Stations: Brookdale

Few communities in the Santa Cruz Mountains are more shrouded in mystery and confusion than Brookdale. The village began life as Clear Creek, a descriptive name applied to the fast-running mountain stream that runs down the east side of Ben Lomond Mountain until emptying into the San Lorenzo River about a mile south of Boulder Creek. In the 1870s, the flume was constructed through the area, a likely site for several of the more scenic photographs since the structure was situated relatively low to the ground here. In addition, a feeder flume was erected up Clear Creek. It was along this feeder that the first logging activity in the area that would become Brookdale began.

A Southern Pacific train approaching Brookdale with passengers waiting to board, circa 1915. [Courtesy George Pepper – colorized using MyHeritage]

In March 1880, McKoy & Duffey acquired stumpage rights to the Ellsworth tract on Clear Creek. The property itself was likely owned by a lumber combine of Grover & Company and James P. Pierce, who hired itinerant mill crews to harvest timber tracts outside their core domain. Andrew Duffey left the partnership in March 1882 to pursue a new enterprise leaving sole ownership of the mill to Hubbard Wilson McKoy, who closed it in 1883 to take over management of the Central Hotel in Felton. Duffey was not done with the area, though. The Comstock brothers, led by Jared W. Comstock, joined with Edward P. Reed and leased property from Pierce a half mile up Clear Creek in early 1888. They brought Duffey on as a partner in October. Their mill was capable of producing 15,000 board feet of lumber per day. It benefited from the replacement of the flume by the Felton & Pescadero Railroad—though a spur beside Clear Creek is not mentioned in Southern Pacific documents until 1892, it seems likely that it was installed at the same time the mill opened in spring 1889. The Duffey & Comstock partnership only lasted a single season since Jared Comstock died in October 1889.

Survey of Grover & Logan's properties at Clear Creek shortly before the start of development, based on E. D. Perry's August 1894 survey. Reed's Spur (called Reid Switch) features prominently in the top-left quadrant. [Courtesy Santa Cruz County GIS]

Reed’s Spur survived the collapse of Duffey & Comstock and Duffey continued to run the mill there in partnership with Frank W. Simmons until September 1891. In January 1891, Reed purchased the property outright from Pierce’s Ben Lomond Land and Lumber Company and he may have taken over the mill in 1892 following Duffey’s departure. In April 1895, he hired Irvin T. Bloom and Patrick Patton to manage the mill, which ran with a crew of forty men. At the same time, the Grovers began milling lumber at a site further to the north at a bend in the San Lorenzo River. The economic recession in the mid-1890s led to the brief closure of the mill but it reopened in 1897 with a focus on clearing the remaining standing timber in the vicinity of today’s Brookdale Lodge. However, by this time, the area had grown in prominence as a camping and picnic destination, so the company wisely decided to retain the larger trees and hired W. H. Booth to clear the undergrowth, specifically in the area between the river and the County Road along either side of Clear Creek.

Feeder flume over Clear Creek, circa 1884. [Courtesy University of California, Santa Cruz – colorized using MyHeritage]

The Grovers’ decision reflected a fundamental shift in attitude toward the area around Clear Creek. Whereas just a decade earlier, clearcutting marketable timber was the only reason for owning land in the San Lorenzo Valley, the economic turbulence of the 1890s paired with a growing concern that the natural beauty of the valley was being destroyed led several lumber firms to pause operations and reconsider their long-term goals. Much worked in Clear Creek’s favor—high somewhat flat shelves sat on either side of the San Lorenzo River, creating five areas perfect for campgrounds and vacation cottages. Furthermore, the railroad passed directly through all five areas, meaning access would be simple. And the lumber firms had not entirely cleared all of the territory, so towering redwood and fir trees still stood tall. On top of those benefits, the river meandered slowly and eddied in multiple places, creating several ideal locations to erect seasonal dams for fishing, boating, and swimming. The spectacle of the area was captured in early photographs and camping became one of its hallmarks.

View of the San Lorenzo River at Brookdale, circa 1910. [Courtesy ebay – colorized using MyHeritage]

From the late 1880s, groups of Santa Cruz, Oakland, San Francisco, and San José elite gathered together each year at camps strung along the San Lorenzo River. The three-mile stretch between Ben Lomond and Boulder Creek was the most popular destination as it was the least developed and a few old groves of trees had withstood the threat of the axe. Two of the earliest named camps were Camp Thunder and Camp Lightning, led by prominent Santa Cruz families, both established in 1887 about a mile south of Clear Creek. The first major camp on Clear Creek was established in July 1890 as Camp Yelland, named after its most famous attendee, artist Raymond Dabb Yelland. For three summers, Oakland and Santa Cruz elite bivouacked on either side of the creek at the camp. News of camp sites around Clear Creek goes quiet over the following years, possibly because of the activities of the nearby mill. A fire in April 1897 burned part of the mill and lumber yard, as well as much of the remaining timber tract, prompting Bloom & Patton to close the mill. Shortly afterwards, James Harvey Logan took over management of the property for the Grovers and began laying out a formalized campground on Grover Island.

Narrow gauge tracks south of Reed's Spur, May 5, 1901. Photo by Henry King Nourse. [Courtesy California State Library – colorized using MyHeritage]

Having just retired as a superior court judge, Logan shifted roles quickly and was elected an officer of Grover & Company in June 1897 alongside Stephen F. Grover, Lafayette F. Grover, Joseph Schwarts, and H. E. Makinney. He took a personal interest in Clear Creek and erected a country home there in April 1898, from which he could oversee the development of the company’s mountain resort. Over the next three years, Logan and Stephen Grover erected cottages for themselves and their families, using still-living trees to help support the rustic structures. They also sold lots close to the river to Alameda families, who also built cottages, platforms for tents, and other amenities. By 1902, the seasonal community had grown large enough to justify the addition of a post office, which opened in April under the name Brookdale.

