Gordola & Scaroni

Ocean Shore Railroad 1912 Survey Map. (UC Santa Cruz)

The Coast Line and Ocean Shore railroads shared very few stops between Santa Cruz and Davenport. One place that could not be ignored, however, was a large dairy owned by the Scaroni family along the North Coast of Santa Cruz County just south of Majors Creek.

Pio Scaroni first settled on his portion of Rancho Refugio in 1868 after moving from Gordola, Switzerland. Scaroni became well known for his butter and cheese, eventually becoming an American citizen in 1884. Pio diversified his properties over the following years and became, in addition to his dairy business, one of the top growers of artichokes in the north county. In 1901, a portion of his properties were also leased to the Santa Cruz Oil Company to enable bitumen mining. Pio died in 1931, though his descendants continued to own the land until 1998.

The combination of agricultural output, dairy goods, and petroleum products brought the two rival railroads straight through Scaroni's property. Rivals until the end, the Ocean Shore got the privilege of naming their stop Scaroni, located 6.6 miles north of the small Santa Cruz Depot building. The Coast Line Railroad, coming to the game late, was forced to use a secondary name for the stop, Gordola, named after Scaroni's home town. Their station was located 4.8 miles north of the larger Southern Pacific depot in Santa Cruz, 85.6 miles south of San Francisco via Santa Cruz and the Mayfield Cutoff.

In the end, the Coast Line won out. At Scaroni, just south of Majors Creek, the Coast Line built a 2,500' long siding, long enough to support 27 waiting boxcars and flat cars, with a second shorter spur adjacent to it.  Since the Coast Line was on the eastern side of the shared right-of-way, its siding and spur were also to the east. The northern end of the siding terminated just before Scaroni Road, then simply a county road that ended at the Scaroni farm house. Meanwhile, the Scaroni stop maintained by the OSRR had no siding or spur and was located on the wrong side of the property for anything other than passenger use. Both railroads had to bridge, and subsequently fill, a small unnamed seasonal creek that was in this area, the culvert of which still sits under the right-of-way today.

The Ocean Shore Railroad closed in 1920 and the San Vicente Lumber Company took up the tracks in late 1923. The right-of-way in this area is used as a farm vehicle dirt road, though it has long lost its ballast and grading. The Coast Line, later Southern Pacific, Union Pacific, and now Santa Cruz & Monterey Bay Railway, remains intact but the siding and spur have both been removed with no trace of them remaining. In 1998, the Scaroni family sold this entire property to the state of California and it has since been appended onto Wilder Ranch State Historic Park, acting as its northern coastal boundary.

Citations:

• Donald Clark, Santa Cruz County Place Names: A Geographical Dictionary (Scotts Valley, CA: Kestrel Press, 2008).

Parsons Beach

Ocean Shore Railway Company survey map, 1912. (UC Santa Cruz)

Between Santa Cruz and Davenport, the Ocean Shore Railroad provided more stops for local passengers and freight than the Coast Line. There are many possible reasons for this, but the Ocean Shore was a much more limited line, especially after 1906 when connecting the line to San Francisco was pretty much a lost cause, thus they needed as many patrons as possible. It is in this attitude that they provided a small stop at Parsons Beach where Baldwin Creek flows into the Pacific Ocean.

The beach was named after Dr. George Parsons, the landowner who purchased this small section of Rancho Refugio from José Bolcoff on 1 December 1854. Parsons was an English dentist with an office in Santa Cruz as early as 1850; details before that date are unknown. By 1905, when the railroads were running through the property, M.L. Baldwin owned the property. To the south, C. Lombardi held land, while just to the north, the Scaroni family operated a dairy.

The Ocean Shore Railroad maintained a small spur lagoon near the beach on the west side of the tracks, 5.7 miles north of the Ocean Shore Depot in Santa Cruz. The spur was accessible from the south and terminated at the end of the bluff where a cut was required for the right-of-way. The spur was 390' long and the stop hosted a small wooden shelter. The actual purpose of the stop and spur are unknown, though the former was probably for local beach-goers and the family while the latter was likely for agricultural crops and other freight. Information regarding the career of M.L. Baldwin is lacking from the historical record, leaving the function of the property up to speculation.

When the Ocean Shore ceased providing service along the line in 1920, the stop at Parsons Beach ended service as well. The tracks remained for another three years as the San Vicente Lumber Company used them, but even those were pulled in 1924. The remaining set of tracks through the property are those of the Southern Pacific Railroad (now the Santa Cruz & Monterey Bay Railway). Today, Parsons Beach is called Four Mile Beach (because it is located four miles north of the Santa Cruz city limits), though it also is called Tiger Beach occasionally. A somewhat expansive lagoon sits beside the railroad tracks in this area and the original Ocean Shore right-of-way exists as a local access road for farmers. The entirety of the beach is within the bounds of Wilder Ranch State Historic Park, thereby making the beach a state beach. Public access is permitted via a parking area along CA State Route 1 and a short dirt road.

Citations:

• Donald Clark, Santa Cruz County Place Names: A Geographical Dictionary (Scotts Valley, CA: Kestrel Press, 2008).

Wilder Ranch

The Ocean Shore Railroad and the Coast Line Railroad shared only a few things in common...besides the same right-of-way between Wilder Creek and the Davenport Cement Plant, the same goal of connecting Santa Cruz to San Francisco via the coast, and the same failings that these two things would inevitably bring to each company. One other thing they shared, though, was freight service to the Wilder Ranch property just north of Santa Cruz. But even with this, the two competitors couldn't agree, so Wilder had multiple sidings and spurs—three in fact.

