5. Yerba Buena to San Francisco
Before 1848, Mexico and, subsequently, Spain ruled over San Francisco. When the first Spanish explorers reached San Francisco Bay in 1769, they annexed the surrounding area and declared it to be a part of New Spain’s Province of Las Californias.
Control of Alta California, which included the area that would eventually become San Francisco, shifted from Spain to Mexico in 1821. In 1835, Englishman William Richardson set up shop in Yerba Buena Cove intending to serve as a middleman between harbor area farmers and the ships that would stop in the harbor. The local term for the plant was yerba buena, which means “good herb.”
But how did we get from Yerba Buena to San Francisco, you might ask? Well, in 1846, the Mexican-American War broke out, and later on, in July of that year, the soldiers claimed Yerba Buena as American land, and soon the name changed.
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New Bedford, Massachusetts, once the ‘Whaling Capitol of the World’, & now the leading port of the nascent US Offshore Wind Energy, was once known as ‘Bedford’ until it was learned that Massachusetts already had a city/town known as Bedford in the upper part of the state.