City of Martinez history

The adobe house now located at the rear of the John Muir Home Historic Site was built in 1849 by Don Ygnacio 's son, Don Vicente.

Martinez, city, seat (1850) of Contra Costa county, western California, United States It lies on the south shore of Carquinez Strait (between Suisun and San Pablo bays) north of Oakland.

As the story goes, a thirsty miner wanted to celebrate his 1874 gold mining success, so he entered a local saloon and handed over a handful of gold nuggets in exchange for a bottle of champagne.

Between that time, when Martinez was little more than a trading post, and 1876, when the city was incorporated, the gold rush played an integral role in the city’s economic standing.

The Central Pacific, with the tie to the transcontinental line, came in 1879 with the world's largest ferry boat, transporting trains across the Strait to Port Costa.

The Martinez Museum, a project of the Martinez Historical Society, is housed in a Victorian cottage built in 1890 and features artifacts, documents, City maps and photographs.

More than 4,000 square miles (10,500 square km) of the desert lie below sea level, including the 300-square-mile (800-square-km) Salton Sea, a lake with no outlet that was created in 1905–07 when the nearby Colorado River broke out of its channel.

Tectonic movement along the fault has caused massive earthquakes, including the San Francisco earthquake of 1906.

In the east-central region is the Trans-Sierra desert, which extends along the sheer east escarpment of the Sierra Nevada range and comprises part of the vast interstate Great Basin of the Basin and Range Province. Its largest towns are in the Owens Valley, which was a fertile farmland until its groundwater flow was diverted to Los Angeles through a mammoth series of conduits built in 1908–13.

The California State Water Project, launched in 1960, is the largest water-transfer system ever undertaken.

With some interruptions, the ferry service between Martinez and Benicia will continue until 1962, when the opening of the George Miller, Jr.

The Hayward Fault in the San Francisco Bay Area and the San Gabriel fault zone in metropolitan Los Angeles have produced several major earthquakes, though the destructive quake centred in the Los Angeles suburb of Northridge in 1994 occurred along one of the San Andreas’s larger secondary faults.