Berkeley's Mystery Walls

“Half a mile east of Grizzly Peak stand the remnants of stone walls which have baffled the researches and curiosity of antiquarians” reported an 1896 issue of the San Francisco Chronicle, “by whom they were erected, when and why is an unsolved mystery”. Unexplained rock walls, like those in the Berkeley Hills, are also found scattered south for nearly forty miles along the ridge lines of the East Bay Hills above Hayward to the summits of Monument and Mission Peak in Fremont where clusters of the three foot tall stacked limestone rock and boulder walls extend from a few feet to over a half mile in length.

The world wide building of stone structures dates back hundreds of thousands years to the stone age and has provided limitless explanations, conjecture, and urban myths about the mystery walls of the East Bay. Were they evidence of early giant hill dwellers who gained immense strength by lifting the heavy rocks, as suggested by UC Chemistry Professor Henry Myers, after reportedly uncovering stone images, axes, and pieces of pottery? Or a colony from lost Atlantis that defended their hillside rock fortresses with spears, bow and arrows, and by hurtling boulders? A long forgotten race or maybe Aztecs of Mexico who may have used the walls for defense? In 1908 “Professor” Joseph Voyle, President of the questionable Berkeley Society for Psychical Research, using a divining rod claimed that some of the walls were remains of a prehistoric civilization (Voyle also claimed to have discovered a radium mine under San Francisco, inventing an earthquake detector, and creating a non-intoxicating alcohol substitute). Others were inclined to believe that the rock formations on East Bay ridges were the work of unknown ancients called “The Earliers”. and that the walls may have served as navigational aids for extraterrestrials.

Tentative conclusions of a recent experimental study dating the growth of lichens on the walls is that the surviving segments in the Berkeley Hills may have been built between 1850 and 1880. However without documentation, who the rock stackers were, and why the walls were constructed may remain an unsolved mystery