Most railroad companies have their secrets and those that operated in Santa Cruz County were no different. When railroad fever hit California shortly after the Civil War, it coincided with a lack of viable and affordable workers to build the many dozens of planned routes throughout the state. Famously, the Central Pacific Railroad arranged the importation of thousands of Chinese workers to construct its route through the Sierra Nevada and across the Great Basin to Promontory Summit, Utah where it connected with the Union Pacific Railroad, thereby creating the first transcontinental railroad. They were not the first Chinese in the state—several thousand had moved to San Francisco and the Gold Country in the late 1840s and throughout the 1850s—but they were the largest influx in the region's history. As soon as the railroad project was done in 1869, Chinatowns and Chinese villages popped up in every moderate-sized settlement in Central California and cheap manual labor flooded the market.

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Chinese workers making a cut along the Monterey Extension Railroad near Pacific Grove, 1889. [California State Library – Colorized using DeOldify]

Central Pacific quickly realized that their dream of connecting the continent was only the first step in a grand plan to dominate the Western United States, including Santa Cruz County. Acting quickly, Central Pacific bought the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1868 and immediately relocated some of its Chinese workers to San José, where they were employed in building the Santa Clara & Pajaro Valley Railroad to Gilroy between 1868 and 1870. Following that project, they continued on by grading the California Southern Railroad, which became Southern Pacific in October 1870. It was this route that first brought the railroad within range of Santa Cruz County and allowed for the plausible construction of a railroad line along the county's coast to the town of Pajaro.

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The Chinese fishing village at China Beach (New Brighton State Beach), 1880s. [Santa Cruz Public Libraries – Colorized using DeOldify]

Like most California coastal towns, Santa Cruz had Chinese fishermen from early on, and they had a small settlement within modern-day New Brighton State Beach. Chinese laundries popped up in Santa Cruz and Watsonville as well, and at least one Chinese fruit dryer was active in the 1870s in Watsonville. These businesses formed the nascent cores of Chinatowns that arose in Santa Cruz and Watsonville in the 1860s, places where the local Chinese community congregated, traded goods, and often lived. Initially, they were almost entirely composed of working men and prostitutes, but over time families transformed these crude neighborhoods into insular villages within predominantly white towns.

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The Front Street Chinatown beside the San Lorenzo River in Santa Cruz, late 1880s. [Colorized using DeOldify]

Racism forced these communities to be transient at times, with them often relocating as necessary to protect their residents. The first community in Santa Cruz was located on Pacific Avenue (Willow Street) between Lincoln and Walnut Streets. When the street was renamed around 1872 and the business district moved down from the Upper Plaza, Chinatown moved to Front Street, where it remained throughout the 1870s and 1880s. Following the relocation of the Santa Cruz railroad depots to the freight yard in 1893, Chinatown relocated beside it, between Chestnut Street and Neary Lagoon. The Watsonville Chinatown was initially located at the corner of Maple and Union, but it was forced to move across the Pajaro River to along Brooklyn Street in 1888.

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Chinese workers working along the Monterey Extension Railroad near Pacific Grove, 1889. [California State Library]

California was geographically the nearest state to China and, as such, received the vast majority of Chinese immigrants into the United States. As the numbers of Chinese grew, so too did anti-Chinese sentiment, especially in the Bay Area where the population was the highest. As early as 1850, the Chinese were driven out of the gold industry and in 1858, a law was passed barring the entry of any Asian person into California, but this was overturned by the state Supreme Court in 1862. The depression of the 1870s led to further anger at the Chinese, whom many saw as stealing white people's jobs despite no evidence that this was actually the case. Indeed, the only reason the state government continued to allow Chinese to settle in California was because of their taxable income. By the late 1870s, Asians made up a quarter of California's wage-earning population but used almost no state resources since most were relatively young, healthy men without families. The final straw came in 1879, when California included the exclusion of Chinese in its new constitution, a decision that was expanded by the federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. But this did not stop opportunists like the railroads from employing Chinese workers in their construction efforts. With so many veteran workers of the transcontinental railroad stranded in California, it was worth the risk of fines and public censure for companies to hire cheap Chinese labor to affordably build their railroads.

In 1870, the population of Santa Cruz County was mostly poor and agrarian and had no time or money to build railroads, despite the need. The wealthy were more optimistic, but lacked the clout and money to hire locals to build their dream railroads. Thus, Chinese workers were brought into the county to do the work. It is unknown whether the grading for the San Lorenzo Rail Road, begun in 1868 but halted shortly afterwards due to property disputes, used Chinese laborers, but it seems likely considering the fact that all other railroads built in the county until the end of the century used them. The first railroad to be successfully built in the county, the Santa Cruz Railroad between Santa Cruz and Watsonville, certainly employed Chinese to do the grading and track-laying. A tent city was built beside the right-of-way in the vicinity of Live Oak where crews slept and enjoyed evenings before working long days at the end of track as it slowly progressed southeast toward the Southern Pacific tracks at Pajaro. These workers did not come from the established local Chinatowns and did not live in them, although they would visit them on their days off to buy food and enjoy the pleasures that such a community provided. Lotteries held in the Chinatowns advertised to the workers and runners collected bets in the morning and returned the next day with any prize money, undoubtedly taking a sizeable percentage for the trouble.

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The Chinese worker village either along the Loma Prieta line or the Valencia Creek line, 1880s. [Pajaro Valley Historical Association – Colorized using DeOldify]

Sandy Lydon in his book Chinese Gold outlines the forms of compensation that workers of the Santa Cruz Railroad received. These figures and benefits, with minor variances, can be assumed for all of the local railroads regardless of the company. On average, crews worked ten-hour days, six days a week at a rate of one dollar per day. Two dollars were deducted per week for food and another dollar was usually lost to pay for clothing, recreation, and upkeep, leaving workers with around three dollars per week in income. The railroad companies did provide tents and spaces to pitch them, but offered few other amenities. One benefit—or so it seemed at the time—was that any medical expenses for injuries sustained while on the job were covered by the railroad company and living expenses would also be paid for men unable to return to work. Since workers rarely had families with them at this time, no provisions were given for the care of wives and children.

The second railroad project in the county and the first to be completed was the Santa Cruz & Felton Railroad between Santa Cruz and Felton high along the west bank of the San Lorenzo River. For eight intense months from late 1874 to mid-1875, Chinese workers scaled the sides of San Lorenzo Gorge cutting an at-times tenuous path along the hillside. It was these workers that built the first railroad tunnel in the Santa Cruz Mountains through the Hogsback of Rancho Rincon near today's Paradise Park. No worker died in these endeavors, although minor injuries were common. Since the city of Santa Cruz was staunchly anti-Chinese by this time, it did not allow construction crews to operate within the city limits, so construction of the Mission Hill Tunnel was done by Cornish miners while the Railroad Wharf and other bridges along the line were built by the all-white Pacific Bridge Company. Non-Chinese workers proved costly and a good portion of the overall cost of construction was to pay the wages of these workers.

Even before the Santa Cruz Railroad was completed, construction had begun on the South Pacific Coast Railroad along the East Bay. Like all the other railroads in the state, the company used Chinese workers extensively in the construction of its line from Alameda Point to Santa Cruz. The reason for this was sheer practicality, proven by the recent cost overruns of the Santa Cruz & Felton Railroad: Chinese workers could be employed cheaply and were, in the eyes of their employers, entirely expendable and replaceable. Through political bargaining and Comstock Lode money, the South Pacific Coast was able to safely ignore prohibitions on employing Chinese workers in the railroad industry and push to build its route through the Santa Cruz Mountains.

By 1878, 600 of the South Pacific Coast Railroad's 700 construction workers were Chinese. Crews working for the company were mostly from the Ning Yeung Company of San Francisco, which specialized in finding jobs for out-of-work Chinese manual laborers. Most work crews were composed of twenty to thirty men under a Chinese contractor, with a white site supervisor in charge of relaying tasks from the general manager. Rather than paying workers directly, the South Pacific Coast paid the Ning Yeung Company, which then sent funds to the supervisors to pay to the employees. Attempts by Santa Clara County to tax the workers mostly failed largely due to threats to the tax collectors' lives by the workers. The workers did everything from grading and track laying to tunneling and ballasting. The only thing they didn't do was build the bridges, which was handled by the Pacific Bridge Company.

Injuries were common in railroad construction projects and the Chinese workers received the brunt of the injuries. On the Santa Cruz Railroad in its final months of construction, several workers were maimed and severely injured and one man was killed when the construction train's brakes failed and ran over a group of workers. Indeed, for every mile of railroad built in Santa Cruz County, a Chinese worker died. And the deadliest place to work in the region was in the Summit Tunnel along the South Pacific Coast route along Los Gatos Creek.

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A Chinese laborer outside the worker shanty at Wrights, c 1883. [Bancroft Library – Colorized by Derek R. Whaley]

Wrights had been established around 1877 as a worker camp with around four dozen Chinese living outside the tunnel's north portal. A similar settlement arose on the opposite side along Burns Creek so that the tunnel could be bored from both ends. The tunnel crossed the San Andreas Fault and leaked methane and petroleum from a deep coal vein on the Wrights side. Initially, this threat was dealt with by regular burn-offs of the gas and oil, but more accumulated as crews dug deeper. The first major incident occurred on February 13, 1879, when a burn-off ignited a pocket of oil and fire roared out of the tunnel, singeing worker and timber alike. The intensity of the heat caused the tunnel to act like a cannon, blasting away machinery and structures near the entrance. Around a dozen workers were severely burned and five eventually died from their injuries, with many of the rest sent to San Francisco for treatment.

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Chinese workers, white supervisors, and train crew working outside the Summit Tunnel, probably in early 1880.

Fear of returning into the tunnel led to several fights between supervisors and crew. The crews were briefly replaced by Cornish miners in late March, but these workers were even more problematic and new Chinese crews were convinced to work at an increased rate of $1.25 per day. Still, fear and animosity persisted between supervisors and workers, with Nick Borrosey shooting and killing a worker in June 1879. Despite adopting many different techniques to alleviate the gas and oil problem in the tunnel, disaster struck again on November 17. A stick of dynamite unexpectedly exploded igniting a massive cloud of gas and oil. Twenty-one workers and two supervisors were in the tunnel at the time, and another twenty workers ran into the tunnel to rescue their friends following the explosion. But the worst was yet to come. A second explosion followed shortly after the first, and twenty-four Chinese workers were killed instantly. The remainder as well as the supervisors were badly burned as they hobbled out of the tunnel portal into the smokey night air. Seven more workers died from their injuries after being transported by rail to Chinatown in San Francisco.

By January 1880, a permanent fire was alighted at the source of the gas leak in the Summit Tunnel and work resumed. Although new Chinese workers were coaxed into resuming construction, their efficiency and morale were so low that the railroad decided to bring back Cornish workers and reassign the Chinese workers to the other end of the tunnel, which had not experienced the same problems. This finally worked and the two crews raced each other to complete their ends. With the tunnel completed, air could flow through it regularly, dispersing the gas and reducing the risk of further fire and explosions. An out-of-the-way cemetery was established near the tracks at Wrights to mark the graves of the two dozen men who died there in November 1879, but the markers have long since disappeared and the location is now lost. No further workers died while building the line to Santa Cruz.

While the disaster in the Summit Tunnel was certainly the worst felt by Chinese railroad workers in the county, a mudslide in Felton in 1881 was a close second. Following the completion of the South Pacific Coast route, worker camps were established across the line, especially in the mountains, to maintain the trackage, top up ballast, and repair tunnels and bridges. Around twenty workers lived north of Felton, probably along Zayante Creek, when a mudslide fell on their settlement during a winter storm in February 1881. A dozen bodies were found in the slide but many more are thought to have been washed down the creek and river or been left buried.

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Chinese crews heading out to work on the Loma Prieta Railroad, 1882. [California Historical Society – Colorized using DeOldify]

When the Southern Pacific Railroad took over the Santa Cruz Railroad in 1881, it brought in thousands of Chinese workers for the dual task of standard-gauging the railroad and building a new branch line up Aptos Creek for the Loma Prieta Lumber Company. Broad-gauging took two years and in mid-1883, crews were redirected to the redwood forest of Aptos Creek to cut a crude railroad into the heart of the mountains. After reaching the new town of Loma Prieta, crews turned to the northeast and reached the narrow gorge nicknamed Hell's Gate, which proved to be the only obstacle in Santa Cruz County that required workers to hang on ropes from above to cut a grade in the cliffside. While major construction along the line ended in 1888, a reduced crew remained to oversee the continuous expansion of trackage deeper into the mountains.

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The slide zone on the Boulder Creek Branch near Brackney were some Chinese workers died cutting the grade, 1885.

At the same time that the Loma Prieta Branch was under construction, the South Pacific Coast Railroad was building a new route up the San Lorenzo Valley from Felton to Boulder Creek. Most of the workers were veterans of the railroad's main route through the Santa Cruz Mountains. The route to Boulder Creek was less troubled than that through the mountains, but the difficult terrain in the Brackney area required careful construction and several Chinese workers died in the effort. These men may have been the last Chinese lives lost for the cause of Santa Cruz railroading. When the branch was completed, most of the crews were transferred to the Almaden Branch.

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Chinese crew carving out the Valencia Creek grade, 1886. [Aptos Museum – Colorized using DeOldify]

Three private railroad projects were the last to utilize Chinese labor in the county. In 1886, Frederick Hihn hired Chinese crews to build a narrow-gauge railroad along Valencia Creek between Aptos and his mill three miles to the north, as well as the tracks' extension into the forests beyond the mill. Meanwhile, north of Boulder Creek, the Santa Clara Valley Mill & Lumber Company likely used Chinese labor in early 1888 to build a low-budget narrow-gauge railroad on the San Lorenzo River. And in the Pajaro and Salinas Valleys in the early 1890s, Claus Spreckels employed multiple crews of Chinese workers to construct the Pajaro Valley Railroad along the Monterey Bay so that sugar beet farmers could more easily get their products to the large Western Beet Sugar factory in Watsonville.

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Chinese workers on a flatbed car on the Monterey Extension Railroad near Pacific Grove, 1889. [California State Library]

The mass employment of Chinese by the railroads ended around the turn of the century. By this point, the Chinese Exclusion Act had been in force for two decades and adherence to it had become more societally expected than in the boom days of the 1880s. Most of the Chinese men living in the state had been doing so since the 1860s and were now considered too old to work efficiently. Furthermore, outbreaks of plague in Chinatown in San Francisco beginning in 1898 led to further negativity toward the Chinese which added to the public opinion that the Chinese were unclean and diseased. Thus, when the Ocean Shore Railway and Coast Line Railroad projects to build a route along the coast between San Francisco and Santa Cruz were initiated in 1904, both companies chose not to employ Chinese workers. Chinese men and their families continued to live and work in several industries throughout the county, but their time as a labor force for the railroad was at an end.

Citations & Credits:

• Lydon, Sandy. Chinese Gold: The Chinese in the Monterey Bay Region. Capitola, CA: Capitola Book Company, 1985.
• Whaley, Derek W. Santa Cruz Trains: Railroads of the Santa Cruz Mountains. Second edition. Santa Cruz, CA: Zayante Publishing, forthcoming.

While narrow-gauge railroad spurs criss-crossed the lower parts of Chestnut Street and Pacific Avenue in the early days of Santa Cruz County Railroading, the area near the southern end of Washington Street was relatively undeveloped. A railroad spur may have reached the southern end of the road in order to reach high piles of lumber, but otherwise the section was poorly developed. Olive & Company followed by Grover & Company maintained the lumber stacks but did little else with the land. An old planning mill between Chestnut and Washington, which was converted to a hay barn by the 1890s, was the only significant railroad-related structure in the vicinity.

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Colorized postcard showing the Santa Cruz Union Depot with the open field and planing mill structures at the end of Washington Street visible at right, c. 1905. This property was owned by the Santa Cruz Lumber Company at the time, although the lack of lumber suggests the photograph was taken during the off season.

