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Description:
Beautifully engraved unissued Certificate from the Santa Clara Valley Mill & Lumber Company dated 187_. This historic document has an ornate border around it with a vignette of an operating lumber mill along a river. This item is over 120 years old.
Certificate Vignette The demand for firewood and building lumber by the citizens and towns of the Santa Clara Valley produced a road over the summit from Saratoga to the San Lorenzo Valley in 1870. Prior to this entry, the Castle Rock area had been visited by tanbark choppers, hunters and an occasional settler in the lower or southern portion of what is now the park. A brief non financially rewarding "gold rush" rocked the upper San Lorenzo prospecting in 1855; was soon over, but did leave the earliest known place name - "Tin Can Springs." Potential mining claims would be made for the next six decades, but none proved valid. When the Saratoga-Pescadero Turnpike crossed the summit and headed down the San Lorenzo Valley the area was opened for settlement. There were two earlier horse trails, apparently only occasionally used by horse back travelers. Neither trail allowed wheeled vehicles. Along Damon Ridge, there was a trail noted in federal survey records (1868) as the "Santa Clara" or "Santa Cruz Trail." The trail was irregular and difficult to trace in federal notes. A second trail was well known as it traversed the top of Pescadero Ridge from the gap at the summit to the "Waterman Gap" area. This trail was known for James "Buckskin" Lawrence, a professional hide hunter, who killed and cured deer skins for the glove industry in San Jose. Lawrence left the area in the early 1870s and the name slipped into obscurity. The two trails were used to give access from the summit into the game areas during hunting seasons when Nimrods after deer and trout or salmon trekked into the San Lorenzo "Gulch" or to Big Basin. Buckskin Lawrence Trail disappeared under the Carmichael and Hubbard Logging Company logging road, which became John W. Chace's road which became part of Highway Nine in 1916. The Saratoga Toll Road crossed the "Gap" at Summit Ridge in 1870 and passed through the property (the extreme southern edge) of Casey Newhouse's 160 acres. That same year, authorized by the owners of the toll road, an easterner, William S. Brewer and his wife, leased a piece of Newhouse's property and built a toll station and developed a tavern, with bar, restaurant and "hotel." Brewer also built several barns, corrals, a feed lot and out buildings. For ten years, the family, Brewer, wife, son and daughter, struggled to survive on the operation of the rest stop and the percentages of the tolls he collected. The road was not heavily traveled except for wood products wagons which often featured dual outfits: two wagons and ten to twelve horses. Commercial ventures, such as stage coaches, failed regularly and there were few tourists who used the badly maintained, rutted, dusty (or muddy) route. Lumber wagons did dominate the toll road into the Santa Clara Valley through the early 20th Century. In the fall of 1880 a major fire burned up Pescadero Canyon from sea shore to beyond the summit and wiped out "Brewer's Station." Brewer moved to Saratoga and opened a hardware store and lumber yard on the Saratoga to Santa Clara Road. John W. Peery, of Lorenzo, with a sawmill in Boulder Creek had managed the "San Lorenzo Road" as the toll road was officially referred to in Santa Cruz records, from 1874. In 1875, Santa Clara County declared the east half public and finally gained control in 1880 after the fire wiped out "Brewer's Station." Peery, in 1881, put a toll collector at the gap, but the station soon failed. The station collector did not collect enough tolls to pay his wages. And, the toll road only covered a little over eleven and a half miles. The southernmost toll gate was at G. Fergusson's Ranch and Fergusson collected the toll from his doorstep. As work on the Saratoga Toll Road progressed down the north side of the upper San Lorenzo Valley, a squatter named Henry Tracy sold his 160 acres to a William H. Hall. The next year, Tracy purchased his claim from the federal government thereby making his sale to Hall legal. At a site just below the modern intersection of the Saratoga and "Beekhuis" Roads, Hall put in a roadside resort that served as a rest stop for travelers. No description of the facilities at "Hall's" has been found and only two references to the site have been located. Both notices were during the summer of 1875 by eastern excursionists traveling from Saratoga through the northern Santa Cruz Mountains to Santa Cruz. "Hall's" was noted as providing refreshment for "horses and men." An examination of the ground and using other such road side rest stops of the era as a yard stick, one can project a possible image of the resort. Facing the Saratoga Road might have been a two-story structure; the upper floor was level with the road and probably featured a hash house and tavern. Wagons and buggies would be parked at the edge of the road next to the building. The lower floor could have been enclosed quarters for the owner or an opened faced storage area. A road would have passed between the tavern and out buildings to the rear. This road, or lane, is now part of the Beekhuis Road. The area to the rear of the station site is large enough for a barn, hay lot, corrals and small support buildings. Because descriptions are so meager, and no one recorded an over night stop, it is unknown if "Hall's" offered night time accommodations. Probably not, since a "hotel" was situated at the Gap five miles above, and the town of Lorenzo (now part of Boulder Creek) was only seventeen miles away. There is no me
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Reference#: sanclarvalmi |
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