The Cascades, James H. Logan's first summer house in Brookdale, circa 1903. [Courtesy Scott Tucker – colorized using MyHeritage]

The unusual name raised some eyebrows. A writer for the Evening Sentinel misread the announcement as “Brookville” and asked: “Why not call it Loganville or Groverville?” The name’s origin, though, has older roots. In 1887, a Camp Brookdale arose in an unspecified location near Boulder Creek—possibly at Clear Creek, which was associated with its neighbor at the time. This camp returned in 1889 before disappearing, possibly to be replaced by Camp Yelland the next year. In 1897, grocer John B. Bias’ Brookdale Cottage appeared on Olive’s Sulphur Springs on a tributary of Soquel Creek, not far from the Grovers’ primary mill. Bias had previously been a business partner with Lafayette Grover, Stephen Grover’s son, in 1892 and the two ran in the same social circles. Ultimately, the name was descriptive, possibly brought over by the Grovers from their home state of Maine, where both “brook” and “dale” were far more common terms than in California. It likely gained increased notoriety, though, due to Brookdale Farm of New Jersey, which was widely publicized in newspapers throughout the 1880s and 1800s as one of the foremost stables for breeding and training racehorses. Thus, contrary to popular belief, the name Brookdale was likely chosen by the Grovers rather than Logan.

A Southern Pacific passenger train at Brookdale Station, circa 1915. [Courtesy Grant Correll – colorized using MyHeritage]

The evolution of the industrial settlement of Clear Creek to the resort destination of Brookdale readily embraced by the railroad. Reed’s Spur first appeared as a flag-stop on employee timetables in April 1902 and was renamed Brookdale in October 1903. A single-story passenger shelter with an agent booth was added shortly afterwards, with a small freight platform installed just to the south. The existence of this platform and a short-lived freight shed suggests that Grover and Logan still anticipated some industrial revenue to derive from Brookdale, at least in the short term. The 239-foot-long spur also remained and was even extended to 400 feet during the standard-gauging of the Boulder Creek Branch in 1908. But retaining this feature can be easily explained since several photographs show passenger cars and excursion trains parked on the spur to keep the branch line clear for regular rail traffic. The station was staffed seasonally, functioning as a scheduled stop from late spring to early autumn and as a flag-stop the rest of the year.

Map of Brookdale, Santa Cruz Co., Cal., published by the Union Litho Company for James H. Logan, 1910. [Courtesy Library of Congress]

Brookdale became a tourism boomtown. Grover Island was sold in late 1902 to Arthur H. Breed, city auditor of Oakland, who renamed it Huckleberry Island and quickly began selling lots to hand-selected friends. Between the County Road and the river, fifteen lots were laid out and four permanent cottages soon erected. On the west side of the County Road, Lafayette Grover enlarged and expanded his summer residence Minnehaha, named after a character in a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, into a boarding house to be run by Augusta “Gussie” Heubeling. And as part of their first promotion drive, Grover and Logan installed electrical lighting, sewage, and telephone services throughout the community. To manage this new resort and oversee property sales, the partners founded the Brookdale Land Company around May 1903, with Logan serving as site manager and Grover keeping the books and managing advertising. They went their separate ways at the end of 1905, leaving Logan in sole charge of Brookdale.

Entrance to The Brookdale, circa 1920. [Courtesy UC Santa Cruz – colorized using MyHeritage]

The same year, The Brookdale opened as the first dedicated hotel in the hamlet. Madame N.M. Du Quoy ran the hotel from 1905 until 1910 on behalf of the Brookdale Land Company. In early 1911, Logan sold most of the remaining undeveloped land in Brookdale to John Dubuis, while he sold his interest in the developed parts of the community to the Santa Cruz Emporium Company, run by William M. Aydelotte, in February, including The Brookdale, the town’s general store, the Chateau, the Cuckoo Cottage, Rose Cottage, Near Spring Cottage, the community dance hall, a stable, and a warehouse. At the same time, Du Quoy bought Logan’s home on Cascade Street—formerly The Cascades and renamed by her Burlwood—and converted it into a new hotel. Logan’s interest in Brookdale should have ended with these sales, but Dubuis defaulted on his payments in early 1912 and Logan petitioned to have the sale rendered void. Instead, Dubuis’ property went up for auction in March and was sold to Theodore A. Bell. By 1914, Bell and Logan must have come to some agreement as both began selling property in the area and Logan began the erection of the two-story commercial building at the corner of Pacific Street, where the general store and post office later relocated.

Brookdale passenger shelter and office with a keg on a handcart outside, circa 1918. [Courtesy George Pepper – colorized using MyHeritage]

Brookdale held steady for the next decade as a vacation spot for travelers wishing to remain within easy reach of the Bay Area. Both trains and automobiles brought visitors to the mountain town, and the village evolved into a seasonal town complete with stores, homes, and amenities. But this also deprived the hamlet of the that made it desirable, namely untamed wilderness and rustic charm. Thus, in 1923, Dr. F. K. Camp of Pasadena purchased the aged Brookdale Hotel and began a comprehensive renovation and expansion. He demolished much of the old resort and in its place built 34 cottages of several rooms each featuring tiled baths, heating, lighting, and private garages. On the County Road, he erected a rustic lobby flanked by redwood columns, walled with creek stones, and heated by a floor-to-ceiling fireplace. Over Clear Creek, he created a sprawling dining room divided across three terraces and intersected by a waterfall and the babbling stream. And opposite the dining room he installed a pair of concrete swimming pools, steam heated and lighted from under water. The Brookdale Mountain Lodge and Redwood Terrace Gardens opened to the public on May 18, 1924 to great fanfare. Over the next several years, Hollywood celebrities visited the hotel and dined at the Brook Room, making the hotel famous on the Central Coast.

