The San Joaquin County real estate deal that started it all — and arguably the biggest  land transaction ever for the county — was completed for $60 worth of groceries and a white horse.

That was back in 1844 when Guillermo Gulnac — a grocery store owner in the pueblo known as San Jose — accepted those items of payment for a land grant he had received from Mexico’s California Governor Manuel Micheltorena at the time encompassing 48,747 acres in the Delta at the confluence of the San Joaquin and Calaveras rivers.

The Board of Supervisors on Tuesday, Jan. 28, at 1:30 p.m. will celebrate what that deal led to — the formation of San Joaquin County 175 years ago on Feb. 18, 1850.

The proclamation ceremony at the supervisors’ chambers at the county administrative center at 44 North San Joaquin Street is the first in a series of events planned throughout 2025 marking the county’s 175th anniversary.

Land bought was referred to as

Rancho Campo de los Franceses

The land Gulnac traded for the groceries and horse was dubbed Rancho Campo de los Franceses.

It referenced the French-Canadian fur trappers who made camp there as the southernmost outpost of the Hudson Bay Company. The area is now known as French Camp.

The buyer was Charles Maria Weber.

 The German immigrant who first arrived in the United States as a 22-year-old stepping off a ship in New Orleans in 1836 was Gulnac’s partner in the grocery store. Before partnering with Gulnac he worked for a while for John Sutter.

The land he bought was where he mapped out a town in 1849 that he named Tuleberg after the prevalent tule grass in the area.

Tulberg became Stockton and emerged at the dawn of the 20th century as one of the most promising large cities on the West Coast.

It was one of many instances where the true wealth of the Gold Rush that built California was not from vast fortunes hardy miners collected while first panning Sierra waterways, then digging and ultimately creating the first massive widespread environmental disasters in the Golden State via placer or hydraulic mining but by selling supplies to gold seekers.

It was the money to be made off of the hundreds of thousands of miners from around the globe that allowed Yerba Buena that had been rechristened San Francisco to go from a proverbial backwater outpost of just under 1,000 residents in January 1848 to a cosmopolitan city of 342,000 by Jan. 1, 1900.

San Joaquin is one of 

the original counties

 San Joaquin was incorporated as one of California’s original counties on Feb. 18, 1850 — seven months prior to California gaining statehood on Sept. 9, 1850. There are now 58 counties.

San Joaquin County was named for the San Joaquin River, which was named for Saint Joachim.

Gabriel Moraga — a Spanish explorer who was one of the first Europeans to see what is now the Central Valley — named the San Joaquin River during an expedition from 1806 through 1808. He also named the Sacramento, Merced, Kings, Calaveras, and Mariposa rivers.

Saint Joachim, according to Christianity, was the maternal grandfather of Jesus. Joachim is the patron saint of fathers, grandfathers, married couples, linen traders, and cabinet makers.

Before there were Europeans, the area now encompassing the 1,426 square miles of San Joaquin County was inhabited by the native Yokuts and Miwok peoples.

A malaria epidemic in 1828 and a rebellion of native people led by Chief Estanislao — for whom the Stanislaus River and Stanislaus County are named — drastically reduced the native population.

Most of today’s boundary of San Joaquin County were created via five land grants when California was a province of Mexico from 1843 to 1846.

At the time of its incorporation, San Joaquin County had 3,647 residents. That is roughly the combined population added to Manteca and Lathrop during 2024.

The 2020 Census placed the county’s population at 779,223. Today, the county is estimated to have 802,000 residents.

There were an estimated 157,000 people in all of California — the combined population of today’s Manteca, Lathrop, and Ripon — back in March of 1848.

San Joaquin County now has eight cities (in the descending order of their current populations): Stockton, Tracy, Manteca, Lodi, Lathrop, Mountain House, Ripon, and Escalon.

 Weber succeeded 

by not mining

Weber’s success was based on the same premise of not mining per se but supplying the miners. 

He did dabble, though in prospecting for gold. He left his ranch with several Native Americans in his employ searching forest north of the Stanislaus River for gold and then finding gold on the Mokelumne River. His findings on the Mokelumne are considered by many as the first found in the area that would become known as the southern mines.

Weber left behind his employees and headed toward the American River finding traces of gold in every stream he crossed including one named in his honor — Weber’s Creek — west of Sutter’s Mill.

His biggest “find” was arguably that of what two of his employees that were Indigenous Californians reportedly found in Wood’s Creek.

That led to the founding of the Queen of the Southern Mines — Sonora.

Weber decided the best way to seek his fortune was to return to his ranch and make a living selling supplies to miners heading to the gold country.

Weber opted to concentrate on developing Tuleberg. It was a town site he laid out at the end of the navigable water for miners heading up from San Francisco Bay on their way to the mines. As such Tulberg became a major supply point for miners.

Weber enlisted the help of Commodore Robert Field Stockton — the leader of the America military in California that was not a state at the time — to protect Tulberg. In appreciation of the commodore’s help, Stockton renamed Tulberg as Stockton in 1850. It was the same year Stockton was incorporated as a city.

 To contact Dennis Wyatt, email dwyatt@mantecabulletin.com