Not long after the opening of the Santa Cruz Union Depot at the freight yard in 1893, things began to change at the yard. The Railroad Exchange Hotel opened at the corner of Center Street and Pacific, and activity at the yard had shifted further to the north. The Santa Cruz Lumber Company, which was a composite company that merged the lumber interests of Grover & Company and the F. A. Hihn Company, used the opportunity to establish a planing mill and lumber yard between the railroad tracks and Center Street, spanning both sides of Washington. There is no evidence that railroad tracks crossed into the property and the yard layout does not leave room for rails, but the large warehouse erected beside the tracks makes clear that the company still relied on rail for most of its transport needs. Between Washington and Center a large mill was built alongside a mouldings workshop, kilns, a space for dressing lumber, and some warehouses. The operation persisted until the early 1910s, when the Hihn Company was consolidated into the Hammond Lumber Company, which promptly took over the facility and then shut it down within a few years.

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Sanborn Fire Insurance map showing the southern end of Washington Street at the Santa Cruz Lumber Company's planing mill and lumber yard, 1905. [University of California, Santa Cruz, Digital Collections]

The vacant structures of the lumber company were converted for use as a paper mill throughout 1917.  However, this project ran into some ill-timed snags. The plant was intended to produce craft-grade paper using redwood fiber through a proprietary process developed by George M. Pillsbury. But Pillsbury died in April 1917 before the plant opened. The project continued without him, opening to test the process and materials in August, but it proved economically unviable. In November 1918, all the of the machinery was removed and the structures taken over by the Santa Cruz Canning Company.

The canning company was interested in commercially canning sardines in Santa Cruz. The company's primary structures were initially located on the old Railroad Wharf, but after the city refused to grant a permit to establish a formal cannery at the base of the old wharf, the directors decided to purchase the old planing mill near the Union Depot and remodel it into a cannery. It was they who requested the spur from the mainline Southern Pacific Railroad track near the turn of Pacific Avenue across Washington Street and into the facility in October 1918, although it was not actually installed until mid-1920. This track would remain a feature of the yard into the 1960s and was the only track to run directly behind the depot building and through its parking lot. The cannery officially opened in early July 1919 following several difficulties moving machinery and getting the facility ready for business.

From the time of its opening, the cannery was not a particularly popular business with local residents or tourists. The sewer for the facility drained into Neary Lagoon, both polluting the water at Cowell Beach and making the entire area smell like dead fish. The corporation was purchased by L. A. Pederson of San Francisco in 1919 who immediately began expanding the facilities on Washington Street. Nonetheless, complaints continued to hound the company. Oil and runoff into the sewers had begun to clog pipes, leading to the company using Hihn's old wooden drains instead. But these proved inadequate. The company did not resume operations until August 1921 after several upgrades to alleviate complaints and meet new city decrees. But it was not enough. The company closed down permanently at the end of 1922 and sold the land to the Wood Brothers Company.

George W. Wood bought the property in mid-June 1923 in order to begin producing products for the Charters Incubator Company. However, within a few years the location became the company's primary kit-built home factory, as well. George Wood worked double time for both his own firm and the East Side Lumber Company for nearly three decades until March 1939, after which he established a new lumber and brokerage firm on Soquel Avenue. He sold Wood Brothers to George Ley's Santa Cruz Lumber Company, which already operated at numerous sites in Santa Cruz so did not require the property on Washington Street.

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The Santa Cruz Union Depot on a slow day, June 11, 1939, with a boxcar parked on the Standard Oil spur at right. The tall oil tank of the company must have been brand new in this photograph and can be seen in the distance to the right of the depot. Photograph by Wilbur C. Whittaker. [Jim Vail – Colorized using DeOldify]

Standard Oil purchased the lot as well as a lot at the intersection of Pacific Avenue and Washington Street. At the junction, they built a service station, but the start of World War II led to its closure only two years after it had opened, likely due to gasoline rationing and a lack of traffic due to curfews. The station became overgrown in the war years but a popular neighborhood victory garden was planted in the empty lot beside it. On the old planing mill property, Standard Oil erected a large vertical oil storage tank beside the spur. Probably after the war ended, two more tanks were added. Each was surrounded by flooded moats to prevent leaks and the spread of fire. A small storage warehouse sat just beside it and may have been left over from one of the previous operations at the site.

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Aerial photograph of the Santa Cruz Union Depot area showing the Standard Oil spur crossing Washington Street and passing into its yard near the center-right, late 1940s. [Tom Hambleton – Colorized using DeOldify]

Oil was delivered multiple times a week via tanker cars delivered to the spur. Lumber may have been shipped from the spur occasionally too since stacks can be seen in the photograph above beside the spur on the opposite side from Standard Oil. This land was likely retained by the Santa Cruz Lumber Company. Standard Oil only appears to have operated its depot into the 1960s at which point the depot shut down and the tanks and infrastructure removed. The spur was abandoned shortly afterwards and all trace of it was gone by the Southern Pacific yard map that was produced in 1973. The property became a light industrial factory within a few years but did not utilize the railroad any further.

Geo-Coordinates & Access Rights:
36.9663N, 122.0271W

The site of the Standard Oil depot is now split on either side of Washington Street at its junction with Center Street. Originally, Washington Street continued to the south until meeting Pacific Avenue but was redirected in order to make space for Depot Park in the late 1990s. While part of the lot is now a sports field, the section north of Washington Street is occupied by Sea Engineering, Broprints Custom Screenprinting, and Skateworks. No remnant of the original plant remains.

Citations & Credits:

• Santa Cruz Sentinel and Santa Cruz Evening News, 1890s - 1960s.
• Whaley, Derek R. Santa Cruz Trains: Railroads of the Santa Cruz Mountains. Santa Cruz, CA, 2015.

Geo-Coordinates & Access Rights:
Because the layout of the Santa Cruz freight yard has changed considerably over the past 145 years, the location of the older lumber spurs are not immediately apparent or certain. Most sat within the grounds of what is today Depot Park, but the surrounding roads were very different, with neither Washington Street nor Center Street reaching Pacific Avenue. In later years, the lumber yards stretched between Chestnut Street and Front Street, although not all at once. Nothing remains of the lumber yards and most of the land has since been developed into homes and businesses.

Citations & Credits:

• Whaley, Derek R. Santa Cruz Trains: Railroads of the Santa Cruz Mountains. Santa Cruz, CA, 2015.

There was a time once when Santa Cruz had two rival city railroad depots. On either side of Cherry Street outside the mouth of the Mission Hill tunnel, the South Pacific Coast Railroad built its main Santa Cruz depot directly across the road from the Santa Cruz Railroad's depot. At the time, it seemed like a good idea. The Santa Cruz Railroad had gotten there first back in 1875, before the Santa Cruz & Felton Railroad had even finalized the location of its planned bore through Mission Hill. With few freight customers in Santa Cruz due to the Steamship Wharf, the Santa Cruz Railroad felt it only needed enough space in the city for a turntable, a small yard for its rolling stock, and an area where the company's horsecars could cut through on their way to the beach.

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The Santa Cruz Union Depot on April 25, 1942. Photographed by Wilbur C. Whittaker. [Jim Vail – Colorized using DeOldify]

Rather than obstructing the path of the Santa Cruz & Felton, the Santa Cruz & Felton used the St. Charles Hotel downtown as its passenger station and continued its line down Chestnut Street to its own Railroad Wharf, which was linked to the Steamship Wharf with a connection. It soon moved its freight facilities to the area below Blackburn Terrace, between Washington Street and Neary Lagoon. When the South Pacific Coast Railroad took over the line in 1879, it split its Santa Cruz depots. As it began upgrading the freight facilities at the Washington Street location, it installed a new passenger depot below Mission Hill just outside the tunnel portal across from the Santa Cruz Railroad depot. A second Santa Cruz station was also installed at the beach, which served as a freight depot for goods coming in via steamship and as a transfer point for the horsecar line heading to the beach.

The success of the South Pacific Coast Railroad and poor fortune by the Santa Cruz Railroad led the latter to go bankrupt in 1881. Southern Pacific took over the latter that year and standard-gauged the tracks in 1883. Soon afterwards, in 1887, it leased the South Pacific Coast Railway, but standard-gauging was not an economical option at the time due to the complex nature of the line through the mountains. Thus, the city of Santa Cruz had three railroad stations in two locations servicing separate lines of different gauges. Unification of the stations and lines was desperately needed.

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A heavily altered colorized postcard of the Santa Cruz Union Depot, possibly depicting its opening day, 1893.

Public encouragement for unification began in 1888 but plans were not finalized until 1892 when Southern Pacific chose as the site of its Union Depot the junction of Washington Street, Center Street, and Pacific Avenue, essentially the place where the Santa Cruz & Felton Railroad had originally established its city freight yard. Although Southern Pacific had continued to use the turntable, water tower, and engine house there for its narrow-gauge trains, the existing facility was inadequate for the union yard. Fortunately, most of the nearby freight businesses had either shut down or were able to move, so Southern Pacific in coordination with the city government began laying out a formal plan for the area. Washington Street was extended via a slight curve all the way to Pacific Avenue, with Center Street merging into Washington just before the junction. Since most of the freight at the yard was lumber brought in from the San Lorenzo Valley, narrow-gauge spurs were reinstalled to access the two lumber yards at the yard. Chestnut Street was also extended and the local Chinese community moved to its southern end beside Neary Lagoon in order to build the new station and yard.

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Colorized postcard of a narrow-gauge South Pacific Coast Railway train on the dual-gauge tracks beside the Santa Cruz Union Depot, c 1900. Note the standard-gauge boxcars on the left beside the obscured freight depot and the streetcar parked on a track on the far right.

Throughout 1892, nearly all of the trackage at the yard was realigned and all of the existing railroad structures were replaced. Many of the tracks were also converted to triple rails to support both standard-gauge and narrow-gauge trains. Southern Pacific had planned from the time of its acquisition of the South Pacific Coast to standard-gauge the line, but that project was slow through the mountains so retaining the narrow-gauge to the Railroad Wharf remained essential. The original Santa Cruz & Felton narrow-gauge track through the cut of Pacific Avenue to the wharf remained in place as standard-gauge, but nearly every other track had a third rail installed. A new mixed-gauge roundhouse was built near the site of the original, with a water tank, turntable, coal pile, oil tanks, and two oil pump houses installed nearby to support the maintenance of the rolling stock. Smaller structures were added or removed from the yard as needed.

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View of the Santa Cruz freight yard with four separate Suntan Specials parked, late 1930s. Note the long freight depot at the left. [Gene O'Lague Jr. – Colorized using DeOldify]

The most important change at the yard, however, were the additions of purpose built freight and  passenger depots that sat across the tracks from each other. The freight depot essentially replaced the need for the old Santa Cruz Beach station, which was removed at the same time, while the new passenger depot led to the decommissioning of both passenger depots on Cherry Street. The freight depot was a fairly standard Southern Pacific no-frills structure. It was tall and long but not especially wide with a long platform that fronted a track that ran along the west side of the yard. An office for the depot's freight agent was located about midway down the length of the building.

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The Santa Cruz Union Depot, c 1900. Note the passenger cars parked behind the depot—these narrow-gauge cars were on the wharf spur and ready to return over the mountain to San José. [Vernon Sappers – Colorized using DeOldify]

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The Santa Cruz Union Depot in 1912. [Vernon Sappers]

The crowning glory of the Union Depot was the new passenger station. Opened on January 1, 1893, the two-story late Victorian-style building with a double-gabled dormer upstairs was built in a non-standard, Eastlake style that closely resembled the San Luis Obispo depot, which opened the following year. The bottom floor consisted of an office station agent's office situate between two waiting rooms, with a large, single-story baggage room set off on the north side of the building. The station agent and his family lived in the upstairs part of the building. A large chalk board was located between two ticket windows on the track side of the building and the agent was responsible for updating train times each day. Initially, the station also was the receiving point for small parcels and mail, while the station agent doubled as a Western Union telegraph operator. A low concrete platform ran along the side of the tracks outside the station but no outdoor seating was originally available.

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Passengers buying tickets at the Santa Cruz Union Depot's ticket office, 1911. [Colorized using DeOldify]

Santa Cruz County has never supported a successful flour industry, but several attempts have been made over the years. Joseph Majors attempted to grow wheat and refine flour in the 1840s near Scotts Valley but gave up soon afterwards. Frederick A. Hihn also ran a small grain mill out of his shop on Pacific Avenue in the 1850s, but gave up. Over the hill in Los Gatos, the Forbes Mill and its successors tried for years to commercially refine wheat only to experience endless hardship and multiple bankruptcies. Other companies and people attempted to produce commercial-grade flour as well throughout the 1860s and 1870s, but the Central Coast is simply not a profitable grain-growing region. That fact, though, did not stop J. E. Butler of San Mateo from trying.

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The Centennial Flour Mills building on Pacific Avenue in a dilapidated state, late 1880s. Note the piles of lumber indicating that Grover & Company has taken over the mill. [Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History – Colorized using DeOldify]

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Newspaper advertisement for the Centennial Flour Mills, August 10, 1878. [Santa Cruz Weekly Sentinel]

In early 1876, Butler incorporated the Centennial Flour Milling Company, a name chosen in honor of the United States' centennial. Butler hoped to tap the existing grain growers on the North Coast of Santa Cruz County and encourage more elsewhere in the region to join them in order to refine commercial grade grain products for mass market distribution. The towering mill he built in Santa Cruz on Mill Street (later the bottom of Pacific Avenue) was the tallest structure in the city when it opened. In its four stories, it was able to produce flour, bran, corn meal, barley, graham flour, grist, and various other grain products. The land had been purchased directly from the Blackburn Estate and was noted as being the site of an Ohlone food drying place in pre-Spanish times. The mill opened in mid-June 1876 to much excitement.

The mill cost $20,000 to construct and was truly impressive for the time in many ways. Although the building was made of wood, it sat on a solid stone foundation. The machinery was freshly purchased from the Lick Mills in Santa Clara County, which had just replaced its machinery. Grain was stored on the bottom floor alongside the corporate office. The boiler and engine rooms were set off in a two-story lean-to with a smokestack that rose above the hight of the building. The second floor was where the grain was processed into flour via two large grindstones. The top two stories were primarily machinery-oriented, although additional grain was stored on the fourth floor to be fed into the mill. Large chutes ran between floors to allow for the easy movement of grain and products. An external commercial chute was also located on the second floor that could drop bags of product down into waiting wagons. At maximum capacity, the mill could produce 200 barrels of flour per day via a 200 horsepower steam engine.

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Sanborn Fire Insurance map showing the Centennial Flour Mills on Pacific Avenue, 1883. [University of California, Santa Cruz, Digital Collections]

Centennial Flour was one of the first private firms to use the tracks at the Santa Cruz freight yard to export and import goods. Before the mill even opened, the Santa Cruz Weekly Sentinel advertised that the company would connect to both the Santa Cruz & Felton and Santa Cruz Railroads, but a connection was only ever made to the former. A freight spur for the mill was installed around June 9, 1876 and extended from an existing track that connected to the railroad's Pacific Avenue horsecar line (later the Pacific Avenue Street Railroad Company). A large single-story warehouse was erected in July between the main spur and the mill to store unprocessed grain that was sent in from the fields and sacks of processed grain products for shipment via the Railroad Wharf. A triangular platform jutted out from the warehouse beside the company's spur while a long boardwalk beside the spur provided additional space for loading boxcars and also a means to access the mill without walking across dirt and mud, which could contaminate the products in the mill.

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Newspaper advertisement for Bay View Flour Mills, January 28, 1882. [Santa Cruz Weekly Sentinel]

For two years, the Centennial Flour Mills operated without significant interruption and weekly ads appeared in the Sentinel. When it did close for the first time in June 1878, it was to upgrade its machinery and the company continued to advertise until September 14, 1878, when all mention of the company in the newspaper ceased without explanation. Apparently, the mill resumed operating, however, only without advertising since it was noted as closing July 1, 1880, implying it had been running before that time. In August, the mill underwent reconditioning to fix mistakes originally made by the millwright. These improvements cost between $3,000 and $4,000, which was quite high for a small industry that was facing increasing competition via other local mills and cheap grains imported via steamships and the newly-completed South Pacific Coast Railroad's line. The mill reopened in September but was forced to shut down again in January 1881 when Butler had his credit called in by the Santa Cruz Bank. Lacking available funds, he forfeited the mill. In June of that year, Robert Orton nearly leased the property, but in mid-July, it came under the management of Luke Lukes of Dixon. As soon as he took possession, he had a new two-ton fly wheel installed in order to reopen the mill. Lukes ran the company for eighteen months under the name Bay View Flour Mills before being declared insolvent in court on January 10, 1883. By this point, the mill appears to have been not operating for several months and was entering a state of decay.

