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San Ramon has come a long way since its beginnings as a rural outpost for ranchers in the 1800s.
The small town once known as Limerick will be celebrating the 30th anniversary of its incorporation on Wednesday night at Bridges Country Club.
San Ramon’s first mayor, Diane Schinner, will be on hand for the event, along with William Harlan, whose family was among the first settlers in the area.
The city went through several names before its current name was finalized, among them, Brevensville, for blacksmith Levi Breven and Lynchville for William Lynch, an energetic early pioneer.
“After the gold rush it became a small village with a blacksmith and a small store. It had a school in the 1860s,” said historian Beverly Lane. “It had several names, but generally it was called San Ramon. When the train came in 1891, it was called the San Ramon branch line and that’s when everybody pretty much agreed that was what the village would be called.”
The area that initially included Dublin was pretty much a farming community until after World War II, Lane said, with walnuts and pears among its primary crops.
The the end of the war, the community had begun to grow. By 1970, there were 28,000 people; 10 years later, the population had more than doubled to 57,000.
“That decade of the 70s was a real growth decade,” Lane said. “Of course the freeway went through the valley, all the way to Dublin by 1966. The (Interstate) 680 freeway had the effect that people were able to live here and work elsewhere. Houses went up all over the place.”
Because San Ramon and Dublin were both isolated from county government in Martinez and Oakland, and what Lane described as “cowboy development time,” people began to push for incorporation.
“In the 60s there were two attempts to incorporate. In the 70s there were two more attempts to incorporate,” Lane said.
Those initial attempts, she said, would have created a single valley-wide community. It was only after Danville successfully lobbied the Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCO) to incorporate that San Ramon decided to push for city status with the county.
LAFCO had been set up to prevent unviable special districts and cities from forming. Its Executive Officer Dewey Mansfield vigorously opposed Danville’s incorporation vote in 1982.
Mansfield wanted the whole valley to vote on incorporation, although previous valley-wide votes had failed. Danville advocates lobbied LAFCO commissioners and convinced them to support a Danville-only vote.
“In the meantime, all these San Ramon advocates are working,” Lane explained. “They went to the voters and said, ‘Look, Dublin is incorporated in the south, Danville is incorporated in the north, it’s time for us, too.'”
On March 8, 1983, voters overwhelmingly supported incorporation, 3,825 to 1,254. They also elected Diane Schinnerer, Rick Harmon, Mary Lou Oliver, Wayne Bennett and Jerry Ajlouny to the first City Council.
As of July 1, 1983, San Ramon became the seventeenth city in Contra Costa County, with a population of 24,000 people and Diane Schinnerer became the city’s first Mayor.
San Ramon still has a bit of Limerick in it; Limerick Park on Watervale Way pays its respect to the city’s Irish settlers.
Parts of this article first appeared as a column called “Presenting the Past” in the Danville Weekly and have been archived at The Museum of the San Ramon Valley.
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