Griggs: The wharves of Santa Cruz County
The early immigrants to Santa Cruz County from the east quickly realized that there was an abundance of natural resources in the region, including redwood trees for lumber and lime for cement, in addition to rich river bottom soils for agriculture. The challenge from the earliest days was how to transport these resources out of the county. Railroads became important in time, but rail lines were expensive and labor was time consuming to build through the mountains.
Shipping was a logical approach for exporting lumber, lime and agricultural products and, as a result, Santa Cruz County has a long history of wharves, including construction and subsequent destruction. Without getting into the why, the collapse of the outer 150 feet of the Santa Cruz Wharf on Dec. 23 was just the most recent example of the difficulties of maintaining wharves along our high energy coastline.
In around 1861, William W. Waddell, who had migrated from Kentucky and built several lumber mills in the area, established his largest and longest-serving mill about 2.5 miles up Waddell Creek, north of Davenport. Waddell built a road for transporting lumber to the coast, where he began constructing a 1,000-foot-long wharf. This project was soon abandoned, however, when the pile-driver encountered solid rock. He decided to extend the road three miles north to Cove Beach, a protected shoreline just east of New Year’s Point (Año Nuevo), where he was successful in erecting a 700-foot-long wharf. This one worked, and hundreds of thousands of board feet of lumber were transported by horse-drawn wagons running between the mill and the wharf until a storm in January 1865 destroyed the wharf.
A three-mile-long railroad was eventually built across the base of Waddell Bluffs to replace the horse-drawn wagons, and the wharf was also rebuilt only to be partly washed away during a storm in April 1871. The new wharf was quickly repaired and lumber shipping continued. Waddell’s career ended rather abruptly however, when he was mauled by a bear while hunting, which led to his death in October 1875. Lumber milling and shipping continued, but the establishment of Big Basin Redwoods State Park in 1902 ended the lumbering enterprise in the Waddell watershed.
Nothing remains of that early pier, but extensive bluff erosion and beach scour from the severe El Niño winter of 1983 which exposed the base of one of the original pilings of Waddell’s wharf. When Waddell’s wharf was built and originally used as a shipping point, it was in Santa Cruz County. The change in the location of the county line in 1868, however, placed it in San Mateo County.
Captain John Davenport, who migrated to California in 1849 from Rhode Island, is generally credited with being among the first, if not the first, to start shore-based whaling operations. Davenport began this industry in Monterey, and later moved to Soquel and then to El Jarro Point, just north of Davenport, in 1867. In Spanish El Jarro means jug, jar or pitcher of earthenware, but why this point north of Davenport was given this name has never been clear to me. The flat coastal terrace at this point is best known for the nuclear power plant proposed for this location by PG&E in 1969, which would have been the largest nuclear plant in the country. Years of local opposition and the realization of the multiple concerns surrounding nuclear power plants ultimately led to the abandonment of this proposal.
Along with a John King, Davenport built a 400-foot wharf at what is now Davenport Landing. A small village existed at that location from the 1870s to the turn of the last century and consisted of two hotels, two general stores, blacksmith and butcher shops, a shipyard, a wharf and four homes. The original wharf has been described as a shipping point for lime, lumber, cordwood and posts. There is considerable debate among historians, however, whether Davenport Landing was ever actually a whaling station in the narrow technical sense. Most of the village was destroyed by a fire in 1915, and today there is nothing remaining of that original Davenport-King wharf or the old village.
A 2,600-foot-long pier was constructed in the late 1930s to ship cement by sea at Davenport, across Highway 1 from the cement plant. Wave damage during construction led the engineers to turn the outer end of the pier more northerly into the dominant swell direction. The pier had two 12-inch diameter pipes for loading dry cement, as well as a 3-inch line for water and a 6-inch pipe for fuel oil for the cement plant. The SS Cement, which was used to ship the dry cement, was only in service for about 15 years until 1955 when wave conditions made it too dangerous to tie up the vessel to the outer end of the pier. Over the subsequent years, the original foundation pilings have gradually succumbed to the waves, and today only the innermost two supports remain. These are visible from the cliff across Highway 1 from the cement plant where there is a wide pullout on the ocean side of the roadway, next to the railroad tracks.
Another wharf existed about a mile down coast from Davenport, at the mouth of Liddell Creek, better known as Bonny Doon Beach. Liddell Creek was named after George Liddell, who established a sawmill on the creek in 1851. He was an English civil engineer and contractor who migrated to California in 1850. This beach was formerly known as Williams Landing and Williams Chute, and was named after the four Williams brothers — James, John, Squire and Isaac — who were early settlers in the county. James and his younger brother Isaac were involved in the lumber and lime businesses for many years on Rancho Arroyo de la Laguna. They reportedly built the wharf around 1853 for shipping lumber and lime, but it was abandoned in 1869.
In 1889, Williams Landing was taken over and reactivated by George Olive and Co., and became known as Olives Landing. The company found the site attractive as they owned a nearby lumber mill, and a convenient shipping point was desirable. The company developed a scheme using a cable which went straight out 800 feet from a tower on the cliff to a 5,000-pound mooring or anchor. A wire cage was used to haul lumber out to vessels which anchored under it with their sterns nearly in the breaking waves. More wharf history to come.
Gary Griggs is a Distinguished Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at UC Santa Cruz. He can be reached at griggs@ucsc.edu. For past Ocean Backyard columns, visit seymourcenter.ucsc.edu/ouroceanbackyard.