This month’s history walking tours will take us to Encinal Park, a neighborhood whose southern reaches lost its identity when it became part of the Gold Coast in the 1960s.
Caroline “Carrie” Dwinelle and Emile Kower owned the tract. Kower lived for a time in the village of Fruit Vale (today’s Fruitvale District in Oakland). He and his wife Johanna moved to Alameda. They lived on San Antonio Avenue with their son Hermann and daughter Gisele. A native of Stuttgart, Germany, Kower joined a number of his countrymen who invested in Alameda real estate. He also owned property in Oakland and San Francisco.
Carrie married William Worthington Chipman in 1857. Her husband and Gideon Aughinbaugh had purchased the entire Alameda peninsula from Don Antonio Maria Peralta six years earlier. By 1860, William and Carrie were living in San Francisco.
William died in 1873, and Carrie married John Dwinelle four years later. They made their home on Rincon Hill’s Fourth Street, not far from the fashionable South Park. John tragically drowned in the Carquinez Strait in 1881. Carrie decided to return to Alameda and had a home built near the San Francisco Bay shoreline…