Colorized postcard of the Brookdale Lodge's Brook Room, circa 1924. [Courtesy ebay]

By this point, the importance of the railroad to the community had reached its end. The Brookdale Lodge was primarily a destination for automobile drivers cruising the highways of California on a never-ending journey of adventure and discovery. The train was just old fashioned, and every year fewer and fewer people were taking it to Brookdale. Passenger service along the Boulder Creek Branch ended sometime after summer 1930 and never resumed. All public transportation to Brookdale after this point was by Pacific Greyhound buses. When the tracks were removed in the spring of 1934, most residents probably sighed in relief since it meant an end to the occasional freight trains interrupting their rural solitude.

The site of Brookdale Station today, looking southeast down the right-of-way, October 3, 2013. [Photo by Derek R. Whaley]

The station shelter was sold at auction and may have been converted into a cottage. One of the station signs eventually found its way to the San Lorenzo Valley Museum, though it has been shortened on both sides to allow it to fit atop a fireplace mantle. Most of the right-of-way was sold but small sections survive over Clear Creek, on the banks of the San Lorenzo River, and on Huckleberry Island. After weathering the Great Depression, Dr. Camp sold the Brookdale Lodge in 1945 and it soon after passed to Barney Marrow, who owned the Brookdale Inn across the County Road. During Marrow’s years of ownership, the lodge gained an unsavory reputation that stayed with the hotel to the present. The lodge continued to change hands over the decades and suffered substantial fires in 1956, 2005, and 2009, leading to its condemnation in 2011. The Brookdale Lodge is now under the ownership of Pravin and Naina Patel and reopened in July 2025 following many years of extensive renovation work.

Citations & Credits:

• Bender, Henry E., Jr. “SP Boulder Creek Branch (ex-South Pacific Coast Ry.)” [SP22A]. April 2019.
• Chown, Jon. “New Chapter Starts at Brookdale Lodge,” Times Publishing Group Inc. August 4, 2025.
• Gibson, Ross Eric. “Historical Memories Haunt Brookdale.” From San Jose Mercury News, 10/20/1993, 4B.
• San Francisco Chronicle, Santa Cruz Evening News, Evening Sentinel, Morning Sentinel, Sentinel, and Surf, various articles, 1887–1924.
• Southern Pacific Railroad, various material, 1892–1931.
• Whaley, Derek R. Santa Cruz Trains: Railroads of the Santa Cruz Mountains. Santa Cruz, CA: Zayante Publishing, 2015.

Companies: Alpine Lumber Company

The Alpine Lumber Company was the last in a series of lumber ventures in the Santa Cruz Mountains run by Andrew Dallas Duffey. Duffey was born in Canada on December 16, 1842 and arrived in Santa Cruz County in the mid-1870s. Newspaper records from throughout his life show how quickly he became a leader in the Santa Cruz County lumber industry. He first entered the scene on May 19, 1879, when he joined in partnership with Hubbard W. McKoy of Vermont, a former Felton hotelier and merchant who had run a mill alongside Thomas B. Hubbard for the previous three years. Later evidence suggests that Duffey served as mill manager, a role he took several more times over the ensuing decades.

The Harmon mill on Bear Creek, ca 1890, later purchased by the Alpine Lumber Company and used by the Enterprise Lumber Company. [University of California, Santa Cruz, Legacy Digital Collections – colorized using DeOldify]

In April 1880, Duffey became a partner in the short-lived Santa Cruz Lumber Association. The collective was primarily a union of the Grover family, which ran a mill in Soquel, and James W. Peery, who ran a mill in the south side of modern-day Boulder Creek. McKoy & Duffey were clearly minor players in the collective, with the only advantage of their small mill in Felton being its proximity to the South Pacific Coast Railroad line. In any case, the association only lasted a year, dissolving in April 1881. 

Duffey decided on April 8, 1882 to end his partnership with McKoy. The next few years of his life are difficult to follow. It seems likely that he worked as the mill manager for the Olive & Foster mill on Granger Gulch near Felton in 1884. This mill was moved to the headwaters of Laguna Creek in Bonny Doon on land purchased from James P. Pierce in 1885, and then shifted a half mile downstream in 1886. Duffey was certainly the manager that year, which was the last year that Olive & Foster operated.

The precise relationship Duffey had with Jared W. Comstock of Connecticut beginning in 1887 is unclear. At that time, Comstock & Company operated a mill on Hester Creek outside Soquel and Duffey worked for Comstock as a contractor. In October 1888, the two men appeared as equals when they negotiated a deal with Edward P. Reed to open a sawmill in the vicinity of Boulder Creek on the San Lorenzo River. This was Duffey’s first experience in the Boulder Creek milling scene, but it wouldn’t be his last. By the summer of 1889, the mill employed forty men and was cutting 15,000 board feet of lumber per day. However, tragedy struck in October when Comstock died following a sixteen-day illness of typhoid. Duffey set out once more to find a business partner.

In 1890, Duffey joined Frank W. Simmons of Maine in running a lumber mill on Two Bar Creek 3.5 miles north of Boulder Creek and 2 miles up the creek near the present Cougar Rock Road. A reporter for the Surf stated that “the mill is placed directly over the creek bed and though an attempt has been made to cover the stream with slabs in which the saw dust is dumped, yet an immense quantity of saw dust is poured into the water, coloring it as black as ink and poisoning the fish.” This mill had a capacity of 18,000 board feet of lumber per day and was also noted as being on Reed’s property, so it may have previously been the Comstock mill.

