OAKLAND — Redwood Regional Park already gets plenty of attention from hikers, joggers, dog-walkers and others among the more than 1 million people who visit it each year, and now it may also draw attention to its history.
The park will be renamed Dr. Aurelia Reinhardt Redwood Regional Park, after one of the five original members of the East Bay Regional Park District board and its first female member. The district board approved the name change last month at the suggestion of board director Dee Rosario.
According to the park district, Reinhardt helped negotiate the first land purchases that turned into what are now Tilden, Temescal and Sibley parks, and helped obtain the property that would become Redwood Regional Park.
A redwood grove in the park is already named after her — Aurelia Reinhardt Redwoods — but now the whole park will have her name.
“Aurelia had a long history of public service and advocacy for human and environmental rights,” Rosario said in a written statement from the park district. “She was an amazing woman whose legacy is still alive today in the Park District’s 73 Regional Parks and 125,000 acres of preserved open space.”
Reinhardt was born in San Francisco in 1877, graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1898 and became just one of few women at the time to go to graduate school at Yale University, according to biography notes in the Online Archive of California, citing papers in the F.W. Olin Library at Mills College.
Reinhardt was an English lecturer at the University of California Extension Division before becoming president from 1916 to 1943 of Oakland’s Mills College, which she expanded by enlisting benefactors and faculty. She also was involved with a variety of educational boards and groups, including the American Association of University Women, as well as peace organizations, and she was active in politics both locally and nationally.
According to the library’s biographical notes, Reinhardt also was passionate about the work of the Indian Defense Association of California and the Save the Redwoods League.
Reinhardt Redwood Regional Park is one of the most popular parks in the district, receiving 1.4 million visitors every year, according to the district.
The district’s general manager, Robert Doyle, noted in a news release that the renaming of the park after Reinhardt comes as the 100th anniversary of the women’s suffrage movement will dawn in 2020.
“It is fitting for our nationally-recognized park district to highlight Aurelia Reinhardt, a remarkable environmentally and socially conscious woman from Oakland,” Doyle said.
