News & Tall Tales. 1800s.
Stone Pier
State of California in 1856
Stone Pier
Meanwhile, there is now under study a worthwhile project for the city and its harbor, an improvement that will become a necessity in a few years.
This is the construction of a stone pier, a "bulk head," on San Francisco's waterfront facing the bay. This grandiose construction is imperiously needed to prevent the encumbrance of the harbor caused by the mud that accumulates continually all around the city, and for the more than distressing condition of the present piers resting on light, rotten piles, many of which would hardly withstand a strong storm.
Unfortunately, the deplorable financial situation in San Francisco and California and the difficulty of negotiating loans at reasonable rates have so far prevented serious consideration of this project.
It is hoped that the new state administration under the healthy influence of reform will concern itself with this project and put it into effect.
Population Movement
Passengers
The number of passengers arriving by sea during 1856 via the Panama and Nicaragua route and via Cape Horn and the Cape of Good hope was distributed as follows:
| Incoming | Outgoing | |
| 1st Quarter | 7,686 |
4,456 |
| 2nd Quarter | 9,915 |
5,982 |
| 3rd Quarter | 5,910 |
5,467 |
| 4th Quarter | 6,119 |
6,842 |
| Totals | 29,630 |
22,747 |
A gain of 6,883 persons is shown,compared with8,861 in the previous year during which 31,759 passengers arrived and 22,898 left. To the credit of the 1855 figure should be added the increase in population from the immigrants coming across the plains. During 1855, few overland trains arrived from the Missouri frontier, while in 1856 the number of people who came across the continent to California is estimated at 5,000 to 6,000. This influx was made up mostly of Germans, Irish, and Americans from the North.
French, Spanish, and Italian immigration was next to nothing.
Population in California
In spite of such increases, the population of the state, which was calculated at about 335,000 in 1853, has remained from that time on more or less stationary. Even making generous allowances, it is very high if the population today reaches the 400,000 figure when one takes into account the great resources of this state which for lack of manpower cannot be utilized. Immense stretches of land are still uncultivated, mines are still unexplored, and numerous industries are neglected.
The California Historical Society Quarterly
Federico Biesta's Report to the
Sardinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs
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A lively, street-level history of turn-of-the-century urban life explores the Americanizing influence of the Irish on successive waves of migrants to America's cities.
In this award-winning Penguin History of American Life series, James R. Barrett chronicles how a new urban American identity was forged in the streets, saloons, churches, and workplaces of the American city. This process of “Americanization from the bottom up” was deeply shaped by the Irish. From Lower Manhattan to the South Side of Chicago to Boston’s North End, newer waves of immigrants and African Americans found it nearly impossible to avoid the Irish. While historians have emphasized the role of settlement houses and other mainstream institutions in Americanizing immigrants, Barrett makes the original case that the culture absorbed by newcomers upon reaching American shores had a distinctly Hibernian cast.
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Barrett reveals how the Irish vacillated between a progressive and idealistic impulse toward their fellow immigrants and a parochial defensiveness stemming from the hostility earlier generations had faced upon their own arrival in America. They imparted racist attitudes toward African Americans; they established ethnic “deadlines” across city neighborhoods; they drove other immigrants from docks, factories, and labor unions. Yet the social teachings of the Catholic Church, a sense of solidarity with the oppressed, and dark memories of poverty and violence in both Ireland and America ushered in a wave of progressive political activism that eventually embraced other immigrants. Drawing on contemporary sociological studies and diaries, newspaper accounts, and Irish American literature.
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