Alma (1891)

The Alma is a rare survivor from an era when the waterways of San Francisco Bay acted as the primary highway system for the region. Built in 1891 at a boatyard in Hunters Point, she belongs to a class of vessels known as scow schooners. These flat-bottomed workhorses were the delivery trucks of their day, carrying everything from hay and lumber to bricks and grain across the shallow creeks and sloughs of the Sacramento and San Joaquin River Delta. Before the construction of the great bridges that now span the bay, these vessels were the vital economic link connecting isolated coastal communities to the markets of San Francisco.