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Blog postCalifornia was undergoing a growth period at the turn of the nineteenth century and electric streetcar lines helped spread people further and further out into suburbia. In Santa Cruz, the successful Santa Cruz Electric Railroad meandered through downtown, out to the beach, and up to Mission Hill and the West Side. However, the old East Santa Cruz Railroad, a horsecar line built a decade earlier, still was the only service available to people on the East Side, and no attemp t had yet been made to
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Blog postPhotography has been around for as long as California has been a U.S. state. The first commercial photographs arrived in 1839 under the guidance of Louis Daguerre, and the processes quickly evolved into more streamlined, reproducible, and higher quality images. By the time the first railroad infrastructure was built in Santa Cruz County in 1874, photography had gone mainstream and several studios had popped up throughout the county. While fairly stationary photograph was still required into t
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Blog postSanta Cruz County hosted several private railroad lines that were built economically in order to achieve a specific goal and them promptly disappeared out of memory. History books have afforded these railroads little room and even contemporary photographers found them less than inspiring, leaving a dearth of photographic evidence. Thus, little is known about Frederick A. Hihn's narrow-gauge railroad line that once meandered along the east branch of Valencia Creek except what historians Rick H
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Blog postThe existence of the Ocean Shore Railway in Santa Cruz County was in hindsight such a fleeting thing that it is often forgotten how important the project once was to the county. From anticipated electrification of the entire system to a substantial pier at the Main Beach to a massive viaduct over the Southern Pacific Railroad's yards to extensions of the route north to San Francisco and south to Fresno and beyond, the company had a grand vision and aspirations to something great. And while al
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Blog postWatsonville was not immune from the excitement of the streetcar age nor did it miss an opportunity to undermine Southern Pacific's relative monopoly on rail services around the Monterey Bay. The Pajaro Valley Consolidated Railroad was incorporated in 1889 partially for this purpose, but it quickly failed in its goal and became almost exclusively a freight hauler for the Western Beet Sugar Company owned by Claus Spreckels. A different sort of excitement came with the incorporation of the Santa
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Blog postOn the eastern edge of the Santa Cruz Main Beach, the San Lorenzo River meanders gently, pulsing with the tides as it exits into the Monterey Bay. After the Santa Cruz Railroad incorporated in June 1873, the river would prove to be one of its greatest obstacles. Most of the problem was funding, but the geographic terrain at the river's mouth was always going to be an issue. A large sandbar ends the beach, jutting in between the bending river and the relentless sea. The beach was smaller then
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Blog postThe Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk has a feeling of permanence about it. The towering Mission-revival walls of the Casino mix seamlessly with the rows of columns that flank the beachside colonnade. The immense space within Neptune's Kingdom causes people to stop and ponder, wondering what once was. The eerie circling of the Edwardian-style horses of the Looff Carousel contrasts remarkably with the screaming passengers of the Giant Dipper, although both herald back to an earlier, more innocent tim
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Blog postThere was a time once when the Santa Cruz Main Beach was simply a beach. No wharves or piers marred its scenic views. No buildings stood upon its sand dunes and drifts. No roads or rails crossed its ill-defined shores. And the San Lorenzo River meandered lazily over the flats on its slow march to the Monterey Bay. It was a simpler time. The Spanish colonists and Mexican settlers did little to change this landscape, sticking instead to the interior where they were safe from the exposed coastli
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Blog postOn the evening of April 17, 1906, the Central Coast of California was on the brink of big changes for local railroads. After nearly twenty years, the Southern Pacific Railroad was finally upgrading its narrow-gauge route along the old South Pacific Coast Railway line from Alameda Point to Santa Cruz. Meanwhile, the Loma Prieta Lumber Company's mill in the Hinckley Basin off Soquel Creek had just started up again for a new season and the F. A. Hihn mill at Laurel was revving up for its fifth full
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Blog postThere were two very different breeds of streetcars in Santa Cruz County in the nineteenth century. There were the three old, slow-moving horsecar lines that together meandered from Walnut Avenue on the West Side to Arana Gulch and Twin Lakes on the East Side. And there was chic, new electric streetcar lines, that eventually spanned from West Cliff Drive to Capitola and Delaveaga Park. The electric lines did not emerge out of nothing, though—the first company began as a modest rival to the Pac
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Blog postSanta Cruz County has never been a magnet for politicians. Its remoteness and relatively small population simply makes it too unimportant in the grand scheme of United States and even California politics. For the first thirty years after statehood, no sitting United States president traveled to the West Coast. Ulysses S. Grant had served during the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848 in the state, but he did not become president until 1869. He later returned to the state in 1879 as the first fo
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Blog postThe Pacific Avenue Street Railway had been uninspired and coerced by Santa Cruz politicians into extending its horsecar line up Mission Hill to access Santa Cruz High School and several churches located along Mission Street in 1880. An attempt was made to abandon this unprofitable track in 1883 and later attempts to extend it to West Cliff Drive between 1887 and 1889 stalled due to lack of capital and interest. The potential of the Garfield Park development, popularly known as The Circles due
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Blog postSome 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 w
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Blog postThe 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 ex
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Blog postThe 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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Blog postLogging activity in the Santa Cruz Mountains was on the rise in the 1880s. Redwood mills from south of Felton to north of Boulder Creek and along many of the San Lorenzo River's feeder creeks rapidly expanded following the construction of the San Lorenzo Valley Flume & Transportation Company's v-flume that ran down the valley. It alongside its subsidiary Santa Cruz & Felton Railroad brought millions of board feet of lumber to market via the Railroad and Powder Works Wharves at the Santa
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Blog postAt the turn of the twentieth century, every seaside town on the Pacific Coast had a Victorian-style palatial hotel to lure tourists to the beach. Monterey had the Hotel Del Monte. San Diego had the Hotel del Coronado. Capitola had the Hotel Capitola. And Santa Cruz had the Sea Beach Hotel. For nearly forty years, the hotel grew from a small structure on Main Street on the Santa Cruz Main Beach into one of the most renowned resorts on the Central Coast. Celebrities and politicians from across the
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Blog postThe 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.
A Southern Pacific excursion train on Chestnut Street with the remnants of the second track re -
Blog postThe 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.
A band of German musicians outside a home in Austrian Gulch, 1896.
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Blog postThe 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 curre
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Blog postThe 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 st
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Blog postHistories 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.
The Santa Cruz water -
Blog postThere was a time once when the most direct means of getting from the Lower Plaza of Santa Cruz to the Main Beach was taking the steep road over Beach Hill. Modern Santa Cruzans have taken for granted the fact that it was the Santa Cruz & Felton Railroad that, in 1875, cut through Beach Hill in order to provide railroad access to the waterfront and the new Railroad Wharf it was erecting near the outlet of Neary Lagoon. By so doing, the railroad also cut off a short section of the marine bluff
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Blog postThe 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
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Blog postHorsecars were all the rage in Santa Cruz when the Pacific Avenue Street Railroad Company was incorporated on April 5, 1876 by the management of the Santa Cruz & Felton Railroad. The original route connected with the railroad line near Mora Street north of the city and then continued down River Street, turned down Pacific Avenue in front of the St. Charles Hotel, and then continued down Pacific Avenue to the Railroad Wharf, where it reconnected with the Santa Cruz & Felton line. However,
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