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Welcome to San Francisco! California
With an
overland expedition by Don Gaspar de Portola, Europeans first laid eyes on
the Bay in 1770. In March 1776, Captain Juan Bautista de Anza founded the
Presidio and Mission of as-yet unnamed San Francisco.
In 1792,
British explorer George Vancouver, visiting San Francisco Bay, discovered
a protected anchorage east of the Presidio, called Yerba Buena by the
Spanish after the sweet smelling grasses growing around the base of what
is now Telegraph Hill.
In 1847,
Yerba Buena, with a population of about 1,000, changed its name to San
Francisco. The next January, gold was discovered at Sutter's Mill, which
created only a minor stir.
By 1854,
the gold fields had been exhausted, and San Francisco sank into an
economic depression from which it would not emerge until the early 1860s
with the discovery of the Comstock silver lode in western Nevada.
Throughout
the 1920s, plans were put forward for bridges to connect San Francisco
with the East Bay and Marin. Finally in the early 1930s, work began on the
San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, which opened in 1936, and the Golden
Gate Bridge in 1937.
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