Park History
In 1921, the southern tip of Brannan Island, where the modern Brannan Island State Recreation Area is located, was an area of marshland approximately 335 acres in size. The property was one of a number of holdings owned by a man named Peter Cook, before being acquired by the Sacramento-San Joaquin Drainage District of the State Reclamation Board for use by the United States Army Corps of Engineers.
Between 1926 and 1929, the area that would become Brannan Island SRA was used as a dumping site for the sand and silt raised from the riverbed during the dredging and widening of the Sacramento River channel. The dredging operation filled the area with spoils, leading to an increase in the height of the area to between twenty to forty feet above the water level. After the operations were over, the land mostly sat idle, except for the occasional sale of sand by the State to private contractors.
In 1950, the Rio Vista Chamber of Commerce began an initiative to nominate the area to become a State Park. Four years later, a transfer of the property's title to the California Division of Beaches and Parks set the stage for the creation of the park. During the 1950s, the Division of Beaches and Parks granted permission to Travis Air Force Base to establish a boat harbor on Seven Mile Slough for Air Force Personnel. The park would finally open in 1965, expanding access to the bountiful natural and cultural resources of the Delta to more Californians.
Over the years improvements and additions to park facilities have made Brannan Island State Recreation Area an important recreational facility strategically located between the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers.
Samuel Brannan
Brannan Island was named after Samuel Brannan, who in 1846 led a group of 238 fellow Mormons from New York to California aboard a ship known as the Brooklyn. Later that autumn, Brannan would sail west across the San Francisco Bay and continue down the San Joaquin River. He was searching for a location to found the first Mormon community in California. Brannan would eventually select on a site located near the modern town of Ripon, naming the settlement New Hope. Twenty Mormon men from the Brooklyn would come to work in New Hope, although the settlement would not last long.
Brannan and the other Mormons on the ship were part of a larger westward migration of Mormons, led by Brigham Young, who sought to establish their own religious communities independent of American society. While Brannan and the 238 other Mormons on the Brooklyn made the journey by sea, Young led around 15,000 Mormons overland in wagon trains. Samuel Brannan was a strong advocate for Mormon settlement in California, but when Brigham Young decided to settle in the Great Basin in 1847, the colony of New Hope was abandoned.
Despite this, Brannan remained in California and, in the autumn of 1847, opened a store at John Sutter's Fort near the confluence of the Sacramento and American Rivers. In May 1848, Brannan spread the news of gold discoveries elsewhere along the American River to San Francisco. The result was a business boom in California, caused by the influx of prospectors to the gold fields. In just a few months, Samuel Brannan had made over $100,000 selling wares to prospectors, and would eventually go on to become California's first millionaire. By the end of 1849, Brannan owned one-fourth of all the land in Sacramento and would have eventually owned one-fifth of San Francisco.
Around this time, Brannan began to be investigated by the Mormon church relating to financial discrepencies from the voyage of the Brooklyn. After initially being cleared of embezzlement, Brannan would be excommunicated from the Mormon church in 1851 due to his well-known drunkenness, infidelity, and his involvement in vigilante lynch mobs in San Francisco. During the 1850s and 1860s, Brannan would gain a scandalous reputation as California's richest man.
In 1859, Brannan purchased a tract of land surrounding a hot spring at the foot of Mt. St. Helena with the intention of creating a summer resort. He also grew grapes and was successful in the wine making business. At a promotional dinner, Brannan toasted his proposed resort as the "Saratoga of California" but unfortunately it came out as the "Calistoga of Sarafornia" and the name Calistoga stuck. Brannan set out to interest people in the resort by financing a branch of the railroad to Calistoga Hot Springs. This proved to be a poor investment that would ultimately contribute to Brannan's bankruptcy. Brannan's empire would further be shaken by his 1870 divorce from his wife, Ann Eliza Brannan, who had grown tired of his well-known infidelity and ended up with half of Brannan's estate. Although he amassed a fortune during his lifetime, Samuel Brannan died in poverty on May 14, 1889. He contributed his name to a street in San Francisco and to the island and this park in the Delta.