In November 1883, it was speculated in the Sentinel that Grover & Company, which owned the adjacent lumber yard and mill, were interested in purchasing the entire flour company. They likely took over the property within the next two years since lumber piles are shown scattered throughout the flour mill's yard and the grain warehouse is storing hay in the 1886 Sanborn Fire Insurance map. Somewhat unexpectedly, perhaps, Grover expressed interest in reopening the facility in 1888 as a flour mill, estimating that it could produce fifty sacks of flour per day. Grover leased the mill to J. M. Jordan for this purpose, but these plans appear to have fallen through and by 1892 the facility was undergoing conversion into a new planing mill to replace the aging adjacent mill. The converted planing mill remained in operation for the next fifteen years, initially under Grover, then under Grover, Cunningham & Company. Grover joined in the Santa Cruz Lumber Company joint venture but shortly afterwards went bankrupt, passing all of its possessions to the Santa Cruz Savings & Loans Bank, which entrusted it to the Loma Prieta Lumber Company.

Throughout its years operating as a flour mill, the facility was heavily prepared for fires, which were known to be frequent in the often dry environments inside flour mills. Large water cisterns were installed on each level of the mill and steam pumps could lift water to hoses and a hydrant on all of the levels as well. The Centennial Flour Mills also employed a watchmen to ensure no fires were lighted when the mill was not operating. The watchmen was retained through subsequent managerial changes and one remained employed in the winter of 1904. On February 19, the watchman was settling down for his mid-night lunch when he noticed a flickering light in the second floor of the old flour mill. The Santa Cruz Surf reported:

Not in ten years has Santa Cruz had such an illumination as was to be witnessed this morning between 2 o'clock and daybreak, Broad sheets of flame a hundred feet high reflected against an opaque cloud covered sky, giving light enough to distinguish small objects for miles around. People who viewed the illumination from a distance were at first unable to locate the fire, but the bright relief in which Sunshine Villa, Mr. Bowman's residence, and adjacent places on Beach Hill were thrown soon showed that it was the old Centennial mill and the Loma Prieta Lumber Company's mill and lumber sheds that were on fire.

Within fifteen minutes of the time the alarm sounded there was an acre of flame rising skyward, without a puff of wind to deviate its course.... As a spectacle it was very magnificent.

The fire was so hot that it cracked the windows of buildings that sat along Third Street at the top of Beach Hill. It also destroyed several nearby structures including the old grain warehouse and the long-since-repurposed Grover planing mill that once sat beside the flour mill, although much of the nearby mill's lumber was saved by quick action by employees and the fire department. Old planing mill machinery and tools, custom mouldings, and some high grade lumber were all inside the warehouse when it caught fire, amounting to over 200,000 board feet of lost wood products.

The fire coincided conveniently with Southern Pacific's plans to standard-gauge the Santa Cruz Union Depot yard and shift the freight presence away from Pacific Avenue, which had been largely bypassed when the Union Depot opened in 1893. Nothing of the old Centennial Flour Mills facility survived the fire and the entire Pacific Avenue freight zone lost its remaining rail access shortly afterwards. The Surf noted this as a good thing since the city planned to develop lower Pacific Avenue in the coming years, although this never happened and the lot remained vacant as a lumber yard for two decades. Throughout its three operators, the flour mill repeatedly lost money and proved that Santa Cruz County was not a viable place to produce commercial grade grain products.

Geo-Coordinates & Access Rights:
36.9659N, 122.0252W

The Centennial Flour Mills building was located at 407 Pacific Avenue. The site is now occupied by the Neptune Apartments complex and Sanitary Plumbing & Heating Company, which buildings have occupied the location since 1924. No remnants of the Centennial Flour Mills survives.

Citations & Credits:

• Harrison, Edward Sanford. History of Santa Cruz County, California (1892).
• Samuel Hopkins Willey, "A Historical Paper Relating to Santa Cruz, California: Perpared in Pursuance of the Resolutions of Congress for the National Centennial Celebration, July 4, 1876: At the Request of the Common Council of Santa Cruz" (Printing Department of A.L. Bancroft, 1876).
• Santa Cruz Weekly Sentinel, 1875–1893.
• Santa Cruz Surf, 1904.
• Whaley, Derek R. Santa Cruz Trains: Railroads of the Santa Cruz Mountains. Santa Cruz, CA, 2015.

Parcel services are something that we take for granted today. Before 1918, the United States did not have a consistent, nationwide network of parcel service. Even the United States Post Office did not deal in anything bigger than what could be held in a hand until 1913. For most of the country's history, small, local, independent firms managed parcel shipping, while similarly small, local, independent firms managed receiving and delivery. In Santa Cruz, that service was handled by the Daniels' Transfer Company, which worked with Southern Pacific Railroad, the Pacific Steamship Company, and the various long-haul parcel companies such as American Express and Wells Fargo to ensure that parcels arrived at their destination. Efficiency and supply-line problems prompted by World War I, however, forced the country to move forward. The United States government took control of the country's railroads in 1917 to aid the war effort, and this meant that all railroad contracts with parcel firms were suddenly terminated. A solution had to be found to ensure that parcel delivery could resume.

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The former Railway Express Agency building at Depot Park, 2018.

It was the United States Secretary of the Treasury William G. McAdoo who proposed the idea of a unified railroad parcel company in early 1918. In July, the American Railway Express Agency was founded, taking control of the parcel services of American Express, Wells Fargo, Southern Express, and Adams Express companies. American Express was left largely in control of the new agency since it contributed to 40% of the assets, although not in Santa Cruz County. The United States Railroad Administration remained in control of the country's railroads until March 1920 but did not release its influence over the American Railway Express Agency until March 1929. During these years, the REA expanded service to Chicago, which was not originally included in its range, and also opened an Air Express Division in 1927.

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The American Railway Express Agency office beside the Santa Cruz Union Depot, 1920s. [Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History – Colorized using DeOldify]

When precisely the American Railway Express Agency structure was erected at the Santa Cruz Union Depot yard is unknown, but it was probably built between late 1918 and 1920. It was located directly to the north of the main station building along Washington Street. Where previously people would have had to arrange transportation of parcels by visiting the Daniels' Transfer office or visiting the main downtown post office, instead people could go to the Union Depot, where a station agent would receive parcels and then, after appropriate labeling, store them in the adjacent express warehouse to await shipment. In many ways, it streamlined the process, although Daniels' remained in business as an alternative parcel shipper. The building itself was a high-roofed, single story, wood framed building with a plain, stucco exterior done in a vaguely Spanish revival style. The building measured 30 feet wide and 85 feet long and was probably exposed timber inside.

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The Railway Express Agency warehouse to the left of the Santa Cruz Union Depot, late 1940s. [Tom Hambleton]

In March 1929, the government finally relinquished its influence over the organization and it reincorporated under new terms. The new name became simply Railway Express Agency and, rather than being owned by the pre-war express agencies, was jointly owned by eighty-six railroad companies in direct proportion to the average amount of parcel service they carried along their lines. Attempts by other companies to compete with the REA began as early as 1922 with the San Francisco-based Pioneer Express Company, but Santa Cruz County proved loyal to the REA through World War II, with few local competitors really presenting a challenge.
World War II once again challenged local parcel services and most switched to using trucks for much of their short- and medium-haul trips. REA, in response, moved into the refrigerated goods transfer business via a fleet of refrigerator cars, since trucks were still not quite capable of staying refrigerated for long periods of time. This changed in the mid-1950s and by the end of the decade, even this service was suffering dramatically. REA finally adopted trucks itself in 1959 and began to phase out its fleet of rolling stock. In 1960, the company reincorporated as REA Express, Inc., marking its transition from a principally railroad-based business to all forms of transport. The company continued until 1969, when it was sold to several of its employees. Rail service had dropped by this time to 10% of its entire business and REA itself only constituted 10% of all parcel service transactions in the United States. A series of lawsuits against UPS and the Brotherhood of Railway Workers in the early 1970s led to the final demise of the company due to insolvency. The company went bankrupt in November 1975 and all of its goods were sold at auction.

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Santa Cruz Sentinel notice noting closure of local REA Express office, July 23, 1971.

In 1961, the REA agency in Santa Cruz became the only operating office in Santa Cruz County when the office at Watsonville permanently shut down. A decade later, in July 1971, the office closed and all REA shipments were routed to Salinas, where couriers would have to pick up deliveries and route them to Santa Cruz via truck. In 1973, the building became Washington Square, a boutique clothing showroom and store owned by Tom Cahill. It underwent a significant facelift with arched, covered windows and decorative plants around the building. Cahill died in December 1980 but his business lasted until May 1984, at which point it shut down. The location appears to have remained unoccupied afterwards, although it continued to be used for community functions on an as-needed basis. It survived the earthquake unscathed and became the base for the Homeless Garden Project in 1994, which continued to use the building through 1998.

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Washington Square shortly after opening, July 19, 1973. [Santa Cruz Sentinel]

The Railway Express Agency building survived the fire that engulfed the adjacent Union Depot station on January 5, 1998. It was vacated later in the year and was included in the plans for the transformation of the depot area into Depot Park. By the time that the park opened in March 2005, the former Express Agency building had been upgraded for use as a public hall and restroom facility and remains so today. It received a Blue Plaque noting its historical importance to Santa Cruz County history from the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History on May 5, 2012.

Geo-Coordinates & Access Rights:
36.9468N, 122.0273W
119 Center Street

The former Railway Express office is now the only surviving structure at the Santa Cruz Union Depot grounds. The building itself has been upgraded superficially to have rust orange walls over the stucco façade and the roof has modern shingling. The placement of the windows remain original. The structure was shifted slightly when the park was made but it remains within the vicinity of its original location. The interior of the building has been entirely gutted to create the public hall with no hints left as to its original purpose. The walls have soundproofing along all four walls and florescent lights now shine down from overhead. The building hosts several regular programs including yoga classes and parts of it can be viewed during these times or simply by using the restroom.

Citations & Credits:

• Bender, Henry. "SP San Jose to Santa Cruz (ex-South Pacific Coast Ry.)." Unpublished notes. 2013.
• Santa Cruz Sentinel, 1971–1994.

If the Ocean Shore Railway was a thing of dreams, then its plans for its depot in Santa Cruz was the Emerald City. And it proved just as ephemeral. When the company was incorporated, it did not anticipate the type of opposition it received from the Southern Pacific Railroad. Despite cooperating to a degree in the parallel construction of the Coast Line Railroad (SP) and the Southern Division of the Ocean Shore Railroad from the northern city limits of Santa Cruz to Davenport, no such politeness could be found within the city. Both Southern Pacific and the Cowell Lime Company did their utmost to block the railroad's entry into Santa Cruz and succeeded spectacularly.

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The Ocean Shore Railway's West Cliff Drive shelter overlooking the Southern Pacific Railroad's yard in Santa Cruz, c 1906. [Louis L. Stein, Jr. – Colorized using DeOldify]

When it was incorporated in 1905, the Ocean Shore intended to build an impressive trestle viaduct from the hill above Neary Lagoon across the Southern Pacific tracks, Blackburn Terrace, West Cliff Drive, and Pacific Avenue to eventually reach Cedar Street, where a large freight yard would be located between Center Street and Cedar and from Lincoln Street in the north to the Santa Cruz Union Depot in the south. Fred Swanton captured this visionary idea in the panoramic painting below, published in 1907.

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Enlargement from a panoramic painting of Santa Cruz showing in the center the Ocean Shore Railway's proposed viaduct over the Southern Pacific yard and onto Cedar Street, 1907.

The finishing touch would have been a massive cathedral-like passenger depot on Pacific Avenue. Had it been built where planned, it would have occupied both sides of Cathcart Street on the west side of Pacific Avenue from the University Town Center building to the Catalyst. Chief Engineer J. B. Rogers described the proposed depot to the Santa Cruz Sentinel in November 1907:

"The building will certainly be better than any building now existing in Santa Cruz, I assure you. We desire naturally to make our station the center of the city if possible and to make it a revenue producer. No I can not tell whether it will be a steel structure, stone, brick, or of what material it will be, but I am of the opinion that it will be at least four stories high. That will allow three stories for office purposes above the ground floor, which floor will be used as the station. Yes, the electric trains will run right into this building, on the first floor, and up to Pacific Av. The station waiting rooms, booths, etc., will undoubtedly take up the entire ground floor, so that there will not be a single bit of the Pacific Av. frontage blocked off and rented for business purposes. A large amount of the railroad business will undoubtedly be transacted in the upper stories of the depot building."

The company purchased much of the required land for this project but all of its attempts to cross the Southern Pacific yard were blocked.

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Sketch of the Ocean Shore Railway's right-of-way in Santa Cruz showing the proposed viaduct entry into the city and the planned steamship pier on the waterfront, 1906. [Jack Wagner]

By the end if 1905, the Ocean Shore had erected a temporary 8 foot by 10 foot wood frame shelter on the hill above the Southern Pacific yard immediately adjacent to West Cliff Drive. The purpose of this structure was two-fold. First, it allowed passengers from the Santa Cruz Union Depot to more easily access the Ocean Shore's trains by simply walking up West Cliff Drive and around to the shelter. Second, it provided access to the Santa Cruz Main Beach, which hosted the popular Neptune Casino and Plunge until both burned down in mid-1906. Whether there were plans to keep a permanent shelter at the site or whether it was simply a temporary structure built in the interim while awaiting the construction of the main depot on Pacific Avenue is unknown, although the track beside the shelter was originally intended to continue onto a new steamship wharf between the Cowell Wharf and the Railroad Wharf.

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The first revenue train leaving the Santa Cruz passenger shelter at West Cliff Drive, June 1906. [Randolph Brandt – Colorized using DeOldify]

Beside Bay Street, under which the Ocean Shore's right-of-way passed, the company maintained its passenger agency depot. It was situated at the northeast corner of Laguna Street and Bay Street and it appears in miniature in a single aerial photograph taken in 1906 by George Lawrence. The structure was small and simple, resembling in many ways the cottages used by Fred Swanton's Santa Cruz Beach Cottage & Tent City Corporation. Passengers would purchase tickets for the train here and presumably board either at the West Cliff Drive location or near the freight house located midway between Gharkey and Santa Cruz Streets off Laguna.

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Enlargement of George Lawrence's aerial photograph of Santa Cruz, focusing on the Ocean Shore right-of-way with the small depot beside Bay Street at center-right. Note the Bay Street railroad overpass at far right.

The financial upheavals of the Ocean Shore Railway between the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and  1911 led to the reincorporation of the company was the Ocean Shore Railroad Company. This marked a change in strategy for the company including the abandonment of some of its structures. At Santa Cruz, it meant the cutting back of the line to the small depot on Bay Street with the track beyond that point likely abandoned. All transfers with the Southern Pacific Railroad would now pass through the more even grade at Rapetti/Orby, where the San Vicente Lumber Company maintained its large mill. The end of the line on West Cliff Drive remained mile marker 0.0 but the station had decisively shifted. Stanley Steamer autobuses were brought in to connect the line between Swanton and Tunitas and tickets for this and other services were available at the Bay Street depot.

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Sanborn Fire Insurance map for 1917 showing the Ocean Shore depot over the right-of-way on Bay Street. [University of California, Santa Cruz Digital Collections]

Over the following nine years, passenger service came to a crawl as the Ocean Shore continued to fail to connect its separate lines. Eventually, autobus transportation and the better efficiency of the Southern Pacific trains, which could reach San Francisco directly via two routes, meant that passenger service was simply no longer required. Nonetheless, the Ocean Shore maintained such service throughout the duration of its life as an active railroad. In 1920, the company ceased operating as a railroad and the local track was taken over by the San Vicente Lumber Company, which had no need for passenger depots or shelters. The ultimate fate of the Bay Street depot is unknown but it was likely moved and converted into a home as such was the fate of many such structures.

