It was going to be hot last Wednesday so our Piedmont Recreation Department’s Walking on Wednesdays group decided to take a shorter walk through the central part of Piedmont. We could go to the home of Hugh Craig at 55 Craig Avenue, and his story and that of the City of Piedmont’s early years could be told. A strong turnout of 42 walkers and three of their K-9 best friends were at the Exedra for it.
Hugh Craig was a central figure in the City of Piedmont’s first years. In the aftermath of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake many people moved to Oakland and Piedmont. Oakland was looking for property taxes to pay for the additional services it needed to provide. It wanted to annex Piedmont, but some Piedmont residents wanted to incorporate it as a separate city. It was a race and those who favored incorporation had to move quickly. They needed a map to file incorporation papers in Sacramento, so they used a map from the Piedmont Sanitary District. This explains why some Piedmont homes are partially in Oakland.
On January 7, 1907 Craig and another Piedmonter raced to Sacramento to file the incorporation papers. This incorporation had to be approved by the voters, and on January 26, 1907, 79 Piedmont men voted for incorporation and 38 voted against it. It was all men because women didn’t get the right to vote until 1920. On January 31, 1907 the State approved Piedmont’s incorporation.
However, immediately there were problems and some Piedmonters wanted to vote again about being a separate city. On September 5, 1907 a vote on disincorporating and becoming part of Oakland was held. Approval required a 2/3 vote. Ninety-two men voted to disincorporate and 62 voted to stay a separate city. The vote to disincorporate failed by only 10 votes.
It was a short walk up Highland and Mountain Avenues to Craig’s house. He was one of the city’s first mayors and one of the first five Piedmont settlers. He was also a San Francisco insurance man and twice president of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce.
Craig was born in Sydney, Australia in 1841 to Scottish parents. He grew up in New Zealand before moving to Oakland in 1874 to work in San Francisco for the New Zealand Insurance Company. He bought five acres and built a house in 1879 on Vernal (now Highland) Avenue. However, Highland was widened in 1912, so Craig had his home put on log rollers and pulled by horses to where it is now. Craig also subdivided his land and created Craig Avenue with lots on both sides of the street.
Craig is known as the "First Mayor of Piedmont," but there were one or two men who held the position before him. Varney Gaskill was elected mayor by the Piedmont Board of Trustees on February 8, 1907, and Craig was later elected in 1907 and served until 1914.
To fund the new city, Craig instituted a new property tax based on the size of the home’s parcel. Prior to incorporation, all residents paid the same, small tax to the County. Newspaper articles from the time in Meghan Bennett’s History of Piedmont website, https://www.historyofpiedmont.com/craig, provide an understanding of what happened then. On January 28, 1914 the Sacramento Star proclaimed, “Single Tax Successful in City of Millionaires – Mayor of Plutocrat Principality Forces Rich Men to Bear Just Share of Taxes - Imagine the storm of protest … when Craig, ‘a nut on the subject of taxation,’ … raised the assessments of the rich men of Piedmont.”
Land assessed at $150/acre was raised to $3,000 when its market value was $8,000 to $16,000/acre. Some people were not happy. The Oakland Tribune reported on April 21, 1914, “Hugh E. Craig … was not reelected to the chairmanship of the trustees and quit his place on the board.” Craig died on November 11, 1920 at his home at the age of 79 years.
This original Craig house is a beautiful Stick Italianate Victorian, and surprisingly large with five bedrooms and four and a half baths in a total of 4,359 square feet, and now has solar panels. On our first walk in 2018, nearly 20 Wednesday walkers posed for a group photo in front of the house and our larger group did it again last Wednesday.
With all this history shared it was time to really walk. We went up Craig and Oakland and Moraga Avenues. At Estrella Avenue Jim Kellogg, who led a past walk featuring residential architecture, pointed out some additional homes that he hadn’t been able to get to. They were three, identical cedar shake shingle homes built by a man who bought a larger plot and subdivided it. Further down Estrella were twin California Mission Revival homes built in 1923. It was warming up, so we went up Ramona and Bonita Avenues for a leisurely walk back to the Exedra.
