HISTORY OF
SAN FRANCISCO
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Brief History
For years San Francisco has been the highlight for some of California’s greatest moments in history, being known for the Golden Gate Bridge, the Giants, and its lovely sunshine weather. However, how often do we take the time to realize what the city actually means, and where the city was and has derived from. Where does the nickname “Golden City” come from?
Rediscovered by Gasper de Portola in 1769, it wasn’t until 1821 that Mexico, which formally included California, won its freedom from Spain. Winning its freedom from Spain would not only result in the independence of their country, but the freeing of its people. After the first gold was found in the California foothills, in 1849 San Francisco would soon make itself the port and depot for the Gold Rush frenzy, soon earning the name of the “49ers.” Doing so, the population jumped from 1,000 to 25,000. People were coming from all over America to find a place in or near the city of San Francisco to find ways to contribute to the Gold Rush.
Becoming a home to many after the Gold Rush, San Francisco was transforming into a lovely place where people would begin to finally adjust to all the differences they had to overcome with moving across the country to an area they had never been before.
People like Henry Wells and William Fargo, along with Live Strauss and many others found success from the booming number of people moving to California to prosper. However, some things are hard to prepare for, and very little can be done even if expected. In 1906, tragedy struck when 3,000 people were killed as The San Andreas Fault slipped releasing an earthquake measured at 7.8 on the Richter scale. Nonetheless, this would not be the end of San Francisco, as they have made a name for themselves even more so after this turn of events.
San Francisco has since become a city known for its large number of entrepreneurs and computer application developers; over periods of time, these people would move in looking for opportunity while the land and taxes became more expensive, forcing the poor out of the area and into lower income neighborhoods and in some cases homelessness. By the beginning of the 21st century, they had set a new population record which was previously set by those moving in for the Gold Rush. Since then, social media has begun to make the area more and more popular, bursting with new opportunities within the Silicon Valley.