McNears Beach, California
unincorporated community in California
McNears Beach was the site of a fashionable beach resort established in the 1880s on San Pablo Bay in Marin County, California. It was located 0.5 miles (0.8 km) north-northwest of Point San Pedro, and 3.4 miles (5.4 km) northeast of San Rafael. The United States Board of Geographic Names rejected other, similar names proposed for the site, including McNear, McNear Landing, and McNear's Beach.
History
In 1859 John A. McNear purchased 700 acres at Point San Pedro from the estate of Timothy Murphy, the original owner of Rancho San Pedro, Santa Margarita y Las Gallinas, a 21,000 acre Mexican land grant. McNear established a dairy farm and gradually increased his holdings in the area to 2,440 acres and more than five miles of waterfront on San Pablo Bay. Chinese immigrants worked at the McNear ranch and supplemented their income by fishing for shrimp along the shores of San Pablo Bay. In the 1880s, McNear and his son established a fashionable resort on the shore that included a hotel, gardens, and a dance hall. In 1898, he built the McNear Brick Company. His plans for adding a shipping terminal and railroad at the site were thwarted by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.
The McNear post office was established on the site in 1897 and discontinued in 1910.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “McNears Beach, California” as unincorporated community in California. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as unincorporated community in California. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6802501. Authority coordinates are 37.993, -122.453. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1859, 1898, 1906 and 1897.
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This entry incorporates text from “McNears Beach, California” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.