Although the Surf reporter noted that the Two Bar Creek mill would run for another year, the Sentinel stated on October 10, 1890 that it would close down and be relocated to a tract owned by Pierce on Love Creek. This new mill two miles to the north of Ben Lomond, which opened in May 1891, was actually not on Love Creek, however. It was located between Fritch Creek and the settlement of Clear Creek (Brookdale), probably near the end of Roberts Road or in the undeveloped Hillary Heights subdivision. It had an increased capacity of 20,000 board feet of lumber per day and the plan was to keep the mill running for three seasons. A boiler explosion on May 18 may have slowed operations, but Duffey and Simmons were able to replace it within days. Nonetheless, the partners shut down the mill permanently after the 1892 season and dismantled the structures and machinery. Duffey stored them in an empty lot in Ben Lomond until he found a new tract to harvest.

That new tract Duffey acquired was back on Laguna Creek (Bonny Doon) on land purchased from Pierce. Indeed, this remote tract on the backside of Ben Lomond Mountain was likely the same property sold by McKoy to Pierce back in January 1882. For this new venture, Duffey partnered with Roscoe Green Longley, a recent immigrant from Maine born in 1836. Longley proved to be Duffey’s longest lasting partner and they remained in business together for seven years. Their mill in Bonny Doon employed sixty men during the three years that it ran along Laguna Creek, and the partners employed the Ryder Brothers to transport the lumber to market.

The Laguna Creek mill closed in December 1894, but Duffey & Longley continued shipping lumber over the winter, only dismantling the mill around June 1895. By July 15, the mill had been moved to a new site 2 miles up Lompico Creek at the confluence of Mill Creek. A reporter for the Evening Sentinel visited the mill in September 1896 and was welcomed by Edwin Roscoe Longley, a son of Roscoe Longley. The reporter revealed that Duffey & Longley employed fifty-six men at the mill and that the mill had a capacity of 25,000 board feet of lumber per day. The mill shipped twelve wagon-loads of lumber per day out from the South Pacific Coast Railway station at Eccles. The Lompico mill only operated for a year and a half, with the machinery and structures dismantled in November 1896 and stored in Felton. 

 

Sanborn Fire Insurance map showing the basic layout of the Duffey & Longley mill on Boulder Creek, 1897. [Library of Congress]

Duffey next venture in 1897 brought him back to Boulder Creek, where he and Longley erected the mill on the Logan tract near the confluence of Boulder and Jamison Creeks, 3 miles west of town. Like the previous mills, the new mill employed around sixty men and had a capacity of 30,000 board feet per day. Cruisers estimated that there was 12,000,000 feet of marketable timber on the tract, enough timber to last four years. Most of the lumber was shipped to the Santa Clara Valley, thereby bypassing the trade war occurring between various lumber companies in Santa Cruz. An average of two to three flatcars of lumber were shipped out of Boulder Creek daily during the milling season. 

 

Jamison Creek, July 1, 1887. [Bancroft Library – colorized using DeOldify]

The mill on Jamison Creek was the longest operating of Duffey’s mills in Santa Cruz County, running from 1897 through 1900. It also was his most successful. Perhaps due to a surplus of lumber, the partners opened a lumberyard in Ben Lomond in September 1898. Strangely, they sold it only two months later to Benjamin Lloyd. In April 1899, the Evening Sentinel announced that a 4-mile-long railroad was going to be built from the mill into the redwoods along Jamison Creek, although no other source mentions this and the total length of the creek is only about 2 miles. It is more likely that this railroad was the proposed route to Big Basin, along which the mill may have been a planned stop. 

A steam donkey on a sled on the fringe of Big Basin, 1901. Photograph by Andrew P. Hill. [Sempervirens Club – colorized using DeOldify]

Duffey and Longley dissolved their partnership on February 8, 1900, before the start of the milling season. The partners had planned to relocate to Mendocino County at the end of the year, but those plans were temporarily shelved. Duffey finished out the year cutting the remaining timber from the Jamison Creek property, as originally planned, although he rebranded his firm the Alpine Lumber Company. His next target, for the 1901 season, was the redwood grove at Big Basin. 

 

Newspaper advertisement for the Enterprise Lumber & Development Company mill on Pacific Avenue and Laurel Street, July 18, 1899.

Longley sold his half interest in Duffey & Longley to a new firm named the Enterprise Lumber & Development Company, which was little more than a front for the Santa Clara Valley Mill & Lumber Company. Enterprise had been founded on June 24, 1899 by Henry L. Middleton, James Dougherty, and three other investors as a holding company for various properties in the vicinity of Big Basin, including Middleton’s own timber tracts and property owned by the Bloom family. The company operated independently for a short time, albeit under the management of Middleton, and ran a lumber yard on Pacific Avenue in Santa Cruz in July and August 1899. Ultimately, the company made an arrangement with the Loma Prieta Lumber Company whereby the latter would run both yards. 

 

The Harmon mill on Bear Creek in its last year operating for the company, 1898. [UCSC Legacy Digital Collections – colorized using DeOldify]

At the end of the 1900 milling season, Alpine and Enterprise continued to work together for a short time. Enterprise established a mill at the headwaters of Scott Creek in the Little Basin, which it harvested for a year, most likely using Duffey’s old mill, which was nearby. At the end of the year, the mill was moved about a mile down Scott Creek to a property purchased from Grover & Company. Duffey was not involved with this operation. In December 1900, Enterprise purchased the former Harmon family estate on Bear Creek east of the town of Boulder Creek. Duffey joined the venture as mill manager, for which reason the place was called the Alpine mill by newspapers. The company hoped to move the mill to a site at the lower end of the property with plans to later relocate the Scott Creek mill to the upper part of the property. In the meantime, Duffy’s old mill continued to operate on Scott Creek under the management of Pryor & Lemieux. 

