Port Costa, CA

Port Costa is a tiny Contra Costa County town on the south shore of the Carquinez Strait, and its whole shape comes from moving goods across water. It was founded in 1879 as the southern landing for the Central Pacific's train ferry Solano; entire trains crossed from Benicia, then continued toward Oakland. Wheat shipping, warehouses, docks, and the railroad made Port Costa a major West Coast grain port in the late nineteenth century. The ferry ended when a rail bridge at Martinez opened in 1930, and the waterfront economy shrank with it.

ATTRJanna Layton / CC BY-SA 4.0

Today the old schoolhouse is the town's civic hinge. The 1911 Port Costa School closed in 1966, but local volunteers saved it and now run museum tours and make it available for meetings and events. The Port Costa Conservation Society also stewards land that is part of the Carquinez Strait Regional Shoreline, with bluffs, trails, and shoreline beside the town. The local scoop is a former railroad-ferry port that still reads from the water: old warehouse history at the strait, a schoolhouse in the center, and parkland climbing the hills behind it.