Burlingame Water Department

The City of Burlingame is an American suburban city of approximately 28,000 people in San Mateo County, California. It is located on the San Francisco Peninsula and has a significant shoreline on San Francisco Bay. The city is named after Anson Burlingame who was an attorney and a diplomat. Burlingame was settled by wealthy San Franciscans looking for a better climate.It is known for its high residential quality of life and is often referred to as the City of Trees. Industrial growth was spurred in the 1960s and 1970s by proximity to the San Francisco International Airport. The City of Burlingame has many beautiful hotels along the San Francisco Bayfront and is a significant vacation spot for people wishing to visit the San Francisco Bay Area.The earliest documented European contact with what is now the Burlingame area was made by the Juan Bautista de Anza expedition in 1776. Although earlier Spanish expeditions had passed through this area, notably the Portolá expedition in 1769, de Anza is the first to have camped in what is now Burlingame. In his diaries, de Anza refers to the dry arroyo “half a league” north from “arroyo San Matheo.” It can be assumed that this is what locals now refer to as Burlingame Creek. From that date, the Spanish missionaries developed the San Mateo/Burlingame area as the farm to support their mission in San Francisco. With the advent of Mexican independence in 1822, the mission lands were secularized and the southern Burlingame area was part of a land grant, known as Rancho San Mateo, given by Governor Pio Pico to his secretary, Cayetano Arenas. Arenas had hardly taken possession of the land when the uprising in Sonoma that led to the founding of the Bear Republic caused him and his father to dispose of the land to a San Francisco based mercantile company, Howard & Mellus.William Davis Merry Howard soon bought out his partner, Henry Mellus, planning to retire to the country to live in splendor with his young wife. Following his death eight years later in 1856, his estate was divided into thirds, one third for his wife, Agnes, one third for his son, William Henry Howard, and one third for his father-in-law, Joseph Henry Poett. At this point, several conflicting pieces of information create some confusion regarding the exact sequence of events. According to maps dated May 13, 1866 and 1868 on file with the San Mateo County Recorder’s Office, it was Joseph Henry Poett who sold Anson Burlingame a portion of his allotment of the Howard property for the creation of his estate. There was also a deed, dated May 30, 1866, which covered the sale of the land by Poett to Burlingame for $54,757.50. However, there was an additional deed, dated June 2, 1866, which covered the sale of the same land by Burlingame to Ralston for the sum of $1.00.Anson BurlingameMultiple sources indicate that it was through William C. Ralston that Anson Burlingame became aware of the desirability of an estate on the Peninsula. Ralston, a founder of the Bank of California, made his fortune in the development of the Comstock Lode. He admired the Peninsula’s warm, tranquil setting of oak-clad rolling hills nestled between San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Coastal Range and created his magnificent estate at Belmont. One of the many famous guests invited to Ralston’s estate was the United States Minister to China, appointed by President Lincoln, the Honorable Anson Burlingame. Following Anson Burlingame’s death in 1870, D. O. Mills became the guardian of the Burlingame estate, and according to a January 29th, 1872 map also on file with the County Recorder’s Office, Mills sold the property to Ralston.According to the account in Constance Lister’s 1934 manuscript “A History of Burlingame,” however, Ralston purchased the property where Burlingame now stands to the southern limits of the old Buri Buri Rancho from Joseph Henry Poett, who inherited the property from his son-in-law, William D. M. Howard. She further states that it was Ralston who gave Burlingame a site for a future town on his holdings west of El Camino Real to be known as the Town of Burlingame in 1868. This conflicts with an account in the San Mateo Gazette of June 13, 1874, which states that Messrs. Sharon and Ralston had just purchased 400 acres of Burlingame’s land where they had begun plans to lay out a town.Though some survey work was undertaken, and several local property owners hired John McLaren, head gardener for the Howard Family, to landscape their frontages on El Camino Real with elms and eucalyptus, no actual construction had begun by the time of Ralston’s death in 1875. At that time the property was taken over by his partner, William Sharon, who used the property as a dairy farm to supply the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, which he had also acquired at Ralston’s death.