Geo-Coordinates & Access Rights:
Beach Shelter: 150 West Cliff Drive, 36.9629N, 122.0257W
Santa Cruz Station: 221 Bay Street, 36.9606N, 122.0284W
Santa Cruz Passenger Terminal (?): 512 Laguna Street, 36.9592N, 122.0290W

The site of the passenger shelter is now occupied by the Westcliff Townhomes on West Cliff Drive, just before the truss bridge over the railroad tracks. The shelter would have been on the bluff just behind the buildings, which is now occupied by gardens. The passenger depot on Bay Street is either gone or heavily modified into the private residence that now occupies the site. The likely site of the passenger terminal further north along Laguna has certainly been replaced with a new building if there ever had been a building there to begin with. Curiously, the homes on 512 and 520 Laguna are oriented toward the right-of-way rather than the road even though the buildings appear to have been built in the 1960s.

Citations & Credits:

• Bender, Henry E., Jr. "Ocean Shore Railroad." Unpublished, 2017.
• Hamman, Rick. California Central Coast Railways. Second edition. Santa Cruz: Otter B Books, 2002.
• Hunter, Chris. Images of Rail: Ocean Shore Railroad. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2004.
• Nanney, Duncan. Personal correspondence.
• Nurkse, Peter. Personal correspondence.
• Wagner, Jack R. The Last Whistle: Ocean Shore Railroad. Berkeley, CA: Howell-North Books, 1974.

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A Pacific Avenue Street Railroad horsecar passing the company's horse stables on Pacific Avenue, late 1880s. [Bill Wulf – colorized using DeOldify]

Competition for properties around the Lower Plaza was fierce so Pierce wisely decided to move the stables to the south. Local streetcar historian Charles McCaleb situated the new stables on Cathcart Street, but they were actually located at the corner of Sycamore and Pacific Avenue closer to the beach and at the extreme fringe of the Santa Cruz freight yard.

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Annotated Sanborn Fire Insurance map showing the Pacific Avenue Street Railroad horsecar stables and barn at the corner of Sycamore and Pacific Avenue, 1886, with speculative trackage. [University of California, Santa Cruz, Digital Collections]

Locating the company's stables near the freight zone actually made a lot of sense. Since the line began as a part of the Santa Cruz & Felton Railroad's main route, a track already passed through the backlot of the Olive & Foster lumber yard beside Pacific Avenue, meaning that easements for the land already existed. Although the arrangement of the tracks can't be known with complete certainty, it seems that a siding from the main track passed through the car house where three or four cars could be locked up at night, while another two or three spurs broke off to head into the stables, where the horsecar line's horses, hay, and vehicles in need of repair would be stored and cared after. The track likely unified again behind the stables and then passed into Olive & Foster's yard.

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A Santa Cruz Electric Railway streetcar passing the former horsecar stables on Pacific Avenue, 1895. [Preston Sawyer – colorized using DeOldify]

Pierce ran the horsecar company until May 18, 1887, when he sold to a group led by E. J. Swift. Unfortunately, Swift died in 1889 just as the company was planning an expansion and the company struggled over the next few years to find its footing again. In 1891, a rival company, the Santa Cruz, Garfield Park, and Capitola Electric Railway, was founded with the intention to build an electric streetcar line throughout the West Side. This quickly expanded to the Lower Plaza—the Pacific Avenue Street Railroad's domain. With few other options, the old horsecar line gave up its franchise on August 6, 1892 and was taken over by the new electric line. A new company, the Santa Cruz Electric Railway, was formed on August 23, 1892. By the end of March 1893, the entire line was upgraded and appended to the electric streetcar system and the old carbarn and stables on Sycamore and Pacific were abandoned in favor of the company's preexisting facilities elsewhere.

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Another Santa Cruz Electric Railway streetcar near the old horsecar stables, c 1900. [Harold van Gorder – colorized using DeOldify]

Photographs from the mid- to late-1890s still show the old horsecar barns abandoned on Sycamore Street with no new trackage turning toward them, suggesting they were long out of use. The erection of a fence behind the carbarn further gives evidence of their lack of use during this time. Meanwhile, a new short spur was installed at the Union Depot in mid-1893 to cater to train passengers, suggesting the company maintained no other presence in the area. The consolidation of the various local streetcar companies under the Union Traction Company in October 1904 finally prompted the rebuilding and massive expansion of the former horsecar facilities on Sycamore Street.

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The new Union Traction carbarn on Sycamore and Pacific showing a streetcar and repair vehicle in two bays and the passenger waiting area and office at the corner, 1905. [Randolph Brandt – colorized using DeOldify]

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Annotated Sanborn Fire Insurance map showing the Union Traction Company carbarn and passenger depot at the corner of Sycamore and Pacific Avenue, 1917, with speculative trackage. [University of California, Santa Cruz, Digital Collections]

The new structure was erected in early 1905. The 1917 Sanborn Fire Insurance map shows in detail the arrangement of the carbarn. Situated parallel to Pacific Avenue, it originally had six long bays for parking streetcars overnight. Cars entered from a short line along Sycamore Street. In the first few years, the barns doubled as a repair shop and had one-foot-thick concrete walls, four fire hydrants (one on each corner), a 400-foot-long fire hose, and a 500 volt motor room. Outside the house, to the west, were a small oil house and a transformer house beside presumably two spurs.

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The engine room in the Union Traction Company's carbarn on Pacific Avenue, 1907. [Bill Wulf – colorized using DeOldify]

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Carpenters working in the extension to the Union Traction carbarn on Sycamore Street, 1908. [Bill Wulf – colorized using DeOldify]

These were enveloped following the 1906 earthquake, which collapsed a wall of the barn, by an extension that included a paint shop, mechanics shop, woodworking shop, and blacksmith shop, with the two spurs remaining at the far end of the facility and continuing out back. On the Pacific Avenue side of the carbarn, Union Traction established its primary Santa Cruz passenger depot and corporate office. It included a waiting room, office, storage area, and dressing room for staff.

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The Union Traction car stop at the Union Depot (right), 1907. [Randolph Brandt – colorized using DeOldify]

After a brief few months under the control of the Ocean Shore Railroad, Union Traction was bought by the Coast Counties Power Company, a PG&E subsidiary, in July 1906 and began its recovery from the earthquake. The carbarn was expanded in March 1907 to allow for the local construction of streetcars. At the same time, the tracks were upgraded to standard gauge and the single narrow-gauge track down Pacific Avenue was replaced by two standard-gauge tracks. Meanwhile, the carbarn lost its status as a passenger depot when a brand new Mission Revival-style passenger depot was built at the corner of Pacific Avenue and Center Street directly across from the Southern Pacific's Union Depot in 1907. This provided much closer access for arriving passengers and eliminated the need for passengers to take wagons or buses to the depot on Sycamore.

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The Union Traction carbarn on Pacific Avenue following upgrades, 1907. [Randolph Brandt – colorized using DeOldify]

For the next nineteen years, the carbarn and Union Depot stops remained in daily use ferrying cars and passengers across the county. But the advent of the automobile and its spread throughout the 1910s led to the abandonment in the early 1920s of branches to Laveaga and Capitola. By April 1925, Union Traction was prepared to throw in the towel but it was not until August that permission was granted for the franchise to wrap up in downtown Santa Cruz. On January 14, 1926, the last schedule streetcar ran down Pacific Avenue, almost exactly fifty years after the Pacific Avenue Street Railroad Company was founded. The carbarn was sold in early 1927, possibly to be used by the Auto Transit Company for storing and maintaining buses. It later became a Chevrolet car dealership lot. The fate of the Union Depot car stop is not known but it was gone by 1977 at the latest.

Geo-Coordinates & Access Rights:
36,9671N, 122.0246W
555 Pacific Avenue

The site of the Union Traction Company carbarn is now occupied by a mixed residential-commercial complex at the corner of Pacific Avenue and Sycamore Street. Meanwhile, the Union Depot streetcar depot is approximately in the location of the Homeless Garden Project store beside Depot Park. No remnant of the former streetcar line survives.

Citations & Credits:

• McCaleb, Charles S. Surf, Sand & Streetcars: A Mobile History of Santa Cruz, California. Santa Cruz, CA: Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, 2005.

The Mexican government had been out of power in California for fourteen years by the time that the first proposals for a railroad in Santa Cruz County began circulating in the Pacific Sentinel around 1860. The royal Spanish government that preceded it had been replaced nearly forty years before. And earlier still, the Native American Awaswas people once dominated the region from the Pajaro Valley to Point Año Nuevo. So why does the legacy of the Native American period and the Spanish and Mexican occupation of the Californias hang so heavily over local railroading history? Well, it's all in the names.

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The Castro Adobé and surrounding livestock paddocks on Rancho San Andrés, originally owned by José Joaquín Castro. [Friends of Santa Cruz State Parks – Colorized using DeOldify]

Before California was forcibly colonized in the eighteenth century by Spanish conquistadors and Franciscan missionaries afraid of Russian and British encroachment on their claimed territory from the north, the land was peopled by diverse Native American tribes who lived along the coast and up river and creek valleys throughout the future state. The area of Santa Cruz County, which initially stretched north of Pescadero, was not an especially populous region. Remote, windswept, geographically separated from the interior by heavily-forested steep mountains with roaming grizzly bears and mountain lions, it was not the kindest environment for year-round settlement. Most of the Ohlonean tribes, especially the Awaswas who dominated the northern side of Monterey Bay, stuck close to the coast where the environment was less dangerous and there was adequate land for hunting, fishing, and minor agricultural activities, as well as establishing year-round villages.

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Sketch of Ohlone dancers at Mission San José, 1800s, by Wilhelm Gottlief Tilesius von Tilenau. [Bancroft Library]

Living on the coast, however, made the Awaswas vulnerable to seaborn invaders. Although the Spanish were the first to explore the coast, the Russians were likely the first to directly interact with the people as they hunted seal and otter down the California coast in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Spanish, however, were the first to establish permanent settlements within the Awaswas domain. In the 1760s, the Spanish Empire sent out a settlement party led by the explorer Gaspar de Portolà i Rovira and the Franciscan father superior of the Californias, Junípero Serra y Ferrer. Following the establishment of several principal missions along the coast between San Diego and San Francisco, Portolà set to work founding secondary missions as waypoints for travelers and as places to gather potential native converts (neophytes). Juan Crespí, another priest, established the location for a mission in the heart of Awaswas territory on October 17, 1769, but it was not until August 28, 1791 that a physical mission dedicated to the Exaltation of the Holy Cross was consecrated on the west bank of the San Lorenzo River. Following several floods, the mission was moved above the floodplain and reconsecrated atop Mission Hill in 1794.

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Painting of Mission Santa Cruz. [Romero Institute]

The Spanish presence in the area prompted a quick and deadly decline for the Awaswas people. Before the mission at Santa Cruz was established, many Awaswas peoples were taken to Mission Carmel or further afield to Santa Clara and San Francisco. Mission Santa Cruz completed the job by gathering all the remaining Native Americans together at the mission, where the population was decimated by disease, violence, and malnutrition. Nearly all of the Awaswas people of the region were dead or had fled to distant communities by the beginning of the Mexican period in 1822, leaving the county almost entirely in European hands.

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The Branciforte Adobé, last surviving structure of the former pueblo Branciforte, 1902. [Edna Kimbro – Friends of Santa Cruz State Parks – Colorized using DeOldify]

In 1797, a new type of community was organized across the San Lorenzo River from Mission Santa Cruz. The Spanish government, wishing to reward loyal but aging soldiers while protecting its sparsely settled frontier, began granting large properties to its veterans. Initially, these were small farms centered at el Pueblo de Branciforte on the bluff on the east side of the river. While elsewhere in California the government began granting larger tracts for cattle ranches, the settlers in Branciforte had to content themselves with the small parcels they were given, with their meager wealth supplemented frequently with raids into mission lands and illegal seizures of unallocated land elsewhere in the region. Over the subsequent thirty-six years, the small settlements facing each other across the river vied for political power, control over resources, and physical possession of land and the tiny remnant of native peoples. These people of European or mestizo descent, as well as similar peoples elsewhere in the Californias, became the first Californios.

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Sketch of Rancho Zayante, 1840s, from Vischer's Pictorial of California.

Within a few decades, Santa Cruz-area Californios had staked claims across the coast but lacked official recognition for their lands. For three of these properties, they adopted names from the Awaswas such as Zayante, Soquel, and Aptos. These names have since lived on, reminders of an earlier age mostly forgotten. As land grants were legitimized by first the Mexican and later the American governments, the names were transferred into documentary history, obtaining a formality and historical quality that has ensured their survival. Thus, when the early narrow-gauge railroads first passed through the ranchos that had adopted these names in the 1870s, they in turn gave the names to railroad stations along their lines:

• Zayante (named after Rancho Zayante and Zayante Creek) became a remote hilltop station of the South Pacific Coast Railroad above Zayante Creek north of Felton
• Soquel (named after Rancho Soquel and Soquel Creek) was the original name given by the Santa Cruz Railroad to Capitola station when the station still sat on the west side of the Soquel Creek railroad bridge
• Aptos (named after Rancho Aptos and Aptos Creek) sat between the County Road (Soquel Drive) and the Santa Cruz Railroad's tracks in the town still named after it.

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Diseño of Rancho San Vicente on the North Coast of Santa Cruz County. [Bancroft Library]

Unlike the Spanish, the Mexican government granted land in perpetuity, which the United States government later upheld in many instances. Grantees were given one year to cultivate the land, either through agriculture or through industry, and were required to build a home upon the land in which they were required to live for that first year. Lacking the machinery to easily cut redwood timber, most of the early rancho homes in Santa Cruz, as elsewhere throughout the state, were made of adobe. It was also required to define their boundaries before either the Mexican government or, later, the American government would accept the grants. José Bolcoff, a Russian settler and husband to another member of the Castro family, served as Santa Cruz's surveyor during the 1830s and 1840s. It was he who mapped many of the boundaries for the roughly two dozen recognized ranchos that soon spread across the county from the coast to the peaks of the Santa Cruz Mountains.

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Map showing the comparative sizes and compositions of Mexican ranchos in Santa Cruz County. [Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History]

A total of twenty-three ranchos were located in Santa Cruz County at the time of statehood, the northernmost being Rancho San Gregorio, which later became part of San Mateo County, and the southernmost Rancho Bolsa del Pajaro. With the exception of the three ranchos mentioned above, the names of these properties were evenly split between Spanish descriptions of places and the names of saints upon whose feast day the place was discovered or christened. Almost as soon as the land was surveyed, grantees began leasing and subdividing their lands between tenants and new owners. This process reached a peak shortly after the United States annexation of Alta California, so that by the time that the railroads first arrived in the county, little of the land was still owned by the original families of the grantees.

