The former campus of Holy Names University, in the hills just above the Warren Freeway, has been for sale for a while, but no one seems to want to move an existing college or start a new one there. The owners of “The Oakland Hills Campus,” BH Properties, just filed plans to put low-density housing there and preserve a few of the old buildings. Left unsettled are the even older presences on the property: the Peraltas’ old chapel and the Ohlones’ ancient ocher quarry.

Right now the property is gated but not posted, so I went there to look at the old places. I first featured the quarry here 15 years ago, when I didn’t know much about it. That was in autumn; the photos today are in just-spring.

The quarry site is uphill 150 meters from the old chapel (more about that later), by a playground behind the former Raskob Learning Institute. I call it a “site” and not a quarry because the evidence points to the boulders being moved here when the campus was built in the 1950s. I think the original quarry site was more spread out and is now covered by buildings. Take a look at the bare terrain, as revealed in the digital elevation model.

^{From nationalmap.gov; illumination from northwest}

Old maps show that the ravine in the middle, where a tributary of Lion Creek runs, used to dominate the scene. Today the stream is culverted and almost everything around the campus has been uprooted or buried, but in 1897, the earliest USGS topographic map shows the chapel site as a low rise above a gentle swale stretching to the southwest. The freeway excavation obscures what was originally a saddle between the headwaters of Peralta and Lion Creeks.

Local historian Dennis Evanosky says that Antonio María Peralta, the Mexican rancher who first possessed this part of Oakland, called the place “Loma Colorada,” suggesting that this “red hill” is where the Ohlones produced ocher from boulders exposed here. And the good stuff is really red.

Dennis says Peralta held on to this parcel longer than his other lands. The chapel he built here was a noted landmark, with an inspiring view. And like Indian Gulch, this place must have been unusually significant to Peralta’s unpaid Ohlone workers. They remembered the traditional uses of ocher in body paint, sunscreen, dyes, medicine and burials. This ocher patch had been their regional monopoly, supporting rich trade connections throughout the Bay area.

Some of the boulders have hollows in them where the quarriers pounded and harvested raw material.

I suspect that the boulders have been turned, though there’s no easy way to be sure. The typical mortar holes we picture, used to turn acorn into meal, needed the hardest rock, and they needed to face upward, like the example below from Berkeley’s Mortar Rock Park. Grinding soft red rock into grit to collect in baskets is a whole different operation, it seems to me, and the hollows face different directions.

The boulders aren’t consistent in their composition, nor are they consistent with the bedrock exposed just downhill. They’re spaced artfully and don’t form any sort of pattern, the way they might if they were exhumed by erosion as an ensemble. In short, I interpret the quarry site as a modern artifact.

Still, the boulders are pure and distinctive, unlike any other place in Oakland, and they’re at the far north end of the Leona volcanics that give rise to our ocher occurrences. (See my backgrounder on how ocher forms.) I surmise that the boulders emerged at this spot because the topography retarded erosion and helped the ocher evolve gently to a better state of purity, then weather out in large bodies ready to use.

The Ohlones harvested ocher here for thousands of years, a kilo at a time. Suddenly the Spanish arrived and took them all to the San Jose Mission, the king gave the Peraltas the land, and when the missions failed the surviving Natives became the Mexican ranchers’ serf class. Antonio Peralta set up a chapel here for Catholic priests, who visited regularly. Eventually the land came into American hands, and in 1908 an architect born in Ontario named George Edward McCrea (1871-1943) bought it and built a house here for his family, adding rooms over the years. A nearby plaque says the house incorporated the chapel’s foundation.

In 1943 McCrea’s surviving son Robin gave the “ancient Indian camp” to the city of Oakland for use as a park. It appears on a 1950s road map as McCrae Park, but the city did little to improve it. A few years later the College of the Holy Names sold their original location on Lake Merritt to the Kaiser conglomerate and sought this land for their next campus. The city sacrificed the park for the college, inducing Robin McCrea to deed the land to the college and substitute a parcel on Lion Creek in its place, which is today’s McCrae Park. (It’s conceivable that some red boulders were brought up from there.)

The college burgeoned and thrived (until 2023), but in all of its bulldozing and landfilling did little to preserve the historic assets. The McCrae house, once a charming farm cottage, is in poor shape today, between decrepit and tumbledown, and the Ohlones’ camp is wiped out except for the cluster of boulders. BH Properties would turn it all to an ungainly meld of public cultural center and suburban sprawl, with no room left for the aboriginals.

The tribes haven’t forgotten this place, as I learned years ago. The Ohlones were recently granted a 4-acre reserve in nearby Joaquin Miller Park. They gave it a name in the local Chochenyo language, Rinihmu Pulte’irekne, “Above the Red Ocher.”

This entry was posted on 2 March 2026 at 7:58 am and is filed under Geoheritage, Quarries and mines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.