China Camp: The San Rafael Shrimp-Fishing Village That Once Had About 500 Residents

On the San Pablo Bay shore in San Rafael, a few weathered buildings and a pier are what's left of a shrimp-fishing village.

The village

Coast Miwok people lived in the area before the 1700s, according to Wikipedia. Much of the land was granted to Timothy Murphy in 1844 and later passed to John and George McNear, who ran a dairy ranch, a quarry and a brickyard that employed Chinese immigrants. By the 1880s, about 500 people lived in the Chinese village, many of them from Canton, and they supported themselves by shrimp fishing in San Pablo Bay.

The park

The 1,514-acre state park was established in 1976. In 1979, a 75-acre district that includes the village and a prehistoric shell midden was added to the National Register of Historic Places. The park is also part of the San Francisco Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve.

Visiting

Friends of China Camp, a nonprofit, has run the park since 2012, when the state cut funding for 70 parks. The group says the park is open daily from 8 a.m. to sunset and has 15 miles of multi-use trails, including the ADA-accessible, foot-traffic-only Turtle Back trail. Back Ranch Meadows Campground has 33 tent-only sites. The group also notes that researchers are studying the flood-prone North San Pedro Road as sea levels rise.