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Excerpt of a 1918 United States Geologic Survey map of the middle portion of Santa Cruz County. [University of California, Santa Cruz, Digital Collections]

Railroad companies borrowed names from their surroundings regularly when founding stations, and such was the case with those that operated within Santa Cruz County. The names of ranchos, the rights to some of which were still going through the courts and the names still in common discussion within the county, provided a convenient source for station names:

• Los Gatos, now a substantial town north of Santa Cruz in Santa Clara County, was originally derived from Rancho Rinconada de los Gatos
• Pajaro and Vega, along the Southern Pacific Railroad's Coast Division mainline just across the Pajaro River from Watsonville in Monterey County, were named after Rancho Vega del Río del Pájaro
• Aromas, split between Monterey and San Benito Counties and just across the Pajaro River from Chittenden, was named after Rancho Las Aromitas y Agua Caliente
• Laguna, later Nuga, was either named generally for the nearby sloughs or specifically after Rancho Laguna de las Calabesas, which was located nearby outside of Watsonville but never confirmed as a legitimate grant by the US government
• San Andreas, the original named of Ellicott station, was named after Joaquín Castro's Rancho San Andrés, now La Selva Beach
• Rincon, above the San Lorenzo River and now a popular mountain bike gathering point, was named after Rancho de la Cañada del Rincón en el Río San Lorenzo
• Laguna Creek (Southern Pacific) and Lagos (Ocean Shore Railroad) on the North Coast were named after Rancho Arroyo de la Laguna

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Molino on the Loma Prieta Branch, 1890s. [Aptos Museum]

Spanish words were frequently adopted by the railroads to describe new stations where other established terms were not available or already in use elsewhere. Along the Loma Prieta Branch alone was Molino, Loma Prieta, and Monte Vista, more than half of its official station names. Meanwhile, on Los Gatos Creek was Alma, Oleoso, and Eva, while the tracks south of Gilroy included Carnadero and Nema. However, Spanish names based on common words did not become commonplace within the San Lorenzo Valley, with only Siesta as an example, nor along the Santa Cruz Branch, where can be found only Manresa, named after the similarly-named city in Spain and birthplace of Saint Ignatius of Loyola. But in both these latter cases, the names were selected for specific marketing reasons, Siesta as Fred Swanton's mountain retreat, and Manresa as a Jesuit seaside resort.

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Painting of an idealized Awaswas village along Aptos Creek by Ann Thiermann. [Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History]

The Ohlone, Spanish, and Mexican periods still hang heavily upon the Central Coast of California, and the early railroads borrowed from that heritage when establishing its many stops throughout Santa Cruz County and its immediate surroundings. While some of the places such as Soquel, Aptos, Zayante, Pajaro, Aromas, and Los Gatos still survive today as places, others like Loma Prieta, Rincon, or San Andreas have mostly fallen away, lost to the wilderness or to suburban sprawl. But many of the names still survive on maps, as the names of businesses and streets, and in the memories of people who came before and wrote down their recollections for future generations. The railroading history of Santa Cruz County is rich, and a large portion of that is due to the peoples that came before it.

Citations & Credits:

• Clark, Donald T. Santa Cruz County Place Names: A Geographical Dictionary. Second edition. Scotts Valley, CA: Kestrel Press, 2002.
• Powell, Ronald G. The Tragedy of Martina Castro. The Secret History of Santa Cruz County I. Santa Cruz, CA: Zayante Publishing, forthcoming.
• Whaley, Derek R. Santa Cruz Trains: Railroads of the Santa Cruz Mountains. Second edition. Santa Cruz, CA: Zayante Publishing, forthcoming.

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Charles B. Gifford's painting of a Bird's Eye View of Santa Cruz, c. 1873. Note the relatively continuous hillside along the waterfront, with only a dip to allow for Pacific Avenue to cut through to the beach. [Bancroft Library]

William F. Blackburn of Harpers Ferry, (West) Virginia, was one of the most important Americans in Santa Cruz when the territory was annexed to the United States from México in 1848. He moved onto Isaac Graham's Ranch Zayante in 1845, where he worked for the season making shingles. After the season ended, Blackburn relocated to Santa Cruz and opened a general store and hostelry in one of the old adobé structures at Mission Santa Cruz. During and immediately after the Mexican-American War, he was appointed  alcalde (mayor-judge) of Branciforte by the military governor of California three times, although often alongside other prominent locals including William Anderson, Adna Hecox, and Joseph Majors. During the war, he also briefly served in General Frémont's battalion and afterwards attempted to strike gold in the Sierra Nevada. Following statehood in 1850, he served as a justice of the peace and ran for the judgeship of Santa Cruz, in which role he served from 1851 to 1854. He later was elected to the California State Assembly in 1857.

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Lithograph of William Blackburn from James Guinn's History of the State of California, 1903.

Members of Blackburn's family joined William in Santa Cruz in the 1850s, namely his brothers, Jacob Alt and James Hanson, who were instrumental in the introduction of apples to the Pajaro Valley. William himself settled in a stately home with a view of the ocean at the western end of Beach Hill, between Neary Lagoon and the Davis & Jordan Wharf. As payment for his role as alcalde, he had been given a grant of land in 1847 that stretched from Laurel Street to the ocean, with Pacific Avenue to the east and Bay Street to the west marking its other boundaries. With the help of another brother, Daniel Drew, William planted potatoes across Beach Hill and the flats beneath it near the lagoon. The income from these potatoes provided for Blackburn's income for the remainder of his life. In his final years, he later replaced the potatoes with apple orchards, visible also in the painting above, following the lead of his brothers in Watsonville. Elsewhere, the Blackburn family were responsible for building the sawmill in Blackburn Gulch along Branciforte Creek and later developing that area for housing.

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A stump from redwood logging operations in Blackburn Gulch. [Santa Cruz Public Libraries – Colorized using DeOldify]

As a brief aside, Neary lagoon along the northwest edge of the Blackburn property was originally the route of the San Lorenzo River at the time when the Spanish first settled in the area in the 1790s. The river, so long levied now, once meandered between the two ends of Beach Hill, shifting restlessly as one end silted up forcing it to transition to its other outlet. Indeed, even after California became a state, nearly all of the land immediately north of Beach Hill was unusable for almost two decades due to the intemperate nature of the river, which would sometimes flood the entire area between the lagoon and Beach Flats. In its early days, the body of water went by Laguna de la Playa (Beach Lagoon), and later Blackburn Lagoon. Irish immigrants James and Martin Neary purchased a section of land beside the lagoon from the Blackburns in 1862 and used it primarily for dairying and some minor agricultural pursuits. The Neary family continued to own it until 1962, when Alice M. Neary sold the property.

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Pastel painting 3025 Neary Lagoon Santa Cruz City Park, Tule Marsh in Fall, October, by Ann Thiermann.

While William Blackburn is certainly important in understanding the history of Blackburn Terrace, his wife was the key player in the conversion of the west end of Beach Hill into an isolated bluff. Blackburn married Harriet M. Meade in 1859, only a year after she had arrived in California with her father. The couple had one son together who died as a toddler in 1864. William later died on March 25, 1867 in San Francisco and was buried at Evergreen Cemetery in Santa Cruz. Harriet then became mistress of the estate and continued to oversee the property well into the twentieth century. She never remarried but rather became a prominent widow in Santa Cruz society, helping lead the Ladies' Aid Society and becoming involved in several other local charities.

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The Santa Cruz Main Beach, showing from left the S. J. Lunch house, the Blackburn house, the Sea Beach Hotel, the Douglas House, the Neptune Baths, the Miller-Leibbrandt Plunge, and the Kittridge house, c 1900. [Santa Cruz Public Libraries – Colorized using DeOldify]

Harriet had less interest in her late husband's property, however, and immediately began selling lots to interested parties, even moving out of her old house and into a smaller cabin located nearby. Much of the lower flats were sold to Frederick A. Hihn, who plotted out a housing subdivision that never took off. Hihn decided to keep the apple orchard intact until his Santa Cruz Railroad scheme in 1874 finally found a different use for some of the land. Hihn, on behalf of the Santa Cruz Railroad, also acquired an easement through Blackburn's property alongside the Neary Lagoon outlet to the Monterey Bay so that the railroad could cross into the Lower Plaza and then down Chestnut Street. By using the outlet's existing channel through the marine terrace, the railroad avoided the need for a substantial cut and instead only required a minor cut through the western side of Beach Hill.

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The West Cliff Drive bridge over the Southern Pacific tracks with the Magic Carpet Motel at right on Blackburn Terrace, 1977. [Santa Cruz Public Libraries – Colorized using DeOldify]

The only real casualty of this was the Bay Street viaduct, which originally crossed over the outlet and then wrapped around the front of Beach Hill from the top of the West Side terrace and on down the backside of Beach Hill over a natural low point in the hill. With this viaduct removed, access between West Side and the Lower Plaza was only possible further to the north down California Street. About a decade later, a Howe truss bridge was installed over the railroad tracks, once more establishing a crossing at the waterfront, but the route from Beach Hill down to the Lower Plaza first underwent a more drastic transformation.

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Colorized lithograph of the Santa Cruz beachfront, circa 1882, showing Blackburn Terrace at center-left with the South Pacific Coast Railroad's beach station overly prominent to its right.

The Santa Cruz & Felton Railroad came late on the scene in Santa Cruz. Desirous of a wharf at the Main Beach, the company was blocked from reaching the Monterey Bay via the lagoon outlet due to the presence of the Santa Cruz Railroad. The railroad, therefore, was forced to find some other means of reaching the beach. The existing Gharkey's Wharf at the end of Main Street was slightly too far to the east to be usable and was also reaching its end of life. Therefore, the best solution was to build a new wharf beside it to the west, with a connecting wharf that could expand railroad access to it briefly while the new wharf was built. But the trouble remained: how to get the tracks to the other side of Beach Hill?

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Property boundary map showing the newly-built routes of the Santa Cruz Railroad and Santa Cruz & Felton Railroads through Harriet Blackburn's land, 1877. [Santa Cruz GIS & Historical Maps]

The solution was brutal but effective. Buying land from Harriet Blackburn on the extreme east side of her property along Pacific Avenue where the marine terrace dipped low, the Santa Cruz & Felton Railroad blasted Beach Hill down to the same level as the Lower Plaza, thereby creating a deep cut that permanently isolated Blackburn's land from the rest of the bluff. The cut was also substantial. Using Chinese laborers, the railroad made the cut wide enough for two railroad tracks—one for the mainline to the wharf and one for a horsecar line to the beach—as well as a service road. Pacific Avenue, meanwhile, continued over the hill following its former path, exiting just across from the new wharf.

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Sanborn Fire Insurance map showing Blackburn Terrace, lower Pacific Avenue, and the Bay Street bridge, 1888. [University of California, Santa Cruz, Digital Collections]

When the new bridge over the lagoon outlet was built in the 1880s, the road down from the bridge to Pacific Avenue remained dangerously steep and could only be used by horses and unladen wagons. Around 1920, Mayor Arthur Adelbert Taylor finally convinced the county to purchase another part of Blackburn Terrace for use as a viaduct that gradually descends along the Pacific Avenue side of the terrace until reaching the Lower Plaza near the Southern Pacific Union Depot. In later years, this stretch of road was realigned and became an extension of West Cliff Drive, with Bay Street becoming the new road down to the foot of the Municipal Wharf beside the Dream Inn.

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Subdivision map for Blackburn Terrace showing property boundaries and the proposed lots within the property, c. 1889. Note that Chestnut "Avenue" conceptually shared the Santa Cruz Railroad's right-of-way beside the Nearys Lagoon outlet. [Santa Cruz GIS & Historical Maps]

The remnant Blackburn land, now on a hill sandwiched between two railroad lines and Bay Street (West Cliff Drive from the 1940s), began its long second life. In 1889, Harriet subdivided her property as Blackburn Terrace, the first official use of the name, but the subdivision sold poorly. Only two homes were built there in the 1890s and another in the 1910s. The largest of the buildings was a vacation house named Concha del Mar, owned by San Francisco attorney John R. Jarboe and his wife, author Mary Halsey Thomas, pen name Thomas H. Brainerd. While Harriet hoped to sell the lots for vacation homes, by the 1910s most of the properties that sold were to the families of Italian fishermen who worked on the old Railroad Wharf and, later, the Municipal Wharf. The nearby La Baranca neighborhood along Bay Street became an Italian community, but some families also settled on nearby Blackburn Terrace. In 1907, the Ocean Shore Railway briefly planned to erect a massive viaduct across the terrace in order to bypass the Southern Pacific yard but was blocked in its plans.

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Closeup of George Lawrence's Bird's Eye View of Santa Cruz, 1903, with Blackburn Terrace in the center. [Bancroft]

Harriet Blackburn died on October 11, 1920 in Santa Cruz and was buried beside her long-departed husband in Evergreen Cemetery. Her heirs were close relatives and friends who sold the tiny remaining property and divided the money between themselves over a protracted period of time ending in 1943. With the final disposition of the estate, the remaining Blackburn property was finally sold off and subdivided for use by the railroad, the city, hotels, private residences, and various businesses. By the late 1920s, the railroad tracks down the cut beside Blackburn Terrace were removed and Pacific Avenue redirected along that path, with the former route up Beach Hill established as an extension of Front Street.

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Concha del Mar on Blackburn Terrace, 1896. [The Sidewalk Companion to Santa Cruz Architecture – colorized using DeOldify]

Development of Blackburn Terrace remained slow into the 1950s. Eventually several more homes as well as a hotel were built atop the terrace. The Concha del Mar remained an informal motel until 1966 when it was expanded to become the Magic Carpet Motor Lodge. This was replaced in 1996 with a Ramada Inn, which is now a Howard Johnson. The legacy of the Blackburn family survives primarily through a few roads named after the family, notably Blackburn Street within William and Harriet's old property, and Blackburn Terrace itself.

Citations & Credits:

• Clark, Donald A. Santa Cruz County Place Names: A Geographical Dictionary. Second edition. Scotts Valley, CA: Kestrel Press, 2002.
• Guinn, James Miller. History of the State of California and Biographical Record of Santa Cruz, San Benito, Monterey, and San Luis Obispo Counties. Chicago: Chapman Publishing, 1903.
• Harrison, Edward S. History of Santa Cruz County, California. San Francisco: Pacific Press Publishing, 1892.
• Santa Cruz Evening News, 1923.
• Santa Cruz Sentinel, 1943.
• Steen, Judith, ed. The Sidewalk Companion to Santa Cruz Architecture. Third edition. Santa Cruz, CA: Museum of Art & History, 2005.
• Stevens, Stanley D. "The Alcaldes of Branciforte-Santa Cruz (1802–1850)." Santa Cruz Public Libraries Local History. 2006.

Histories often overlook obvious facts in favor of the sensational or exciting. When the South Pacific Coast Railroad first reached Santa Cruz in 1880, its trains stopped at the luxurious, if cramped, depot at the corner of Cherry and Rincon Streets just outside of downtown. But the tracks continued on to the freight yard and Railroad Wharf, and at the foot of that wharf was the railroad's actual terminus: the small and mostly forgotten Santa Cruz Beach Station.

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The Santa Cruz waterfront at the foot of the Railroad Wharf, c 1909, showing the foundation for the Union Ice Company ice house in the center foreground at the site of the Santa Cruz Beach station. [Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History – Colorized using DeOldify]

The Santa Cruz & Felton Railroad had set the precedent for this station through its erection of a substantial lime, grain, and all purpose freight warehouse between its tracks and Pacific Avenue at the western end of Second Street. The primary purpose of this structure was to store freight while awaiting the arrival of steamships to the Steamship and Railroad Wharves, which were connected in 1877 via a curved wharf. The lime stored in the warehouse was from the various lime kilns in Felton, namely H. T. Holmes & Company on Bull Creek and the IXL Lime Company on Fall Creek. The grain was likely from the nearby Centennial Flour mill and perhaps smaller mills along the coast. As with all of the Santa Cruz & Felton infrastructure, this warehouse did not support or interact with the nearby Santa Cruz Railroad, the tracks of which passed in front of it on their way to the Park Street depot.

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Various men standing around the foot of the Railroad Wharf with a Santa Cruz & Felton passenger car and horsecar in the background, and the local saloon at left where the Sea Foam Hotel would later be built. [Harold Van Gorder Collection, Santa Cruz MAH – Colorized using DeOldify]

Since the Santa Cruz & Felton Railroad did not formally cater to passengers, it had no need for a passenger depot either downtown or at the beach. In fact, the area near the foot of the Railroad Wharf at this time was almost entirely industrial. The Pacific Steamship Company's local office was just across the street from the warehouse while a saloon catering primarily to sailors and railroad workers was accessed simply by crossing the railroad tracks across from the wharf. All of the beach amenities were located further east where the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk is located today.

