the hill. Welch claimed from the top of that hill on the eastern side thereof looking toward Monte Diablo. That high hill is called “Reliz”…” (It becomes significant that Señor Pacheco testified in 1860.)

In other testimony, G.F. Allardt, surveyor for R.C. Matthewson, deputy United States Surveyor, stated: “…this ridge of the highest land for several miles around…the summit of hills arising to the westward from Murderous (sic) Creek…”

Part of the result of the litigation was the official “Plat of the Rancho las Juntas as finally confirmed to the Administrator of the Estate of Wm Welch,” on which were plotted the three forks of Murderer’s creek and McClellan’s House. (Near the present Tiegland Road, located at the foot of the “high hill” described by Señor Pacheco.) A schoolhouse, the area’s first, was built on McClellan’s property in 1860.

That “high hill,” tall as the Eiffel Tower, shadowed the schoolhouse. And it would have been in the little one-room structure that the founders of the proposed school district would have met in 1860 to choose the most appropriate name to describe their new District. And what other name would they logically have chosen than that of the most defining object in their corner of the world?

And so the Pleasant Hill School District would have been born, officially transcribing the name for the record the very first time. Later, the near-by road was so labeled, then the entire area, and, ultimately, the City.

A hundred years later, the Local Agency Formation Commission, in its infinite wisdom, proclaimed the hill that bore Guillermo Welch’s boot prints on its summit to be within theSphere of Influence of the City of Lafayette!

And so, except for an eastern portion still under the jurisdiction of Contra Costa County, Pleasant Hill’s namesake was officially annexed into the City of Lafayette.

A subdivision later constructed on that eastern portion of Pleasant Hill remaining in Contra Costa County was then inappropriately named “Lafayette Hills.”

Where’s Judge Hoffman when we need him?

-Ray Peters