Shaping a Shoreline: Stories from the Waterfront
Board of State Harbor Commissioners Records · 1863–1963
China Basin Terminal Painting, Jonathan Jay Baumgartner, 1921, Board of State Harbor Commissioners, F3413:2474, California State Archives, Office of the Secretary of State, Sacramento, California.
Visit the Exhibit
Shaping a Shoreline opens October 17, 2026, in the California State Archives’ fourth-floor research room gallery. Admission is free.
Board of State Harbor Commissioners Records
From Wharf to Record
The California Legislature establishes the Board of State Harbor Commissioners, placing the entire San Francisco Bay waterfront under three appointed commissioners.
Clerks fill the pages of a new Main St. Wharf Book, one of more than a thousand ledgers that would track tolls, wharfage, and dockage along the port.
Marine fireman Emil Kraut is scalded aboard ship; his claim is entered into the Board’s Industrial Accident Register.
Hilda Gohrman is appointed Secretary of the Board of State Harbor Commissioners — the first woman to hold the post.
Artist Jonathan Jay Baumgartner paints the China Basin Terminal at the height of its working life.
The record group closes, leaving behind a century of maps, ledgers, and correspondence documenting San Francisco’s working waterfront.
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A Board Charged with the Bay
In 1863, the California Legislature formed the Board of State Harbor Commissioners and gave it a sweeping mandate: control of the entire San Francisco Bay waterfront. Its three commissioners — appointed jointly by state and municipal governing bodies — were charged with maintaining and improving the port for maritime commerce, from repairing and constructing sea walls, embankments, wharves, piers, landings, and thoroughfares to dredging the docks that kept ships moving.
The Board funded its work by collecting tolls, rents, wharfage, craneage, and dockage, putting excess revenue back into new construction. The ledgers, correspondence, and personnel files it generated over the following century — more than a thousand bound volumes in all — document not only the growth of one of the nation’s great ports, but the everyday working lives of the people who kept it running.
Hilda Gohrman, Secretary of the Board
Hilda Gohrman
Hilda Gohrman began her career with the Board of State Harbor Commissioners as private secretary to its president. In December 1918, the commissioners appointed her Secretary of the Board — the first woman to hold the position. She served for four and a half years, paid the same $3,000 annual salary as the man she succeeded.
Gohrman’s appointment made the local papers; a clipping preserved in a Board scrapbook celebrated her as a “girl chosen for state post.” She was one of many women who kept the Commission’s offices running in the early twentieth century — often, like Gohrman, the sole financial support for a widowed household, working as stenographers, telephone and comptometer operators, and secretaries.
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What the Records Hold
The Board of State Harbor Commissioners generated an extraordinary paper trail. A sample:
Wharf & Pier Books
Volume after volume tracked traffic at individual Bay wharves — here, more than a century of Jackson Street Wharf ledgers.
Jackson Street Wharf volumes, 1895–1898, Board of State Harbor Commissioners, F3413: 287, California State Archives, Office of the Secretary of State, Sacramento, California.
Main St. Wharf Book, 1895–1898
Ruled pages recorded tolls, wharfage, and dockage day by day at the Main Street Wharf.
Wharf & Pier Books, Board of State Harbor Commissioners, F3413: 287, California State Archives, Office of the Secretary of State, Sacramento, California.
Personnel & Injury Records
The Board’s Industrial Accident Register logged workplace injuries like marine fireman Emil Kraut’s 1914 scalding — and the compensation that followed.
Industrial Accident Register, 1914–1917. Board of State Harbor Commissioners, F3413:2054, California State Archives, Office of the Secretary of State, Sacramento, California.
Employee Identification
A Water-Front Pass, renewed annually, let Board employees like Kraut move through the port’s guarded gates.
Water-Front Pass, E. T. Kraut, 1918, Board of State Harbor Commissioners, 2010-124, California State Archives, Office of the Secretary of State, Sacramento, California.
California State Archives
The California State Archives, a division of the Office of the Secretary of State, preserves the historical, legal, and administrative record of California government — from the state’s founding documents to the working papers of agencies like the Board of State Harbor Commissioners. Housed in Sacramento, the Archives makes these collections available to researchers, students, and the public, and features rotating exhibitions like Shaping a Shoreline in its fourth-floor gallery.
Materials courtesy of the California State Archives, Office of the Secretary of State, Sacramento, California.