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Sanborn Fire Insurance map showing the location of the South Pacific Coast Railroad's Beach Station across from the Railroad Wharf, 1892. [University of California, Santa Cruz, Special Collections]

For the area immediately near the wharf, the arrival of the South Pacific Coast Railroad in 1880 heralded a conversion of the entire beachfront to a resort area. The company established at the foot of the Railroad Wharf, which it expanded and improved, its southern terminal station. Branded Santa Cruz Beach on timetables, both due to its location and to assist in marketing, the depot was a mid-sized structure that hosted a freight house on one side and a ticket office, waiting room, and baggage closet on the other side. Outhouses were located out back beneath the Bay Street bridge. Its location was strategically convenient: it sat directly between the Santa Cruz Railroad and South Pacific Coast Railroad tracks, both lines of which also supported horsecars at the time. It also was at the foot of the wharf, meaning any steamship passengers could easily access the depot. And it was directly south of the junction of Bay Street and Pacific Avenue, the two main vehicular arteries on the beach.

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Artistic rendering of the waterfront in 1880 showing the Santa Cruz & Felton Railroad's warehouse at center-left and an extremely simple Santa Cruz Beach Station at the foot of the Railroad Wharf (middle-left wharf).

But convenient location was not enough for the South Pacific Coast—it felt that the beachfront also needed a desperate facelift. In 1882, it removed the Steamship Wharf and its connection to the Railroad Wharf, thereby opening the Santa Cruz Main Beach to a much wider panoramic view of the Monterey Bay. From this point forward, the beach scene changed quickly. Almost immediately, several new hotels appeared across Beach Hill while several older hotels were expanded and improved. Most of these businesses changed their names to reflect ocean themes, such as Sea Beach Hotel, Ocean View House, Seaside Home, and Sunshine Villa. Several new bathhouses also opened up to the east, prompting the Sea Beach Hotel to tripled in size by early 1892. At the foot of the wharf, Joseph Kinney level his former industrial lot in order to erect the Sea Foam Hotel (later the Hotel St. James), which proved to be a popular lodging for sailors and low budget vacationers.

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George R. Lawrence's Birdseye View of Santa Cruz with a closeup on the foot of the Railroad Wharf, showing a streetcar passing in front of the Hotel St. James and the Union Ice Company ice house, 1906. [Bancroft Library]

As with all things, though, the Santa Cruz Beach station met its end in 1893. With the opening of the Santa Cruz Union Depot that year, the Southern Pacific Railroad clearly felt that it no longer required a separate station at the beach. When precisely the freight warehouse and depot were removed is unknown, but the Beach Station disappeared from timetables immediately and both structures were gone no later than 1905, when the next Sanborn Fire Insurance map was produced. All that remained was a Union Ice Company ice house beside the tracks, likely catering to local fishermen. This was removed around 1908.

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Postcard of the Chamber of Commerce Park at the former location of Santa Cruz Beach station, 1910. [James Long – Colorized using DeOldify]

In 1910, Andrew Carnegie, who had previously donated funds for a city library, visited Santa Cruz. In preparation, the Santa Cruz County Chamber of Commerce redeveloped the site of Santa Cruz Beach station into the Chamber of Commerce Park in an effort to beautify the waterfront. The group installed concrete sidewalks and pathways and planted trees, shrubs, and flowers. It also erected a small pergola, visible in the postcard above, and a public toilet beside Bay Street. The park remained in place into the 1920s when it eventually was replaced with a service station that doubled as a shop for local surfers. By the late 1960s, it had become an overflow parking lot for the wharf.

Geo-Coordinates & Access Rights:
36.9633N, 122.0246W

The site of the Santa Cruz Beach station is now occupied by the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary Discovery Center on Pacific Avenue across from Front Street. With the exception of the single track that still passes beside the center, no remnant of the former South Pacific Beach station remains.

Citations & Credits:

• Santa Cruz County Chamber of Commerce, "Santa Cruz County Chamber History." 2013.
• Whaley, Derek R. Santa Cruz Trains: Railroads of the Santa Cruz Mountains. Santa Cruz, CA, 2015.

The history of the Henry Cowell Lime & Cement Company on the Santa Cruz Main Beach begins before California statehood. In 1849, early American settler Elihu Anthony erected a potato chute at the top of Bay Street in order to get his crops to passing ships quickly without the need for boats that had to fight heavy waves off the beach to get to waiting ships offshore. In the end, the chute was still impractical since the waves at the bottom of what would become Steamer Lane (named after the steamships that would later dock there) were often too violent. As a result, Anthony decided to expand the chute into a pier by making it longer and wider. The chute had been a steep decent to the bottom and the new pier was no different, but Anthony made this work. Anthony's business partner, Edward S. Penfield, built a large warehouse at the top of the pier to store goods awaiting shipment.

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The Cowell Wharf at the end of Bay Street with the Railroad Wharf visible through the pilings, c 1890s. [Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History – Colorized using DeOldify]

A great and permanent change overtook the pier around late 1853 when Isaac E. Davis and Albion P. Jordon began using it to ship lime products to market. Earlier that year, Davis and Jordan had opened a large limestone quarry at the top of Bay Street and the convenient location of the pier at the bottom of Bay Street could not be ignored. By January 1854, the partners had purchased the pier and warehouse for $7,000. When they paid off the mortgage on the properties the next year, they began expanding rapidly. They spent $20,000 reconstructing the pier into a substantially longer wharf that could serve not just as a shipping point but as the primary public wharf in the city. They hoped to ship most of the goods produced in the region from the wharf, and also hoped to attract passenger traffic. The final structure was 600 feet long with redwood piles sheathed in copper. In 1857, Davis and Jordan expanded it another 400 feet to support larger ships.

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Lithograph of the Davis and Cowell Wharf at the end of Bay Street with a ship docked at its base, c 1870. Gharkey Wharf in the foreground with cattle grazing nearby. [Vischer's Miscellaneous Views]

It was inevitable that competition would arrive to challenge Davis and Jordan's dominance of the bayshore and it came in May 1857 when David Gharky erected a second thousand-foot wharf at the end of Main Street. Within months of completion it was shipping the lime of rival companies as well as lumber and other local products. It also began receiving passengers. Davis and Jordan gained one important customer in 1864, however: the California Powder Works. The company had moved onto a site on Davis and Jordan's land in Rancho Rincon along the San Lorenzo River and Jordan became an investor in the powder-making scheme. The Powder Works began using Penfield's old warehouse on Bay Street as a powder magazine and used the wharf to send and receive shipments of goods.

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A ship docked at the bottom of the Cowell Wharf with barrels of lime being hauled onto the ship, c 1900. [Santa Cruz MAH – Colorized using DeOldify]

Everything changed in the summer of 1865, though. Henry Cowell purchased Jordan's share of the lime company and immediately started a power play within the firm and in Santa Cruz politics in general. This led to a rift with the Powder Works, which purchased Gharky's wharf in late 1865 and ceased using the limeworks' wharf. Cowell fought back by attempting to buy land across the foreshore and Santa Cruz beach, as well as lots on the coastal terrace in order to stop the Powder Works from expanding its shipping operations outward. Over the next decade, the Cowell Wharf, as it became to be known, evolved into the major West Side shipping point but lost much of its other revenue sources, while the Powder Works Wharf became popular with smaller freight concerns and gained the patronage of the Pacific Coast Steamship Company, which earned it an alternative name: the Steamship Wharf.

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View of the Santa Cruz Beach showing the Cowell Wharf in the foreground, followed by the Railroad Wharf, connecting wharf, and Powder Works Wharf, c 1880. [Bratton Online – Colorized using DeOldify]

With the addition of the Railroad Wharf in late 1875, the Cowell Wharf became increasingly dedicated to just lime shipments. At the top of the wharf, the old warehouse had evolved into a massive 50 feet by 275 feet structure that kept barrels of lime dry while awaiting shipment out. A tramway from the warehouse to the bottom of the wharf was installed and its cars could hold sixteen barrels each. They went down the wharf via a gravity system with a man on each car controlling the brake. They were returned to the warehouse via horsepower. Barrels were loaded onto ships via slings held aloft by overhead booms.

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Cowell Wharf with its large warehouse on the cliff at the end of Bay Street beside the Railroad Wharf, 1906. Excerpt from George R. Lawrence's Bird's Eye View of Santa Cruz. [Santa Cruz MAH – Colorized using DeOldify]]

The completion of the Santa Cruz Railroad in 1876 and, more importantly, the arrival of the South Pacific Coast Railroad in 1880 marked the decline of coastal shipping in the city. For most of the local freight concerns, it was cheaper, more efficient, and safer to ship via rail. Cowell continued to use the wharf, however, into the early 1900s when a series of storms led to the wharf's dismantling. In late 1907, a storm knocked out the center section of the wharf. Cowell repaired this but further storms in 1908 ensured it could no longer function and Cowell switched entirely to shipping via rail. Most of the remains of the wharf were removed in 1914, with a single truncated pile lasting into the 1950s.

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The remains of the Cowell Wharf following the storm of 1907 with the Railroad Wharf and Sea Beach Hotel visible in the distance. [Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History – Colorized using DeOldify]

With the transition to exclusively rail transport beginning as early as the mid-1880s, it is perhaps not surprising that a railroad spur was eventually installed for Cowell's operations on the coast. Indeed, Ernest Cowell, the president of the company, had been advocating for such a spur since at least 1904 and possibly many years earlier, but Southern Pacific had been hesitant. In 1905, duelling tracks were installed through the West Side by the Ocean Shore Railway and the Coast Line Railroad, a Southern Pacific subsidiary. While the Coast Line only wanted to reach the new cement plant at Davenport, the Ocean Shore had a grander vision of a line that would run between Santa Cruz and San Francisco along the coast.

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Santa Cruz Harbor and Vicinity survey map showing the Cowell spur of the Southern Pacific Railroad blocking further progress by the Ocean Shore Railway at the beach, 1910. [U.S. Coast & Geodetic Survey]

Part of the Ocean Shore's plan included building a substantial railroad wharf on the Santa Cruz waterfront between the Cowell Wharf and the Southern Pacific Railroad's wharf. Indeed, as one of its first constructions in Santa Cruz County, the Ocean Shore had run a track around the bluff above the Southern Pacific's Union Depot yard with the track ending just beside Bay Street (now West Cliff Drive), where it had to stop pending permission to cross the road and an easement through Cowell's land. Had it been realized, the wharf the company planned to build would have likely replaced the rapidly deteriorating Cowell Wharf and provided Cowell's lime company with an alternative to using Southern Pacific. But Southern Pacific realized this and quickly ensured that no such wharf would ever be built.

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The crossroads at the bottom of Pacific Avenue from the porch of the Hotel St. James, showing the Cowell spur with boxcars at right (the truncated tip of the Cowell Wharf is just visible beyond it) and the Railroad Wharf at left, c 1909. [Ken Lorenzen – Colorized using DeOldify]

Only a week after incorporation, the Ocean Shore filed a condemnation suit against the Henry Cowell Lime Company on June 23, 1905 in order to gain access to the bay through the company's land. But Southern Pacific replied in force by sending out a team of fifty workmen to install a short spur through its land at the base of the Railroad Wharf and then up around the coastal bluff onto the Cowell company's land. The Sentinel quite rightly jumped to the conclusion that the sole reason for this spur was to cut off the Ocean Shore's access to the bay, but Ernest Cowell denied these claims and stated that it was he who requested the spur in order to replace his unused station at Rincon. He added that he had never considered selling the waterfront land to the Ocean Shore, hence the latter's condemnation suit. Regardless of the truth of the matter, it gave the Cowell company a direct connection to Southern Pacific trackage on the coast. The Cowell company almost immediately began using the spur to load barrels of lime into waiting boxcars that parked there and to unload barrels of oil. The company installed two 1500 barrel oil tanks beside the spur in order to support the exchange. George Lawrence's panorama above, taken in early 1906, as well as the photographs above and below show boxcars on the steep spur beside the Railroad Wharf.

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Same view as above taken from the bottom of Bay Street, c 1909. [Ken Lorenzen – Colorized using DeOldify]

Precisely how long this spur survived is unknown but it is last mentioned in the Santa Cruz Evening News in August 1918. By that point, the Ocean Shore Railroad's dreams for a coastal line to San Francisco were almost entirely abandoned and the company limped on until late 1920 when a worker strike led to the railroad's effective dissolution. The land where the wharf and spur had once stood remained largely empty for decades until they were purchased for the erection of the Dream Inn hotel. The adjacent beach, meanwhile, was eventually gifted to the city in 1954.

Geo-Coordinates & Access Rights:
36.9621N, 122.0243W

The location of Cowell Wharf was just across from the end of Bay Street between the Dream Inn and Sea & Sand Inn. The last piling was removed many decades ago and nothing now remains of the wharf or the warehouse at the top of the cliff. The spur's location is now occupied by the lower portion of the Dream Inn on the beach as well as its loading zone, the Cowell's Beach Main Parking Lot, and the Pacific Avenue–Beach Street–Bay Street roundabout. Again, nothing remains except vague boundary lines visible on property maps.

Citations & Credits:

• Perry, Frank, Barry Brown, Rick Hyman, and Stanley D. Stevens. "Notes on the History of Wharves at Santa Cruz, California." June 2012.
• Perry, Frank A., Robert W. Piwarzyk, Michael D. Luther, Alverda Orlando, Allan Molho, and Sierra L. Perry. Lime Kiln Legacies: The History of the Lime Industry in Santa Cruz County. Santa Cruz, CA: Museum of Art & History, 2007.
• Whaley, Derek R. Santa Cruz Trains: Railroads of the Santa Cruz Mountains. Santa Cruz, CA, 2015.

The Santa Cruz Main Beach has hosted a total of six piers—all but one erroneously called wharves—since California statehood, and four of them functioned in some capacity as a railroad wharf, although only two were purpose-built as such. Behind many of these structures was an ill-fated dream that Santa Cruz would become one of the primary seaports on the Pacific Coast. The idea was not entirely far-fetched. Santa Cruz was located on the less exposed side of the Monterey Bay, with the strong currents striking Monterey but largely missing Santa Cruz. But the protection was slight and the owners of each pier realized quickly that the current was too strong, the tide too extreme, and the swells too high to safely convert Santa Cruz into a major seaport. Nevertheless, the people of Santa Cruz tried time and again to accomplish the improbable.

The settlement of Wright's Station was one of the most remote in Santa Clara County, but more distant still was a tiny hamlet at the confluence of Austrian Gulch into Los Gatos Creek colloquially named Germantown. This little village of German and Austrian refugees from the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871 never throve and barely survived for almost seventy years.

The 1.9 miles of trackage between the eastern portal of the Mission Hill tunnel and the bridge over the San Lorenzo River saw much change of the decades. The first track through this area was probably set in early 1875 by the Santa Cruz & Felton Railroad and since that time the section has undergone five distinct phases in development, each demonstrating its own unique characteristics.

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A Southern Pacific excursion train on Chestnut Street with the remnants of the second track recently paved over at left, c 1950s. Photography by L. L. Bonney. [Jim Vail – Colorized using DeOldify]

The first phase was the brief period from 1876 to 1883 when the city hosted two narrow-gauge railroads and all of its horsecar lines were owned by or derived from those two lines. The Santa Cruz & Felton Railroad maintained a track initially down Pacific Avenue and, following the completion of its tunnel under Mission Hill in 1876, later down Chestnut Street. Its former Pacific Avenue track was subsequently spun-off as the Pacific Avenue Street Railroad, a horsecar line that ran up Mission Street on one side and ultimately to the San Lorenzo River at the beach on the other. The Santa Cruz & Felton was also responsible for building the Railroad Wharf—it's southern terminus—and a connection to the adjacent Powder Works Wharf, which was soon afterwards demolished in 1882. The railroad supported a small selection of customers north of Beach Hill including the Centennial Flour Mills and Olive & Foster, but otherwise was mostly focused on delivering lumber and lime products from Felton. When the South Pacific Coast Railroad took over the line in 1880, it added a new passenger depot outside the portal of the tunnel and expanded the freight yard beside Neary Lagoon to add more sidings for Grover & Company and later lumber customers. Little else changed for the company until 1893.

