The quarry that struck water

Dracena Park has a story at the bottom of its bowl. It used to be a quarry, until the quarry struck water.

Walter Blair noticed rock on his Piedmont land, and Oakland needed rock. His quarry’s crushed stone went “to pave the dusty streets of Oakland and Piedmont,” as the Piedmont Historical Society puts it.

In the 1870s the crew went deeper. An 1896 San Francisco Chronicle account tells what happened next. A big charge was set, and with the blast “a vast torrent of water sprouted forth from the excavation.” The workmen were knee-deep before they knew it, and they got the mules out with difficulty. “So sudden was the deluge that within an hour where once stood a prosperous quarry nothing was to be seen but a rising mass of water.” Big pumps pulled out thousands of gallons, and the water kept rising. The quarry was abandoned, its loaded cars still on the tracks.

For years it was a pond. By 1927 part of it had been filled to hold a park department greenhouse, growing more than 10,000 plants a year. Later it was a city work yard. In the 1990s the City turned it into a park, and in 1996 it dedicated the lawn at the bottom. Behind the tall green gates, the old quarry walls still rise at the far end of what the City calls its “secret garden.”

Water still finds its way through Piedmont. The City says Pleasant Valley Creek begins in Dracena Park, and that the town’s creeks are fed by springs, rainwater and runoff. Before storms it asks every household to clean “gutters, rain downspouts, driveways, and culverts.” A lot of that rain starts on the roof. If, for any reason, you prefer to delegate that job, we are always happy and honored to do it.