 

One of Henry Middleton's mills near Big Basin, 1901. Photograph by Andrew P. Hill [Sempervirens Club – colorized using DeOldify]

The partnership between Duffey and Enterprise ended in August 1902, when the Bear Creek tract was logged out. By this point, Enterprise had effectively consolidated into the Big Basin Lumber Company and Duffey wanted to focus more on his mill in Mendocino County. All of the properties of Enterprise were soon folded into the Big Basin firm, which itself became a part of the California Timber Company in April 1903. At the same time, Duffey’s old mill was moved to the top of Waterman Creek, a branch of Pescadero Creek, where it became the first lumber mill to operate for the new lumber company. After its second season, a new mill was constructed on Waterman Creek and the Duffey mill was moved to Newell Creek, where it operated from May to October 1905, when the complex burned down. 

Colorized postcard of the Alpine Lumber Company mill at Duffey near Fort Bragg, 1915. [California State Library]

In February 1902, Duffey’s Alpine Lumber Company purchased stumpage rights to a massive tract of land east of Fort Bragg from the Union Lumber Company. At the time, the Union Lumber Company's California Western Railway & Navigation Company (the Skunk Train) went about ten miles along the Noyo River into the untouched redwood forest. Duffey had the lumber company extend the railroad another eight miles to the bottom of what would become Alpine or Duffey Gulch, where the town of Alpine would quickly develop. Over the years, Alpine hosted a school, post office, hotels, and saloons. A branch line of the railroad was also extended up Alpine Gulch to the logging village of Duffey, where the Alpine Lumber Company’s primary mill was located from 1904 to 1912. The town of Alpine burned down in 1919 and was never rebuilt. Duffey died the same year on June 24 in Fort Bragg, where he was buried.

The Alpine Hotel in Duffey, 1904. [Sonoma County Library – colorized using DeOldify]

Edwin Longley, meanwhile, continued to work for the Enterprise Lumber Company and, after it was taken over, the Big Basin Lumber Company. Shortly after the creation of the California Timber Company, he was assigned manager of the Newell Creek mill until July 1905. After resigning due to poor health, Edwin and his father, Roscoe, tried to turn their home in Boulder Creek into a summer resort named Glendower, but the quickly gave up the idea and offered it to the Oddfellows instead in 1906. Edwin Longley returned to the lumber industry in 1906 when he purchased an interest in the McAbee Timber Company. The McAbee company was renamed the Southern Lumber Company in July 1906, soon after which Longley became general manager, a role that he held for the rest of his life. Andrew Longley died on November 22, 1915 at his home in Boulder Creek. His son, Edwin, lived another decade, dying on April 14, 1926 when he accidentally drove off the road near Brookdale and crashed into the San Lorenzo River. Both men were buried in Guerneville, California.

Citations & Credits:

• Powell, Ronald G. The Reign of the Lumber Barons: Part Two of the History of Rancho Soquel Augmentation. Santa Cruz, CA: Zayante Publishing, 2021.
• Stevens, Stanley D., ed. Great Register of the County of Santa Cruz, California, for 1890. Santa Cruz, CA: SC Public Libraries Local History, 2019.
• Wallen, Robert. A Riders Guide to The Skunk Line: Willits to Ft. Bragg. Robert Wallen Publications, 1986.
• Whaley, Derek R. Santa Cruz Trains: Railroads of the Santa Cruz Mountains. Santa Cruz, CA, 2015.
• Various articles from the Weekly Sentinel, Sentinel, Evening Sentinel, Evening News, Surf, Mountain Echo, Mendocino Coast Beacon, and Bakersfield Morning Echo, 1876–1926.

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• Alpine Lumber Company
• Enterprise Lumber & Development Company

People: Chinese Railroad Crews

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Curiosities: Boulder Creek-Area Resorts

From its earliest years as a community, Boulder Creek and its predecessors—Boulder and Lorenzo—was more of an industrial town than a resort destination. Throughout the five decades that the railroad operated in the community, the driving purpose of the settlement was the lumber industry, and it should come as no surprise that much of the timber in the surrounding hills were logged out, leaving little space or scenery for resorts. Nonetheless, resorts did develop from early on and the town was known to host several hotels throughout these years. Below are just some of the hotels and resorts that operated in the vicinity of Boulder Creek during the period 1884-1934.

Boulder Creek House (1872 – 1933)
The first commercial hotel to open in the vicinity of Boulder Creek was the Boulder Creek House, erected along modern-day Park Avenue near where the public library sits today. The hotel was built by John Alcorn, a native of Indiana who moved to the area in 1865. His wife and a Mrs. Eygler ran the day-to-day operations and the hotel was open year-round, which testifies to its industrial clientele. The Weekly Sentinel stated that the building was "two stories high, with a porch the entire length, from which a flight of stairs leads to the dancing hall above. The lower part is divided into dining room and sleeping apartments, and arrangements for the necessaries and comforts of dwellers and travelers."

Boulder Creek House, c. 1877. Photo by R. E. Wood. [California State University, Chico]

Alcorn soon sold the property to Demicrius Crediford, who turned around and sold it to J. S. Carter in 1874. When the San Lorenzo Valley Flume & Lumber Company was founded the next year, Carter sold the hotel to serve as a boarding house for local lumbermen. It passed to the South Pacific Coast Railroad in 1879 and probably remained under their—as well as Southern Pacific Railroad—ownership for nearly thirty years. Several managers were brought on during this time to handle daily operations, including George Denison (1883), Joseph Ball (1886), Samuel D. Morgan, (1894, who briefly renamed the hotel the Morgan House), and George and Albert Denison (1905). During this time, most of the excess property of the hotel was sold to Winfield Scott Rodgers.

J. M. Fuller's Cash Grocery with the Boulder Creek House in the background, c. 1910.
Photo by Cheney Photo Advertising Company. [WorthPoint]

In 1905, Patrick and Fannie Welch purchased the property and it remained in their family for twenty-eight years. In most years, the Welches personally supervised the hotel, but Helen Jeter was brought on to assist in 1913. After Fannie's death, the hotel passed to her son-in-law, Frank Murphy, who leased it to William D. Alexander. Alexander tried to rebrand the hotel the White House in 1924, but the name never took off. Soon afterwards, he tried again by naming it the Alexander House and he opened an Italian restaurant under the name Alec's Boulder Creek House.  Unfortunately, an explosion in the kitchen in the twilight hours of August 14, 1933, quickly turned into an inferno and consumed the entire building except for a few pieces of furniture.