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A short South Pacific Coast Railway train outside the Santa Cruz Union Depot, late 1890s. [Harold van Gorder Collection, Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History – Colorized using DeOldify]

The division between the first two phases was really more represented by the other railroad in town, the Santa Cruz Railroad. Completed in 1876, the system began as a narrow-gauge route and operated its own City Railroad horsecar line using its existing trackage between Cherry Street and the bathhouses at the beach. It likely had at least one crossover with the Santa Cruz & Felton near Cherry Street, where the two tracks began their parallel route down Chestnut Street, but there appears to have been little cooperation between the two lines. Focused more on customers further to the east, the Santa Cruz Railroad had no freight customers in the Lower Plaza of Santa Cruz. Fiscal and natural disasters in 1881 led to the railroad's sale to Southern Pacific, which promptly ended the City Railroad and standard-gauged the route to Watsonville.

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Map showing Santa Cruz city trackage, including horsecar lines, c 1892. [Derek R. Whaley]

This prompted the second phase, which lasted 1883 until 1892, where rival gauge track crisscrossed downtown. The South Pacific Coast, which was leased to Southern Pacific in 1887, maintained a narrow-gauge alongside the Pacific Avenue Street Railroad, the East Santa Cruz Horse Railroad, and the Santa Cruz, Garfield Park & Capitola Railroad, while the Santa Cruz Branch of the Southern Pacific had a standard gauge. Two separate passenger depots for the railroads faced each other across Cherry Street and rolling stock could not properly interchange between the tracks, leading to transfers of cargo and the Railroad Wharf becoming dual-gauge. Meanwhile, no standard-gauge traffic could go north of Mission Hill while no narrow-gauge traffic could head east.

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The Santa Cruz Union Depot after the tracks were standardized, 1910s. [M. Jongeneel Collection, Santa Cruz MAH – Colorized using DeOldify]

The opening of the Santa Cruz Union Depot in 1893 inaugurated the third and least known phase. Most of the trackage between the Mission Hill tunnel and the Railroad Wharf were dual-gauged and the old depots opposite Cherry Street both closed and were replaced with a new combined depot at the end of Washington Street beside the old Santa Cruz & Felton freight yard. A few new freight customers moved in including the Santa Cruz Lumber Company, formed from a merger of several other companies, the Loma Prieta Lumber Company, and the Union Ice Company. Meanwhile, the trackage was simplified somewhat with the main track migrating from the Beach Hill cut to the Neary Lagoon outlet.

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Excursion train on the Davenport leg of the wye at Santa Cruz, July 21, 1951. Photograph by Wilbur C. Whittaker. [Jim Vail – Colorized using DeOldify]

During this time, standard-gauge tracks to Davenport via both the Coast Line Railroad—a Southern Pacific subsidiary—and the Ocean Shore Railroad led to the expansion of the maintenance and turning yard to facilitate the addition of a wye and switchback from the Lower Plaza to the marine terrace to the west. A spur was also added at the beach for the Cowell Lime & Cement Company, ostensibly to serve the company but obviously to block the Ocean Shore's ability to build a pier into the Monterey Bay.

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Map showing Santa Cruz city trackage, including streetcar lines, c 1920. [Derek R. Whaley]

When the route reopened in 1909, all of the trackage in Santa Cruz was standard gauge and the entire freight yard around the Union Depot was reorganized, prompting the fourth and longest phase of trackage within the city. From 1904 to 1926, the Union Traction Company held a monopoly on the local streetcar services, standard-gauging, simplifying, and electrifying all of its lines. When the company finally replaced its streetcars with buses, it pulled all of its municipal trackage. Meanwhile, from 1909 to 2003, the layout of the freight yard only changed a little, despite many customers coming and going over the decades and the depot itself closing in 1973.

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A double-headed excursion train on Chestnut Street with the remnants of the second track recently paved over at left, April 25, 1948. Photograph by Wilbur C. Whittaker. [Jim Vail – Colorized using DeOldify]

A few substantial changes occurred, though, including the closure of the Ocean Shore Railway in 1920 followed by its track abandonment three years later, the removal of tracks from the Municipal Wharf in 1931, and the demolition of the turntable and engine house in 1942. The end of scheduled passenger service to Watsonville in 1938 and to San José in 1940, followed later by the end of the Suntan Special in 1959 and all special excursion trains in 1964, also marked an important turning point for the city. Slowly, structures began to disappear, largely due to fire, but the tracks remained down Chestnut Street, there was still siding space for sand hoppers at the depot, and the iconic wye is a fixture even today.

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An excursion train turning onto Beach Street, June 25, 1939. Photograph by Wilbur C. Whittaker. [Jim Vail – Colorized using DeOldify]

The fifth phase of Santa Cruz trackage history began approximately in 1985 when the Santa Cruz Big Trees and Pacific Railway began running tourists between Felton and the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. By this point, only a few freight customers remained at the Santa Cruz yard and most other than the Santa Cruz Portland Cement Company only used the trackage sporadically. A more formal start to this final period came in 2003, seven years after Union Pacific took over the line, when the municipal trackage was completely removed with the exception of the three main tracks to Davenport, Felton, and Watsonville and a single short spur. Freight and the Big Trees train continued to pass through the area but no longer stopped there for any reason except allowing trains to pass.

The Routes Today:
The primary arteries of the routes through the city still exist and can largely be followed legally. The track begins near the junction of Chestnut Street and Green Street just west of downtown and continues down Chestnut Street for nearly a mile. Along the way, a few century-old wigwags still can be found and they continue to operate when a train runs down the street. The dual tracks down Chestnut Street have long since been removed and replaced with a single track down the middle. After crossing Laurel Street to the south, the old freight yard area is entered and can be followed along either of its branches.

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A view down Chestnut Street today, 2020. [Google Streetview]

Nothing substantial remains except the spur and three ends of the wye, although a few foundation blocks and a maintenance area still occupy the former site of the turntable. While there is no trespassing allowed within the yard, a new trail will soon open allowing people to parallel the tracks. The tracks continue under West Cliff Drive to the San Lorenzo River, and this entire area is paralleled with pedestrian footpaths. No remnant of the wharf spur remains. Similarly, the former Ocean Shore right-of-way above the marine terrace to the west has also been built up and is no longer discernible nor should exploration in this area be attempted. All evidence of the former Union Traction Company trackage has long since disappeared.

Citations & Credits:

• Whaley, Derek R. Santa Cruz Trains: Railroads of the Santa Cruz Mountains. Santa Cruz, CA, 2015.

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The Ocean View House towering over Beach Hill, c 1880. [Harold van Gorder, Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History]

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A waterfall below a narrow wooden bridge on Love Creek, c. 1900. [Santa Cruz Public Libraries – colorized using DeOldify]

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County survey map of Love Creek properties and the Love Creek Railroad, c 1887. [Santa Cruz County Records]

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A waterfall on Love Creek, c 1900. [Santa Cruz Public Libraries]

Citations & Credits:

• Hamman, Rick. California Central Coast Railways. Second edition. Santa Cruz, CA: Otter B Books, 2007.
• Pepper, George. Personal correspondence.
• Santa Cruz Sentinel, 1885–1892.
• Santa Cruz Surf, 1885–1892.
• Whaley, Derek R. Santa Cruz Trains: Railroads of the Santa Cruz Mountains. Second edition. Santa Cruz, CA: Zayante Publishing, forthcoming.

The Sanborn Map Company held a near total monopoly of fire insurance maps in the United States from the 1870s through to the 1970s. The maps were used by fire insurance company underwriters to assess the cost of coverage and the risks. As cities grew in size throughout the nineteenth century, it became harder for individual insurance companies to visit places personally to make such assessments, so mapping companies were formed to produce reliable, detailed surveys of risks instead.

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Banner for the 1892 Sanborn-Perris Map Company map for Santa Cruz and Camp Capitola. [Library of Congress]

Most of the Sanborn company's maps were hand-drawn at a scale of 1:600 or 50 feet per inch on 21" by 25" paper. They were also color coded in various ways to differentiate lower risk features (yellow), areas of high interest (red), and areas of extreme risk (teal), as well as sources of water (blue). As the maps became more advanced, other important features were added such as the routes of water mains and electrical lines. The company focused primarily on cities and towns, so many smaller settlements were skipped. That being said, if a specific business was large enough, it would sometimes feature as an addendum to the nearest settlement with a map. As cities and towns grew, the number of maps representing that settlement were expanded with the largest cities encompassing hundreds of pages by the end.

The company was named after Daniel Alfred Sanborn, who began writing fire insurance maps in 1866 in Tennessee. In 1867, he moved to New York City and founded the D. A. Sanborn National Insurance Diagram Bureau and began writing maps for Boston and other towns in New England. Over the next fifty years, Sanborn began buying out all of his competition, culminating in a monopoly of the industry after the last rival was bought out in 1916. By the mid-1920s, the company employed 300 field surveyors and 400 other staff to produce, print, and sell the maps. Yet it was this monopoly that led to the company's ultimate failure. Unable to keep up with demand and charging high prices for its services, Sanborn became the target of government and corporate attempts to rein the company in. The Great Depression did the job for them, though, and survey work dropped by two-thirds. By the 1950s, many insurance companies began bypassing Sanborn using a system called line carding, which had already been used for structures that did not appear on maps. Basically, individual structures each had a card with a summary of its risks, thereby not requiring a map to access it. This combined with improved building codes, construction methods, and fire protection equipment meant that maps were just not needed anymore. The last new map was produced in 1961 and the last updated map in 1977.

Ways of using this source:
Sanborn maps became an imperfect tool for envisioning the past layout of American cities in a poorly-photographed era. As early as the 1960s, historical societies began collecting maps for local history uses and by the 1980s, it became one of the key resources uses in identifying the history of certain areas. And there are good reasons for that! Original Sanborn maps were extraordinarily detailed and contained unique information not easily found elsewhere.

The first step in using these maps is to find the key or index for the year you are researching. Until the 1920s, most of the maps had an Index map as its first page. It would highlight areas of the city with numbers that correspond to pages of the map series. For smaller settlements, the first page also usually contained a portion of the actual map. In later years, a separate index page with the names of settlements and major businesses was included. These would also reflect changes between versions of the map. 

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Excerpt of a Sanborn Map of the lower plaza of Santa Cruz, 1883. [Library of Congress]

Each map had a wide range of features useful to researchers. For example, this 1883 map of Santa Cruz shows most of the major structures in downtown, as well as early street names and even physical dimensions of features such as the widths of lots and streets. Vacant or abandoned buildings are usually marked as such, while homes—marked "dwg" for dwelling—are scattered across the map. The high risk structures in teal include a paint shops, blacksmith shop, carpentry shop, wagon shop, and candyshop. Buildings with fire protection in red include the St. Charles Hotel, the Pacific Ocean House, the Masonic Hall and adjacent public hall, and a dwelling off Mission Street. And sources of water in blue include hydrants on Locus Street, Park Street, Cherry Street, Vine Street, and Pacific Avenue, and an elevated water tower behind the Pacific Ocean House. Large and important businesses have their names on them, as well, providing good reference information for researchers.

Railroad historians benefit from the fact that mainline tracks are included on Sanborn maps and nearly all railroad (but not streetcar) trackage appears on maps prior to 1900. Other railroad-related features such as stations, depots, tunnels, sheds, car and engine houses, turntables, and water towers also appear. In the map above, almost all of the South Pacific Coast Railroad and Southern Pacific Railroad depots on Cherry and Park Streets are shown, and these largely match photographic evidence from the same period. Sanborn maps also often show or suggest businesses that used the railroad. 

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Excerpt of a 1905 Sanborn Map showing the Santa Cruz Union Depot yard, 1905. [Library of Congress]

This map of the Union Depot yard in 1905 shows several customers of the railroad as well as several other important items. Williamson & Garrett had a warehouse at the end of a spur shared by the Standard Oil Company. Beside these was a large lumber yard owned by the Santa Cruz Planning Mill, which had a warehouse just to the south. Another mill was across Washington Street from this while a third was across Chestnut Street, owned by Sinkinson. Although railroad tracks are not showing going to any of these, their location beside the tracks suggests strongly that they used the railroad and, furthermore, increases the likelihood that private railroad spurs catered to them. This is even implied by the platform listed beside the Santa Cruz Planing Mill warehouse on Washington Street. Southern Pacific-owned spurs, such as that catering to Williamson & Garrett, were usually included on maps, but private ones were inconsistently included. 

Other interesting details can also be gleaned from this map. Williamson & Garrett had a 5-foot-deep platform that ran between its warehouse and the spur and it mostly stored lime, cement, and grain feed in the warehouse. Standard Oil kept two oil tank cars on bricks beside the tracks. Sinkinson's mill produced lumber, novelty goods, and shingles, and Sinkinson himself lived on the property. Meanwhile, the Santa Cruz Planing Mill owned several large structures and produced mouldings, sashes, doors, dressed lumber, and standard lumber, and it kept a night watchman on site. The surrounding lumber yard could support approximately 1,000,000 board feet of lumber!

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Layout of streets and railroad rights-of-way derived largely from the 1877 Sanborn Map superimposed atop a modern Google Map. [Derek R. Whaley]

Perhaps the most important feature of Sanborn Maps, however, is that they document change—sometimes substantial—in a community. By comparing several years of maps with later, more modern sources of information, entirely new outlooks on city planning and development can be discovered. The map above was composed by comparing the layout of streets near the Santa Cruz waterfront from 1877 and today. It shows several streets that have been renamed or shifted, and several other streets that did not exist yet in 1877. It also shows the impact of the railroad on the area now known as Blackburn Terrace.

Downsides and problems with this source:
Precision was never a goal of Sanborn maps. The maps often demonstrated a mildly idealized version of a city rather than reality. Roads often did not stick precisely to the outlined alignment and distortions at the edges of the maps were very common, although these usually can only be discovered when they are placed next to other maps or overlaid on a modern map of the same area. Many smaller or insubstantial structures were also left off, as well as streetcar tracks and railroad sidings and spurs (except in the pre-1890 maps). In addition, geographic features were usually not specified unless they presented a risk or were a source of water, which means elevations and other topographical features were left off maps.

Most problematic, though, was the technique of "pasting-up" old maps in order to update them. Until around 1910, almost all maps produced by Sanborn were originals, as in they were redrawn fresh for every new survey. However, the company began cutting corners in the 1910s and instead of producing new maps, updated old maps using pasted-on revisions that hired pasters would apply to maps purchased by people. Often new maps would be created at the same time to cover areas that had substantial changes or had not been surveyed before, but pasted-up maps became the norm from the 1910s onward and this caused a lot of problems for researchers because demolished buildings would often be left on maps and railroad trackage was not altered to reflect changes in alignments. Business names also were not always changed. The end result is that pasted-up maps are not nearly as useful for historians as original maps and must be treated with caution.

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Excerpt of a 1917 Sanborn Map showing the area around the former railroad depots in Santa Cruz. [University of California, Santa Cruz, Legacy Digital Collections]

The map above is a 1905 map that was "pasted-up" for a 1917 update. The useful aspects of the map are the new structures that have been added, including several new buildings on Vine and Division Streets and an ice house and storage shed beside the tracks off Rincon Street. But there are several issues, too. The tracks still show narrow-gauge and broad-gauge because they reflect the trackage before the lines were standardized in 1908. As such, the ice house sits directly atop a track on the map and it is unclear if any track still followed that route at all. The tunnel, too, does not reflect its actual dimensions since it was also enlarged. Another odd aspect of these paste-ups is that building angles are not always applied perfectly, especially when there's nothing adjacent to the paste-up. For example, you can see a corner of Santa Cruz High School in the 1883 map above at the top edge of the map. Its entry stairway is almost perfectly parallel with the page. The angle of the page doesn't change in the 1917 version, but the school is now rotated about 30 degrees in the photograph. Is this a new school? Was the old school rotated? Why was a paste-up required for a building of largely the same dimensions? These types of questions cannot be answered by Sanborn maps.

Local History Resources:
Library of Congress, Sanborn Maps Collection
(https://www.loc.gov/collections/sanborn-maps):
The collection held by the Library of Congress is extensive, full color, and spans much of the country. But due to copyrights, it also doesn't have everything available online so you will have to visit Washington, D.C. to see the whole collection. The good news is that there are many free maps available for download at good resolutions.

