1909 race program

Albany Hill in Albany

 • 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