Lorenzo Hotel (1875 – 1897)
Joseph Peery was an entrepreneur and visionary and wanted to create a small city high up the San Lorenzo Valley. He founded the town of Lorenzo in 1875 and built the San Lorenzo Hotel along the main county road as a part of his plan. The two-story hotel was a rather no-nonsense structure composed of roughly twenty guest rooms and a stable. Management was initially given to the Elliott family, but it later passed to James T. Taylor, owner of the Big Tree Hotel in Felton, in 1880. George M. Day took over in 1882 and began selling wine, liquor, and cigars downstairs, profiting from the alcohol ban in nearby Boulder. Management of the hotel proved unstable over the following years, though. In quick succession, the hotel was run by Taylor (1884), the Hartman Brothers (1885), W. G. Randall (1886), and Samuel Hubbs (1887). Some time over the next decade, H. E. Gardner purchased the property and hired H. H. Morrell to manage it. Little else is known from this decade, though, except that the hotel appeared as a casualty of the April 14, 1897 fire that destroyed most of the commercial block of Lorenzo. The town was soon absorbed into Boulder Creek and the hotel was never rebuilt. The hotel was located on State Route 9 near Mountain Street.

Hartman Hotel (1883 – 1897)
Another early hotel and possibly a spin-off of or companion to the Lorenzo Hotel, the Hartman Hotel was located where the Boulder Creek laundromat now sits. Dan Hartman founded the hotel in 1883 and it was run by himself and his brothers. During its years in existence, it hosted several VIPs including Grover Cleveland, Ulysses S. Grant, and an entire circus troupe. Like its neighbor, the Lorenzo Hotel, the Hartman Hotel burned to the ground on April 14, 1897. Dan Hartman sustained minor injuries escaping the inferno.

Rex Hotel (1884 – 1932)
For being one of the oldest standing buildings in Boulder Creek, surprisingly little is known about the Rex Hotel, largely because it has a confused and conflated history with another hotel that was located two buildings over: the Basham House. The current building called the Basham House has historically always been the Rex Hotel. Established as early as 1884 as a bordello, the hotel did not gain any respectability until the early 1920s after Newton Ernest Raymer took over the building. He ran a barber shop and general store on the first floor while renting rooms upstairs and in the back. But Raymer was no angel. The hotel barely survived Prohibition and Raymer was arrested for illegal possession of liquor on at least two occasions. On February 2, 1932, Raymer shot himself in a drunken rage while attempting to murder his wife. It was not the first violent attack by Raymer, but it was his last. The hotel shut down for several years but was eventually purchased by P. Giacosa in March 1937, who undertook a remodeling of the hotel. But then it disappeared from records once again. It was taken over by the Boulder Club, run by Jack and Frances Gaultier, in 1973 and after several years servicing local workers, it became a popular gathering place for Hell's Angels and other biker gangs. Drunken fights became an almost daily occurrence and the business ran afoul of the Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC) several times. In 1990, the club shut down permanently. Three years later, the building was purchased by Wes Felts, who renovated it into a restaurant and opened in October 1993 as the Basham House, mistaking the building with the earlier structure that had stood two buildings to the north. After only a year in business, Felts put the restaurant up for sale where it languished for over a year. At some point since then, it was purchased and renovated and now serves as the home of the Psychic Temple at 13133 Central Avenue.

The Rex Hotel as it appeared in 1990 while hosting the Boulder Club. [Santa Cruz Sentinel]

South Pacific Hotel (1886)
As soon as the Felton & Pescadero Railroad came to town in 1885, property speculators came in. And one such speculator was J. W. Billings, who in 1886 erected the South Pacific House on Central Avenue, a clear reference to the new railroad's parent, the South Pacific Coast Railroad. Within months of opening, Billings was adding new rooms and upgrading facilities. However, tragedy struck early in the life of this hotel. On July 30, 1886, just months after opening, a fire ravaged the town and severely damaged the hotel, injuring both J. and his wife in the process. Nothing more is mentioned of this hotel after the fire.

Wildwood Home (1886 – 1932)
The Wildwood Home was another hotel that sprang up in the wake of the Felton & Pescadero Railroad's arrival to Boulder Creek in 1885. Situated at the corner of Lomond and Pine Streets, Wildwood Home was built, owned, and managed by Mrs. L. E. Paschall when it first opened in May 1886. The twenty-room hotel was notable for its creeping vines and ivy that flowed off the second story balcony toward the ground. Management passed through several hands over the years, including to Mrs. Jerome Goerecke (1890) and Mrs. Kenneth Ferguson (1891). Paschall sold the hotel in 1896 to Mrs. M. C. Cumming (née Roundtree) of Fresno, who continued to operate the hotel for several more years. Little is reported on the hotel for the next decade. In 1905, after years of neglect, the hotel was taken over by Julia A. Glenn, who refurbished it completely and added new rooms. She hired Mae Chambers as the manager, who took over in early 1906.

Wildwood Home, sans its iconic vines, c. 1900. [San Lorenzo Valley Museum]

Ownership passed to Mrs. Emma E. Hutchings in the early 1920s and, during this time, several films crews and celebrities stayed at the hotel while filming movies in the vicinity of Big Basin. In 1930, she handed day-to-day management to A. H. Lindsey, his wife, and their three sons, all of Kettleman, California. But the hotel declined while under their care. Hutchings returned in 1932 with plans to either sell or improve the building when a fire struck early in the morning of May 14, 1932. The hotel did not have any guests at the time, owing to the renovation, and there were no injuries, but the building was destroyed outright and never rebuilt.

