This website is no longer updated and has been replaced with a static copy. The Spatial History Project was active at Stanford University from 2007-2022, engaging in dozens of collaborative projects led by faculty, staff, graduate students, post-docs, visiting scholars and others at Stanford and beyond. More than 150 undergraduate students from more than a dozen disciplines contributed to these projects. In addition to a robust intellectual exchange built through these partnerships, research outputs included major monographs, edited volumes, journal articles, museum exhibitions, digital articles, robust websites, and dozens of lightweight interactive visualizations, mostly developed with Adobe Flash (now defunct). While most of those publications live on in other forms, the content exclusive to this website is preserved in good faith through this static version of the site. Flash-based content is partially available in emulated form using the Ruffle emulator.
San Mateo County Bay Ownership 1877-1927
Authors: Gabriel Lee, Alec Norton, Andrew Robichaud, and Matthew Booker
These maps show five decades of change in bay ownership in San Mateo County (south of San Francisco), based on official county maps from those years. In 1868, the state of California parceled out the San Francisco Bay tidelands for sale by county, with a variety of owners bidding on and gaining ownership in San Mateo County. Tidelands in San Mateo County, the most desirable and contested in the South Bay, underwent significant ownership changes early on, but between 1886 and 1888 Morgan Oyster Company consolidated most of the eastern San Mateo tidelands under a single owner. Morgan's early purchases show an interest in accumulating productive oyster habitats extensive enough to support a dynamic system of production that provided unique advantages. Those who attempted to compete in the oyster industry never lasted long. Controlling the tidal flats of San Mateo County also enabled Morgan Oyster to sell tracts only on favorable terms, and the company rarely parted with lands even into the late 1920s, fifteen years after the oyster industry had dramatically declined.
