Before the goats, there were sheep

Long before Hercules was a suburb, the hills around it were a buffer for a dynamite works. And the people who worked there knew what dry grass could do.

In 1980 two local high school students sat down with old-timers and wrote their memories into a booklet. One story stands out. “Workers knew how dangerous fire was in an explosives plant and how quickly it could spread through the dry grass around the plant.” So an employee had an idea: let sheep eat the grass.

Soon, as the old-timers told it, 2,000 to 3,000 company sheep were grazing around the plant. A full-time herder lived in a shack near today’s Sycamore Avenue and raised them with his dogs. When work at the plant slowed at shearing time, the workers pitched in to shear.

Later the company sold the flock, and the new owner kept the sheep on the job. Then dogs from Hercules and Pinole got into the flock, and cattle took over the grazing. After the explosives stopped, crews tried burning the dry grass, gave that up as too risky, and went back to cutting it by hand.

The young City picked up the job. Its 1982 newsletter talked about cutting firebreaks; in 1987 it added hand cutting along fence lines. A City map from 2010 shows goats on the firebreaks, and the City’s page still lists “Goat herds on harder to reach hillsides” for its 50-foot breaks.

The grass on those hills comes back every year, and at house scale the job is the same. The City’s page puts it plainly: “clean your roof and rain gutters of debris such as leaves and pine needles.” If you can’t find a goat to climb up your roof, give us a call, we might be able to… 😉