Alpine House (1890 – c. 1915)
What began life as the Morgan House first opened its doors around 1890 under the ownership of Dr. Sam D. Morgan. The Sentinel describes the hotel in 1894 as "conducted in first-class style, the dining-room and cuisine department being under the able supervision of Mrs. Morgan, whose reputation as a hostess is already well established. The table is supplied with the best the market affords, and everything about the hotel has an air of cleanliness, every detail tending to the comfort of the guests being attended to. Mr. Morgan is considering the enlargement of his hotel, in order to accommodate increasing business." In 1893, L. E. Paschall of Wildwood Home was bought on to manage daily operations at the hotel. When the Alpine House first opened in 1895, it was founded as a separate hotel from the Morgan House, but the two were intricately entwined from the beginning with Sam Morgan in charge of both. As he oversaw the new Alpine House, he hired William Branch to run the Morgan House. Whether the two merged together after 1896 or the Morgan House was demolished is unclear and Sanborn Fire Insurance Company maps of the time do not provide clarity, but the Morgan House is never mentioned again by the Sentinel after 1896.

The Alpine House sat prominently at the corner of Central Avenue and Big Basin Way (State Route 236), c. 1900.
[San Lorenzo Valley Museum]

In 1899, Otto Ausman became a partner in the business, but sold his share to a relative, Emma L. Ausman, in 1904. That same year, W. S. G. Todd became the manager, but he was replaced in 1905 by Frederick G. Troy, a nephew of the McAbee Brothers who owned a mill on Two Bar Creek. However, scandal hit Troy in 1907 when he was found allowing a minor to gamble in the hotel. The hotel shut down for the remainder of the year. In 1908, the hotel was purchased by the Koepkes, who installed the final stretch of cement sidewalks in town. All record of the hotel disappears around 1910. It was located across State Route 236 from Johnnie's Supermarket where the Boulder Creek American Gas is today.

Basham House and Baldwin Lodging House (1891 – c. 1920s)
The real Basham House, not to be confused with the former Rex Hotel now called the Basham House, was built around 1891 by William Basham. For the first several years of its existence, it served as a boarding house for seasonal lumbermen. As such, it was rather small, with only eight upstairs rooms for guests, while the downstairs was used as a restaurant and store. Basham soon sold the boarding house to Andrew J. Baldwin and the latter renamed it the Baldwin Boarding House. Baldwin, in turn, sold it or transferred it to his relative, Rachel F. Baldwin, in 1896. She only kept the hotel for a few years, selling it to Lizzie Brickmore in 1902. Brickmore followed suit and the hotel passed to William F. Pierce in 1905. He was responsible for adding the second-story covered veranda and remodeling the boarding house into a proper hotel with twenty guest rooms in 1911. A few years later, Jacob Hartman purchased the hotel and ran it until 1920, when it was sold to Annie Dexter. After this date, the hotel is never mentioned again in newspapers. It sat midway between the Rex Hotel and the Alpine House, roughly where the alleyway between Boulder Creek Liquors and the Brandy Station is located today.

A trio of hotels on Central Avenue, c. 1912. In the foreground is the Rex Hotel, next to it sits the original Basham House, and in the distance is the palatial Alpine House. [San Lorenzo Valley Museum]

Commercial Hotel and Alpine Inn (1897 – 1956)
The structure that would later be known as the Big Basin Hotel was appropriately founded by the original owner of Big Basin, Henry L. Middleton. Middleton built the Commercial Hotel at the corner of Central Avenue and the future State Route 236 in 1897. He hired as manager George Denison, who once ran the Boulder Creek House and whose brother, Albert, ran it for several years. The structure was a long boarding house with a mid-sized restaurant on the first floor and fifteen rooms for guests.

Commercial Hotel on Central Avenue in Boulder Creek, 1901. Photo by Andrew Hill. [History San José]

A dozen years after the opening of California Redwood Park—now Big Basin Redwoods State Park—the hotel was run by Middleton's California Timber Company, the successor to many of the local lumber firms that ran out of usable timber at the beginning of the twentieth century. In 1914, the company was looking for new sources of revenue since their operations on Waterman and Newell Creeks were running out of usable timber. Their hotel in downtown Boulder Creek held some potential, at least for the short term, so they tried to capitalize on the Big Basin name by renaming the hostelry the Big Basin Hotel. The gambit failed. After a few seasons, the hotel shut down. It was reopened in February 1919 as the George Hotel under the management of George Honold, but the new name didn't stick and the Honold only ran the hotel for a single season.

A big change occurred in 1920, when Adelaide T. Gibbs purchased the hotel and rebranded it the New Alpine Hotel, undoubtedly in reference to the Alpine House. Her death later that year passed ownership to her son, A. W. J. Gibbs. For several years, little was said of the hotel in newspapers and it may have served more as a private home for Gibbs and his family, who also owned Gibbs Ranch Resort above Zayante. The hotel did not become a popular destination until Doris Martin purchased the property in 1925 and tweaked the name into the Alpine Inn. The Martins were popular with the citizens of Boulder Creek and hosted several sold-out dances during the first year that they ran the hotel. They famously installed the first neon lighting on the side of their building in April 1925, signalling a technological change for the rural town. Within a few months, the hotel was completely electrified and well-lighted. However, the Martins did not remain patrons of the hotel for long. In early 1926, Howard W. West took over, but by June, M. S. Griffin was in charge. The next year, West's brother-in-law, Charles Jones, was brought on as manager and remained in that capacity for three seasons. The Martins finallysold the hotel in December 1929 to Ida Lietzow-Chamberlain, who saw its potential as a tourist hub with the impending completion of Skyline Boulevard.

