Adams Point, the peninsula on Lake Merritt that’s now the heart of Lakeside Park, was always open space, but never empty. Activity went on there from Oakland’s earliest days. When a long-forgotten structure was discovered at Adams Point in 1893, the story was in all the papers for almost a week. After that it was forgotten again. Until this post.

In the summer of 1893, Adams Point was undeveloped farmland studded with oak trees at the edge of town, part of the large landholdings of Edson F. Adams. There were no fences, but few people went there. Then one night two local boys, Willie and Arthur Anderson, spotted a pair of men digging in a hillside on the east side of the point near its tip, hiding their tools at the spot during the day. This went on for weeks. Word got around. As people began to visit, the diggers stopped. But they had excavated a set of brick-lined chambers beneath the soil. Rumors arose and two of Oakland’s newspapers, the Enquirer and the Tribune, went into action.

On Saturday, September 16th, the Enquirer placed a small, matter-of-fact item at the bottom of page one headlined “Mysterious Excavations.” Of the diggers it said, “They appear to be sinking a shaft on what was once the site of the old brick yard and excavating what appears to be the wall of an old kiln.” The Enquirer knew its local history and thought the incident was no big deal.

The Tribune, for its part, made it a big deal under a classic front-page headline deck: “RICHES./A Romantic House Located./Two Strangers Dig for Treasure./The Building Is Underground at Adams’ Point./It Is Believed to Contain the Booty of a Gang of Pirates.” One sentence distilled the overall tone: “The whole affair is wrapped in the deepest mystery.”

The Oakland papers didn’t publish on Sunday, but the San Francisco papers did their best to outdo the Tribune. William Randolph Hearst’s Examiner published interviews and pictures under the headline “Oakland’s Little Pompeii,” evoking the ancient Roman town buried by volcanic ash in 79 BCE.

^{Archways of the old kiln. Fires were set inside the arches and raw bricks were baked in chambers above them. From The Examiner of Sunday 17 September 1893, page 8}

The Call spun a colorful piece based on legends of gold buried by pirates, robbers or Forty-Niners. The Chronicle noted that the bricks were a traditional square Mexican type, “hard as iron almost,” and the tiles were traditional Mexican hexagons.

^{From The Examiner of Monday 18 September 1893, page 20}

The diggers were still unknown. Who were they, and what had motivated them to shovel out the whole thing and toss hundreds of bricks into a pile? The papers chased those open questions like a pack of dogs.

On Monday the Enquirer, under the headline “SOLVED,” reported that the underground structure had been both a house and a kiln. The papers went on to uncover the identity, motives and findings of the diggers. But the part of the mystery I care about for this post was clarified early on.

Adams Point, like the rest of Lakeside Park, was created around 125,000 years ago when a warm break in the ice ages raised sea level higher than today. The streams at the time — the same ones we know today — dropped their loads of mud, sand and gravel in alluvial deltas that built up to the new sea level, and then a layer of fine clay accumulated across the top. That clay, exploited by brickmakers, became Oakland’s first geological moneymaker, and Adams Point was where it all began.

Monday’s Enquirer quoted an oldtimer named J. W. Watson that in the early 1850s, two French brickmakers successfully tested the clay at Adams Point with a small kiln. (Incidentally, most people called “French” in 1850s Oakland were French Canadian.) “Their next move was to build them a house, and as lumber was at that date scarce and very expensive, they concluded to dig into the bank and live there.” (Lumber was scarce because the redwoods of the Oakland Hills had been logged out.) Watson said “they were not pirates, nor was their home a storage room for stolen plunder.” He remembered that one of them was named Chevalier.

In Tuesday’s Call another oldtimer, George T. Laflèche, told of a fellow Frenchman named Romby, someone he knew well. Romby built the kiln, he said, by digging into the hillside to save labor, and he used it only in 1850 and 1851, then relocated across the lake to where the clay was better — the site of today’s big Kaiser Center building. He said Romby’s tiles were durable: “There are plenty of these now in existence, and you will find some of them in front of Audiffred & Co.’s place, at the corner of Fourth and Jefferson streets.” Laflèche said that after Romby abandoned the kiln, the winter rains and farmers’ plows soon covered it up.

There is room for both stories, which differ in details. Maybe the facts are still unclear. But in Tuesday’s Enquirer Edward D. Harmon, who owned Adams Point before Adams did, appeared to confirm that Romby’s brickyard came before Chevalier’s dugout.

Romby went on to greater success when he moved again to the shore of San Leandro Bay, where “Romby’s brick yard” was one of the boundary markers for the town of Alameda in 1854, and Brick Yard Cove marked the east end of the Tidal Canal. Watson recalled that Chevalier fell victim to drink and died in the early 1860s.

Adams Point was mapped in 1857, at which time there appears to have been a small landholding outlined right at the point, and a wagon trail passing near. That would have been after Romby’s time. (At the site of Romby’s second kiln stood a windmill.)

^Source

In 1893 the entire peninsula was still roadless. Today the shoreline is only slightly different, so locating the kiln site should be straightforward, although given the intensive development of the park since 1893 I do not expect there to be any sign of it on the ground.

And sure enough, the digital elevation model of the Point adds no further clue.

^{From nationalmap.gov}

I place the site at, or just behind, the row of garages west of the Boat House. Today it’s a bit of wild habitat — easy to call neglected, but surely home to wildlife for whom it’s just fine as is.

Beneath the vegetation is the same old clay.

In 1850 this spot was truly isolated. Not a single dwelling could be seen from it. Duck hunters were the only visitors to San Antonio Slough, and they never spent the night. Even forty years later it was out of the way. To give a sense of how much things have changed, consider that in 1893, the Point was described as “a knoll so a person standing on it can get a clear view as far as Alameda.” Not since the Lake Merritt Channel was filled in and built up.

It’s interesting to visit the news scene at a time when all of it was small print on big paper pages, and the influencers of their day had only two tools, oral conversations and letters to the editor. If you’d like to rummage through the entertaining coverage, I’ve linked to the significant stories below. The characters include a dowsing “spiritualist,” the miner who loved her, a Black preacher with a prisoner’s treasure map, a handful of old coins and a man named Johnson.

Our world seems less haunted now that we no longer expect to find pirate treasure or gold miner’s purses buried in the neighborhood. But when the next forgotten structure is found, those ghosts will surely emerge again, on TikTok or whatever comes after it. And the clay is still there for the digging.

The city should keep an eye open when it excavates in the park. The papers in 1893 said everyone in the crowds took bricks and tiles as souvenirs, but they couldn’t have gotten them all.

Oakland Enquirer
Saturday | Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday

Oakland Tribune
Saturday | Monday | Tuesday

San Francisco Call
Sunday | Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday

San Francisco Examiner
Sunday | Extra: Ambrose Bierce on p. 6 | Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday

San Francisco Chronicle
Sunday | Monday | Tuesday | Thursday

This entry was posted on 17 August 2026 at 7:55 am and is filed under Deep Oakland, Oakland sediment and soil. 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.