The city of Santa Cruz had already been host to two horsecar lines before 1890. One of these—the City Railroad—had gone defunct early on due to poor management and competition with the surviving line, the Pacific Avenue Street Railroad. For a decade, the latter company ruled the local transportation network, but its reach never went beyond the West Side of Santa Cruz, leaving everything east of the San Lorenzo River, which was largely composed of scattered farms and a few village, ripe for expansion. The East Santa Cruz Street Railroad Company heard the call and incorporated on December 12, 1889 to serve the people of Branciforte, Seabright, Live Oak, and Capitola and open those areas to commercial and residential development.

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An East Santa Cruz Street Railroad car on Atlantic Avenue between the beach and Woods Lagoon, 1890s. [University of California, Santa Cruz, Legacy Digital Collections – Colorized using DeOldify]

East Santa Cruz, as the area between downtown and Capitola was called in the late nineteenth century, was a mostly rural area composed of marine terraces bisected by several seasonal creeks—Pilkington, Arana, Leona, Rodeo, and Moran—most of which fed into marshy estuaries: Woods, Schwan, Corcoran, and Moran Lagoons. On the terraces were farms, ranches, and small industries that lined the Southern Pacific Railroad's tracks. The area was not known for its seaside resorts, but the long beach between Arana and Leona Creeks—popularly called Twin Lakes due to the two nearby lagoons—and the beach at the mouth of Rodeo Creek were both chosen by religious groups to serve as summer retreats. Meanwhile, the cove at Seabright, which had briefly been serviced by the City Railroad in the late 1870s, was already in the process of becoming a small camping area by 1890. Despite the low population, many Santa Cruz financiers and property speculators saw spectacular growth potential in East Santa Cruz and hoped that a horsecar line into the heart of the area would bring them favorable returns.

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Financiers of the East Santa Cruz Street Railroad standing in car no. 1 at the end of track on Soquel Avenue and Doyle Street, 1890. [UCSC Legacy Digital Collections – Colorized using DeOldify]

The East Santa Cruz Street Railroad was the brainchild of William Ely, a New York native who became a cattle rancher in Santa Cruz before becoming a major investor in several local enterprises. After hosting several public meetings in mid-1889, Ely convinced enough people to invest in his proposed horsecar line, which received county support on December 3 and city support on December 10. His initial plan was for a route to run from the Lower Plaza of downtown Santa Cruz, up Front Street to Minnesota Avenue (Soquel Avenue), across the San Lorenzo River, and then up Soquel Road (also Soquel Avenue) all the way to Arana Creek. In exchange for permission to build and run this line, he promised to run cars daily over the entire length—about two miles—and to use standard-gauge, flat-rail tracks He was allowed to run the streetcar system using horsepower, mules, electric motors, or even cables, but he chose horses as they were still the most economical at the time.

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East Santa Cruz Street Railroad car no. 2 parked at the end of track with a woman seated in the car, c 1891. [UCSC Legacy Digital Collections – Colorized using DeOldify]

The horsecar line was formally incorporated on December 12 with a capital stock of $20,000 funded by five investors: Ely, Oliver H. Bliss, Isaac L. Thurber, Jackson Sylvar, and William D. Haslam. Ely was open to expanding the list of contributors but not eager and planned to invest more of his own money before soliciting additional help. In truth, Ely wanted to control the company completely and became its chief engineer, construction superintendent, and president. He ordered crossties and bridge components from Cunningham & Company, which was reaching its peak at this time. He had all of the rolling stock built in Santa Cruz by Evan Lukens, who owned a wagon and carriage shop on Park Street. The bridges themselves, including a substantial one over the San Lorenzo River, were erected by the San Francisco Bridge Company. Despite his agreement with the city council, Ely installed narrow-gauge tracks on curved T-rails and the city was left to deal with it. Construction of the line began March 10, 1890 and was completed April 5 except for the river bridge.

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Sanborn insurance map showing the carbarn and stables of the East Santa Cruz Street Railroad at the intersection of Soquel Avenue and Doyle Street, 1892. [Library of Congress]

The East Side horsecar line officially opened on May Day to great crowds and celebrations, with free runs along the line for the entire day. Three cars were ready at this time, one enclosed and two open, and most of the work along the line was completed. A carbarn and stables were built at the eastern terminus at the junction of Soquel Avenue and Doyle Street. Regular service began May 5 with a 5¢ fare from the Lower Plaza to Cayuga Street. Two relatives, William and George Ely, as well as John Soper ran the three cars the first summer. All signs from that summer suggested the horsecar was a success and Ely planned to expand almost immediately.

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The Baptist resort at Twin Lakes beside Schwan Lagoon, 1890s. [UCSC Legacy Digital Collections – Colorized using DeOldify]

On March 3, 1891, Ely petitioned the Board of Supervisors for permission to extend the track from its current eastern terminus to the end of Cayuga Street, clearly as the first step in a planned extension to Seabright Beach and the Baptist resort grounds at Twin Lakes. Hesitantly, the board approved the request so long as the grade down Front Street was flattened and the track to Arana Creek was completed first. The new extension fully realized would continue down Cayuga, turn at Pilkington Lane (Pine Street), and then go to the end of Railroad (Seabright) Avenue, at which point it would turn down Atlantic Avenue and cross Woods Lagoon to terminate at Twin Lakes on a piece of track at the bottom of Central Street (where East Cliff Drive turns towards 7th Avenue). It would prove to be one of the most crooked streetcar lines on the West Coast and the extension encompassed 1.5 miles of additional track. It opened in late August to muted fanfare but was used heavily used and immediately began boosting the value of homes in the vicinity of Seabright and Twin Lakes. The shorter extension to Arana Creek was also completed by late summer.

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The East Santa Cruz Street Railroad's only enclosed car, 1890s. [UCSC Legacy Digital Collections – Colorized using DeOldify]

The East Santa Cruz Street Railroad reached it peak in the summer of 1892. Waiting benches were installed across the line and three more formalized stations were erected at Woods Lagoon, Soquel and Cayuga, and at the Lower Plaza. To alert people that a horsecar was arriving at a stop, bells were affixed to the horses. Even as the Pacific Avenue horsecar line was replaced with an electric streetcar in April 1893, Ely's East Santa Cruz horsecar line continued operating without a hiccup. By 1892, fourteen cars operated across the line, driven by fifteen horses, and revenues were up. Plans were approved for extension tracks to the Oddfellows cemetery on Ocean Street and a route that would cross the mouth of the San Lorenzo River to access the bathhouses. Just as work was set to begin, however, the stock market crashed in February 1893 and the economy stagnated for the next four years. With a lack of investors, Ely was forced to maintain his horsecar network as it was without substantial changes or improvements.

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East Santa Cruz Street Railroad tracks passing in front of the Peters Block near the intersection of Ocean Street and Soquel Avenue, 1890s. [UCSC Legacy Digital Collections – Colorized using DeOldify]

A reprieve came in 1895, though, when Ely obtained permission to replace horsepower along the line with a steam engine, which he named Wm. Ely after himself. It first went into use on July 6 but quickly came to annoy most of the people who lived along the streetcar's route. In November, Ely was forced to reduce the hours that the steam engine operated to only twice daily, once in the morning and once in the evening, and only between Twin Lakes and Soquel Road, at which point horses were required to take passengers into downtown. For all this trouble, Ely had agreed to level and realign the tracks down Front Street and pave the road, a process that was not completed until summer 1897, nearly two years since the steam venture had proved to be a failure. The horsecar line began bleeding money and service to Twin Lakes was reduced to first one roundtrip daily and then none in 1899.

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Two boys playing on a parked East Santa Cruz Street Railroad car, early 1890s. [UCSC Legacy Digital Collections – Colorized using DeOldify]

In 1900, the Board of Supervisors pushed Ely to restore and expand service. After only a year, though, he gave up and put the East Santa Cruz Street Railroad up for public sale. Eager to sell it but also hopeful for its future, Ely offered it at an affordable price in the hope that somebody with money and vision would expand it to De Laveaga Heights and the further along the coast. This hope was realized in August 1902 when a group of local investors purchased the line and shortly reincorporated as the Santa Cruz, Capitola & Watsonville Railway Company with plans to convert the line to electric and extend it further than Ely had ever dreamed. Within months, the old horsecar line was gone and a new era of electrified streetcars in Santa Cruz had begun.

Citations & Credits:

• McCaleb, Charles S. Surf, Sand & Streetcars: A Mobile History of Santa Cruz, CA. Second edition. Santa Cruz, CA: Museum of Art & History, 2005

Some railroads are founded with bold ambitions. Others are a means to an end. The Scott Creek Railway was the latter. By late 1906, the Ocean Shore Railway had reached the south bank of Scott Creek north of Davenport. Ultimately, the railroad would never cross that creek and the history of the main line of the Ocean Shore in Santa Cruz County ends at this relatively barren place with more than twenty miles separating it from the remainder of the line in San Mateo County. But the Ocean Shore was not dead and developments in 1908 ensured that the failing railroad would still serve a purpose in the county, if not what was originally intended.

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Women posing beside the tracks above Little Creek, late 1910s. [Mattei Family Collection, Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History — Colorized using DeOldify]

On May 8, 1908, the San Vicente Lumber Company was formed to harvest thousands of acres of timber located within Rancho San Vicente, which was located at the headwaters of Little and Big Creek above the small hamlet of Swanton. The firm had acquired the land from the estate of Fritz Tischer in January and quickly concluded that the Ocean Shore Railway was the best means of getting the timber to its proposed mill on Moore Creek (now Antonelli Pond). Before even formally incorporating, the company entered negotiations with both the Ocean Shore and Southern Pacific to determine which would provide them with better options in the long term.

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Ocean Shore Railroad train near Swanton with members of the Mattei family, late 1910s.  [Mattei Family Collection, MAH — Colorized using DeOldify]

On June 19, 1908, the Ocean Shore Railway Company amended its articles of incorporation to add an extension track from a point just beyond Scott north of Davenport (today, the vicinity of the Swanton Berry Farm) to the hamlet of Swanton at the bottom of Little Creek. At the same time, a group of men affiliated with the Ocean Shore incorporated the Scott Creek Railway, which was tasked with forging a 2.5-mile-long route up Little Creek to reach the sprawling redwood timber tracts that were located within Rancho San Vicente. The new and unlikely company was capitalized at a modest $50,000 by J. Downey Harvey, John B. Rogers, and Bert Corbet.

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Members of the Mattei family posing beside a San Vicente locomotive at one of the later lumber camps, possibly Camp No. 5, late 1910s. [Mattei Family Collection, MAH — Colorized using DeOldify]

Some owners along the right-of-way, such as Oliver P. Staub, had few qualms and sold the requested land for a right-of-way to the railway. But Timothy Hopkins, a Southern Pacific Railroad investor and partial owner of the Loma Prieta Lumber Company, sued in early July to stop the nascent railway from condemning 30.5 acres of his land near Swanton. The Ocean Shore and Hopkins had been negotiating a right-of-way since early June but had failed to come to an arrangement. As a result, Ocean Shore founded the Scott Creek Railway to handle the liabilities of the resulting lawsuit. Evidence for this is the simple fact that after the lawsuit was settled, the Scott Creek Railway is never mentioned by name again and seems to have been entirely constructed and operated using Ocean Shore equipment and rolling stock from the start.

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Tracks on the Scott Creek Railway above Little Creek, late 1910s. [Mattei Family Collection, MAH — Colorized using DeOldify]

The Scott Creek Railway vs. Timothy Hopkins trial began on October 20, with the majority of local lumber personalities serving as witnesses in support of Hopkins, largely because they too were partially invested in the Loma Prieta Lumber Company and likely feared competition with the San Vicente Lumber Company. The superintendent of the Loma Prieta mill at Swanton argued that a substantial bridge and fill the Scott Creek Railway intended to build across Hopkins' land would make it very difficult to haul timber out of the area. Making little headway with the jury, the entire court visited the proposed right-of-way on November 6 to survey the area. An illness by one of the jurors that same day prompted the case to be dismissed on November 10 and subsequently settled out of court. The settlement involved the purchase by the San Vicente Lumber Company of all of Hopkins' land along Big Creek, Little Creek, and Boyea Creek, a total of 1,100 acres.

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A San Vicente work crew posing at the first switchback above Camp No. 1, c. 1910. [University of California, Santa Cruz, Legacy Digital Collections – Colorized using DeOldify

Although all mention of the railroad disappears from history and newspapers from this point, the railroad itself continued to exist as a wholly subsumed subsidiary of the Ocean Shore Railway. The first report of new trackage to be built by the Ocean Shore came before incorporation—in March 1908—where the proposed length of the track was listed at 7.5 miles, although this seems to have included the branch line to Swanton as well as the track to the Gregory Ranch on the boundary of Rancho San Vicente. A week later, a second notice informed the public that the Ocean Shore would build the track to Swanton itself as a branch line and from there the lumber company would operate using its own rolling stock, including two Shay locomotives, although the reality was a bit more mixed. By April, it was clear that the Ocean Shore intended to build at least some of the route up Little Creek since surveyors for the railroad were actively searching for a viable route.

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Members of the Mattei family at one of the later camps, perhaps Camp No. 5, late 1910s. [Mattei Family Collection, MAH — Colorized using DeOldify]

Around June 15, the Pratchner Company began the task of grading and installing the new track between Scott and Swanton. Over 200 men were employed working on the line, with surveyors and graders already making some inroads along the future route of the Scott Creek Railway line despite the outstanding condemnation suit. Two bridges were planned along the Swanton Branch and more along Little Creek, as well as a switchback just beyond Camp No. 1 at Chandler Creek. On July 1, a special traction locomotive arrived for use by the San Vicente Lumber Company to shuttle logs down the Scott Creek Railway grade for transfer to waiting Ocean Shore trains at Little Creek Junction just south of Swanton, although initially it was used to aid in the construction of the Little Creek line. The route between Scott and Swanton was completed in less than a month, with the final spike driven on July 9. At the same time, over half of the route to the San Vicente timber tract was graded.

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A San Vicente locomotive operating over one of the switchbacks above Camp No. 2, c 1915. [UCSC Legacy Digital Collections – Colorized using DeOldify]

The lumber company wasted no time in using the graded road from its timber tract to Swanton, hauling logs to Santa Cruz where it was cut into crossties, piles, bents, and other materials to construct the remainder of the route. The company likely used a temporary shingle mill at Moore Creek since the actual mill would not be completed until early 1909. Work on the portion of the line through Hopkins' land appears to have stopped until mid-October, when the lawsuit was settled, delaying the opening of the mill until March 1909. By that time, and probably no later than the end of November 1908, the entire Scott Creek Railway line was constructed to Camp No. 2 on the old Gregory Ranch. The Ocean Shore Railway decided at this time that future extensions of the line—and there would be several miles of it—would be the responsibility of the San Vicente Lumber Company.

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A San Vicente log train leaving from above Camp No. 2, c. 1909. [Margaret Koch Collection, MAH – Colorized using DeOldify]

The first load of logs to pass over the Scott Creek Railway and on to the new mill on Moore Creek operated on March 29, 1909. The route included several steep grades, although the steepest grades were reserved for places along the lumber company's private lines. Although the locomotives were designed to operate on steep grades, derailments were common and the first occurred only weeks after the line opened in April. Nonetheless, the Scott Creek Railway endured probably until October 9, 1911, when the Ocean Shore Railway reincorporated as the Ocean Shore Railroad, at which time the little subsidiary was probably either absorbed into its parent or sold to the San Vicente Lumber Company. Regular operations along this stretch of track continued until September 1923, when the area was declared clear of sufficient saleable timber and the mill shut down. The tracks were soon sold for scrap and the right-of-way became a private access road and de facto fire road still in use today.

Citations & Credits:

• Hamman, Rick. California Central Coast Railways. Second edition. Santa Cruz, CA: Otter B Press, 2007.
• Santa Cruz Evening News, 1908-1909.
• Santa Cruz Sentinel, 1908-1909.