The Jacoby Creek watershed is a part of the ancestral territory of the Wiyot native people. Historically the creek has been an important spawning habitat for salmon, steelhead, and even coastal cutthroat trout. The creek remains habitat for Coho salmon and other salmonids coming home to spawn.
Jacoby Creek is one of four major tributaries of Humboldt Bay on the North Coast of California. While the paths of the other tributaries of the bay have been altered, the course of Jacoby Creek has been left much as it was at the time of European settlement. The creek drains a watershed of 17.3 square miles.
Swaths of marshlands previously existed around Humboldt Bay before being reclaimed by European settlers for agriculture, through a process of diking. Some estimates indicate the size of the bay may have been reduced by as much as 10,000 acres since the beginning of reclamation activities in the early 1890s. This work created more farm and pasture land and changed the landscape and the ecology of the area.
While diking changed the appearance, ecosystem, and accessibility of the bay's marshlands and estuaries, logging altered the landscape of the surrounding hills, valleys, and headwaters. Logging has long been a livelihood for the people of Humboldt County. Jacoby Creek has been logged a number of times in the past 150 years, and likely will be logged again. In order to facilitate the transportation of timber resources, a small network of railroads were constructed and operated throughout the Jacoby Creek watershed.
The community that developed near to Jacoby Creek and the logging industry there was named Bayside in 1876. The growth and prosperity of this town were linked to how much resource removal was being done in the watershed. Members of Dolbeer and Carson's workforce settled here and helped found the community. When the logging of the creek's trees halted for a while in the 1890s, quarrying became the new business of interest. It was noted by the Arcata Union that "times will be pretty lively about Bayside the coming summer" when the quarrying work was set to begin.