The Alpine Inn situated prominently on Central Avenue, late 1930s. [Santa Cruz Sentinel]

Lietzow immediately began remodeling the hotel and hired her daughter, J. W. Pfeifer, as manager.  In 1931, she brought in a new manager, Lewis Williams, who continued the renovations and improved the restaurant. Like most hotels in the area, the Alpine Inn suffered from prohibition raids, but its next manager, Louis Wenger, was arrested when a large quantity of alcohol was discovered at the hotel in 1932. Lietzow returned in 1934 to manage the hotel and continue renovations. By this point, Lietzow was living in Los Angeles most of the time and the hotel was becoming a hassle. She hired Lynn Upton and Emma West to run the hotel in 1935, giving them the option to buy. They converted the entire hotel into what would today be termed a bed-and-breakfast. Still, Upton and West were not interested in buying so Lietzow brought on J. A. White in 1936. Finally, in November 1936, Lietzow was able to sell the hotel to C. E. Cadigan, a San Francisco hosteller and property investor. Cadigan immediately installed a cocktail lounge downstairs and convinced Greyhound to establish him as the local agent and the Alpine Inn the bus station. And yet Cadigan's ownership lasted less than two years.

One of the last photographs of the Alpine Inn, taken in February 1956 just months before the building was demolished to make way for Johnnie's Supermarket. [Santa Cruz Sentinel]

In July 1938, the Locatelli family—Poldina, Gery, Peter, and Emilia—took over the hotel. They split the downstairs into a restaurant and liquor store while retaining the upstairs as a hotel. Around 1943, they sold the hotel to Robert and Bessie Burns, who in turn sold it to John R. and Lena Montanari and Marceau and Marie Louise Paulian in 1948. The next year, the Paulians left the partnership and were replaced by William H. and Carmen Sohr. The Sohrs oversaw the conversion of the restaurant into a Chinese Village Dining Room, specializing in Chinese food. The final owner of the hotel was Gene Engle, who purchased the hotel around 1953. After running the business for three years, Engle sold the hotel back to John Montanari in April 1956, who demolished it and built Johnnie's Supermarket in its place. Johnnie's opened on June 7.

Locatelli's Inn and Scopazzi's (1906 – Present)
The early history of the Locatelli Inn—today's Scopazzi's Restaurant—on State Route 236 is not entirely clear. As early as 1906, an Italia Hotel run by Alessandro Musitelli was operating in Boulder Creek, as reported by the Sentinel when Musitelli was caught selling liquor without a license. But whether this Italia Hotel was the same as the latter Locatelli Inn is unknown, although a Sentinel article published in 1955 certainly connects the two. Giuseppe M. "Joseph" Locatelli did not enter the industry until 1915, when he applied for and was granted a liquor license, signalling the start of his business. Interesting, the license he received only allowed liquor to be sold with meals, so this also marks the start of his restaurant. Unfortunately, he was arrested in 1917 for selling liquor without a license (the laws had changed in the meantime) and was forced to simply sell food without liquor, which became a national law when Prohibition arrived in 1920.

Locatelli's Inn, with the hotel barely visible at the far left, c. 1950.

Locatelli made an important addition to his hotel in 1924 when he added the well-known dining room beside the hotel. Soon afterwards, he renamed the hotel and restaurant Locatelli's Inn. Indeed, the 1920s transformed the workmen's hostelry into a prime locale for the Hollywood glitterati, who used the location on Big Basin Way as a base station for several movies that were filmed in and around Big Basin, especially at Poverty Flat. Unlike so many other businesses in the area, Locatelli's Inn survived the Great Depression and World War II, and the whole time remained under the ownership and management of the Locatelli family, even after Joseph's death in 1951. Catherine L. Locatelli took over and ran the restaurant throughout the first half of the 1950s, although the hotel seem to have shut down by this time. She finally sold the hotel and restaurant to John, Albino, and Guido Scopazzi on May 4, 1956. Within a few years, the Scopazzis built a connecting hall between the restaurant and hotel, using the old hotel for extra seating, an expanded kitchen, and office space. Scopazzi's remains in business as one of the oldest and most popular restaurants in Santa Cruz County.

Piedmont Hotel (1913 – 1920)
As the lumber industry north of Boulder Creek collapsed, the town became more of a tourist destination. As a result, several hotels appeared in the 1910s that catered to outdoors adventures and picnickers, such as the Piedmont Hotel at the corner of Mountain Street and Central Avenue. Built by Peter Ricca in 1913, the hotel fell into disrepute only a year later when Ricca was charged with the sale of liquor in the temperance-friendly town. Although he dodged the charges, Ricca's business lost its liquor license in 1918 due to a failure to renew it. Ricca threw up his arms and abandoned the business the next year, selling to Ugo Giomi and W. D. Alexander, who renamed it the Big Basin Inn. Giomi and Alexander renovated the hotel in early 1920 and opened it in April. The hotel featured a dining hall with am expansive dance floor and a grand fireplace. The outdoors were re-arranged into gardens with scenic pathways meandering through them. After only three months, Alexander left the partnership leaving it entirely to Giomi. Perhaps to avoid confusion with the small hotel at Big Basin, Giomi renamed his venue Ugo's Tavern in 1921, at which time the hostelry functions of the business began winding down. The restaurant closed in the early 1930s due to the Great Depression but reopened under the management of Faith Garibaldi in December 1940 as the Boulder Creek Lodge. The main structure of the Piedmont Hotel still sits at its original location, now branded as White House, across from the Boulder Creek Veterinary Clinic.

Citations & Credits:

• McCarthy, Nancy F. Where Grizzlies Roamed the Canyons. Palo Alto, CA: Garden Court Press, 1994.
• Robinson, Lisa A. Images of America: The San Lorenzo Valley. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2012.
• Santa Cruz Sentinel, Evening Sentinel, Weekly Sentinel, and Evening News, 1870-1940.
• Whaley, Derek R. Santa Cruz Trains: Railroads of the Santa Cruz Mountains. Santa Cruz, CA, 2015.