1909
• The first Portola Road Race (pictured, left) is run through Melrose in Oakland, San Leandro and Hayward, with at least 250,000 attending
• Albany (Albany Hill pictured, right) is incorporated in Alameda County
• Fort Ross State Historic Park is established in Sonoma County to protect Fort Ross, founded in 1812 as the southernmost point in the Russian colonization of the Americas
• The C. H. Brown Theater opens in the Mission District, San Francisco
• Samuel Merritt College is founded in Oakland as a hospital school of nursing
• San Francisco Law School is founded
• The neighborhood of Thousand Oaks, a refugee camp from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake adjacent to Albany and Berkeley, is first subdivided