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The town of Giant is long gone"except in memories
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By Heather Macdonald a < I *2 V, y
Correspondent "(j ' ** ■
| RICHMOND — In the crush of demolition, a West
County town named Giant disappeared forever in the
mid-1950s. It was the company town of the Giant Pow-
fler Works, a dynamite plant owned by Atlas Powder
Co. The plant was built on Point Pinole, now in Richmond, at the turn of the century.
>•■• All that remains of the little company town is its
frontage street named Giant Road. But memories of Gi-
fuit still linger large in the mind of Josephine Horton,
V
f Horton grew up in the town of 30 homes located
next door to the Richmond Gold and Country Club. Her
father, J. Ernest Durand, was the powder plant's assistant superintendent.
t Horton remembers Giant also had a boarding house
for the single workers, as well as an auditorium for
jown gatherings, a bowling alley, post office, library
and candy store. At the center of a small, sparse park
sat a Grecian-style cement urn. Every Halloween, said
Horton, Giant's group of 13 children rolled the urn onto
someone's front porch.
"We didn't go door-to-door for treats like they do
nowadays," laughs Horton. "We were into tricks."
A 5-mile bicycle ride from populated Richmond, Horton said, isolated Giant and kept the 100 residents close.
"Everybody was part of the bowling team," Horton
said. "We always had parties. We were just a community all by ourselves out there."
Horton belonged to Giant's gang of children who
grew up and played together. One of the gang's favorite
pastimes was to dig "caves" into the sides of the railroad banks. Giant, she said, sat between the mainline
tracks of Santa Fe and the Southern Pacific.
"It probably wasn't too good an idea with all the
grains going by, but we liked building caves into the
sides of the banks," she recalls. "From there you could
toss out rocks if you wanted to bang a train."
One of the gang's favorite "train robberies" was
stealing sugar beets from the box cars.
"I don't know why we did it," chuckles Horton,
"they were terrible tasting, but we thought it was fun."
The trains also brought hobos who came to the residents' backdoors, where food was always cheerfully
given to them. Horton said the hobos were always polite
as they collected their food then walked down to a
"hobo jungle" at Wildcat Creek.
On warm days the gang swam in the nearby Bay.
The only trouble was the sewer dumped straight into
the Bay back then. Horton wrinkles her nose as she remembers having to clear away the sewage so she could
swim.
Giant didn't have a grocery store, but milk was delivered by one of the San Pablo dairies and a vegetable
truck came each week to sell fresh produce.
"We only went to Richmond once a week," said Horton, "and that was a big day so we got all dressed up. It
was exciting to go once a week to town."
Horton's favorite memory of those town trips was
getting a free hot dog from the butcher at the Quality
Market on Macdonald avenue. Before the trip ended,
Horton and her brother were also treated to chocolate
ice cream at the Eagle Creamery on Macdonald Avenue
between Sixth and Seventh streets.
Later, her boyfriend and future husband of 40 years,
Jack Horton, took her to town for the latgest movie.
They could hop onto the train at the Giant depot and go
right down to Macdonald avenue and then to the Fox
Theater, the biggest one in town.
Horton said she found plenty of excitement in Giant.
She was a member of the Women's Bowling League
which met weekly at the two-lane alley. In those days
they had to pay one of the local boys to set up the
wooden pins. There wasn't even enough room for the
whole league to find seats, said Horton, because more
than 10 people in the bowling alley was a crowd.
The town was about a mile away from the plant, just
in case of explosions. Horton doesn't remember any explosions, but said some did occur when she was a baby.
She only visited the plant a few times.
"The plant was off-limits to us," said Horton. "It never bothered me though, living next to it."
Jack Horton said the plant was closed in the mid-
1950s when the safer explosive nitroglycerin pushed
black powder dynamite off the market. Bethlehem
Steel, he said, purchased the property and demolished
the plant and the town.
At that time the Hortons went digging around the old
plant site. They found almost a dozen pots left by Chn
nese who worked the plant in the early 1900s.
Today they only have a few left of the precious me-;
mentos. The jars and bowls are small works of art in;
clay and glazed in tones of brown, black and dark bluei
Horton proudly displays them on a high shelf in her El
Sobrante home, the only physical evidence she has lef(
of the town that disappeared. j
