Alameda was once a peninsula of grassy fields and sandy beaches, separated from Oakland by a snaking estuary. A tidal canal made Alameda an island in 1902 and its waterfront became a major shipping port. Park Street's bay-windowed commercial buildings looked out on a prosperous city of streetcars and comfortable homes. Between the two world wars, Alameda's Neptune Beach resort and amusement park became the “Coney Island of the West,” eventually boasting a Moorish entrance tower on Webster Street, a stadium, two swimming pools, a high dive, and a roller coaster called the “Whoopie.” Alameda's strategic location made its “airdrome” the busiest in the world in the 1930s and eventually attracted a U.S. Coast Guard base, known as Government Island, and the Alameda Naval Air Station.

An historic account of northeastern Alameda County, California through the genealogy of three pioneer families who came to follow their dreams in the gold mines, but instead connected their lives near present day Livermore. Here they found a better life raising their families in this fertile, though dry, valley passage between the San Francisco Bay and the mountains of the Mother Lode. The photographs of those families were organized by Lillian Meyers Taylor, whose albums were passed down through her daughter, then her grand daughter, and finally her great-grand daughter who decided she could not let them go unnoticed for another generation.

Alameda County spans from the shores of the San Francisco Bay to the golden inland hills. Alameda County Fire Department (ACFD) is comprised of multiple consolidated agencies that began joining forces and sharing resources in 1993. Protecting unincorporated county land as well as Ashland, Cherryland, San Lorenzo, Castro Valley, San Leandro, Dublin, Union City, Newark, Emeryville, and the National Laboratories at Livermore and Berkeley, ACFD serves over 500 square miles and 330,000 citizens. This legacy stretches back 140 years, recalling the shared experiences of bucket brigades, teams of horses pulling steam-engine pumpers down muddy roads, the advent of motorized apparatus, and the days when school boys would be pulled from class to ride tailboard to fight blazes in the hills. These agencies have sent soldiers to two world wars, survived massive earthquakes, fought catastrophic wildfires, and touched the lives of Bay Area citizens for over a century. The ACFD is the sum of its many unique parts, which together form a premier, all-risk fire department.