A barn building at Wilder Ranch (John Pusey)

Let's step back a bit, though, and explore the history of Wilder Ranch. The property was located not even a mile north of the city limits of Santa Cruz in a region once known as Rancho Refugio. Moses A. Meder was the original owner of the rancho and sold the Wilder portion of it to Deloss D. Wilder and L.K. Baldwin in 1871. It included around 4,000 acres and 2.5 miles of oceanfront property. Baldwin disliked the partnership and, in 1885, forced the division of the property, whereafter Wilder retained the portion closest to Santa Cruz. Deloss was already a dairyman having opened a dairy in Marin County in 1859, but his move to Santa Cruz signaled a new start. Deloss and his heirs continued to operate the dairy until 1935, when they decided to invest in agriculture instead, while also keeping a small cattle and horse ranch.

The history of the sidings and spurs enter in 1905 when Deloss deeded fourteen acres of land to the Ocean Shore Railroad under the condition that a siding and flag stop would be maintained on their property. When the Southern Pacific came through later that years, Deloss demanded the same conditions of them, which the SP accepted, and he granted them twenty-seven acres of right-of-way. Thus Deloss had his two sidings, gambling that if one railroad failed, the other would continue to use the right-of-way. Construction of the Ocean Shore began by mid-1905 and by 1906, trains were stopping at Wilder collecting freight and dropping off freight cars. The Coast Line, running behind and damaged by the 1906 earthquake, lagged behind even though its right-of-way was completed. The Coast Line's own track, basically shared in the Wilder region since the SP used the Ocean Shore's contractor, Shattuck and Desmond, finally opened to through traffic in early 1907.

For the Ocean Shore Railroad, the Wilder Siding was located 3.5 miles north of their Santa Cruz Station. For the Coast Line, it was 124 miles from San Francisco via Watsonville Junction and the Mayfield Cut-off. Furthermore, it was 83.4 miles south of San Francisco via Santa Cruz Junction and the Mayfield Cut-off and 7.3 miles south of Davenport. That places it roughly 4.2 miles north of Santa Cruz, but at roughly the same location as the Ocean Shore stop since the Ocean Shore had a more direct line to Wilder. The Coast Line spur included a class C-station with a small platform on the north side of the tracks. The Ocean Shore, on the other hand, had a siding on the south side of the tracks, beside its own right-of-way. Thus the Coast Line had slightly easier access to the dairy property and likely gained more business from the Wilder family because of this. Neither stop had a shelter or building for passengers, though both railroads maintained a formal flag-stop designation for Wilder on timetables.

Heavily overgrown Wilder Spur beside the Wilder Ranch SHP parking lot. (Google Maps)

The Ocean Shore ceased service to Wilder in 1920, though through trains to the San Vicente Mill continued on the old OS track until the end of 1923. The Coast Line, consolidated into the Southern Pacific formally in 1915, outperformed the OS throughout its existence and after 1920 was the sole freight hauler for Wilder Ranch via rail. While freight service ceased to the site after 1935, the spur itself still remains between the parking lot and the tracks, heavily overgrown but otherwise serviceable.

The Wilder family finally sold the property in 1969 with the expectation that it would be converted into a housing subdivision. But after twenty years of property disputes, the State of California finally took it over in 1974 and converted it into Wilder Ranch State Historic Park. Since then, the property has been enlarged with land grants from surrounding areas, stretching all the way up to Bonny Doon. Wilder is expected to be one of the restored stops on the Santa Cruz & Monterey Bay Railway if passenger service is restored on the Davenport branch line in the future.

Citations:

• Donald Clark, Santa Cruz County Place Names: A Geographical Dictionary (Scotts Valley, CA: Kestrel Press, 2008).
• Jack R. Wagner, The Last Whistle: Ocean Shore Railroad (Berkeley, CA: Howeel-North Book, 1974).

Wilder Creek Trestle

As the now-joint Coast Line and Ocean Shore Railroad right-of-way—triple tracked—curved northward out of Santa Cruz on its heading toward Davenport and beyond, it narrowed into a single lane as it passed over its second trestle at Wilder Creek. The creek is an expansive waterway breaking quickly into branches as it travels from Ben Lomond Mountain to Wilder Beach. The largest of these branches required an impressive redwood truss bridge to cross. The trestle began southeast of the Wilder Ranch dairy and ended just slightly southwest of it, spanning roughly 850 feet.

A freight train heads north to Davenport over the Wilder Creek Trestle, c. 1950. (MacGregor)

The creek itself had not always named Wilder Creek, nor do all consider it called that today. The earliest name attributed to it is Bolcroff Creek, for an early Santa Cruz settler, while Meder Creek, named after Moses A Meder, was the name it had until the Wilder family moved in to the property. That name is after Deloss D. Wilder, the first Wilder to own the property beginning in 1871. But the government remains inconclusive on the name, often using Wilder and Meder interchangeably, a debate that still quietly continues to this day in paperwork.

Double-headed excursion train heading toward Santa Cruz, 1948 (Rice & Echeverria)

Unlike the other trestles along the joint-SP/OS right-of-way to Davenport, the trestle over Wilder Creek was never filled in. First built in 1905, it remained a full-exposed wood-frame trestle right into the present, finally being filled at some point after 1951, probably in the 1970s. It is instantly recognizable compared to other water spans in the county due to a darker wood or heavier tar used in the center of the trestle, as is visible in all three photographs here. Because it was not filled, the trestle was heavily reinforced for use along a line that primarily supported cement trains heading out from Davenport, thus photographs show extensive crossbeams with closely-packed pilings. Though heavily photographed in excursion trips that passed the Wilder property, pedestrians were not encouraged to cross the bridge and no walkway or railings were provided for such a use. A sign in the photograph above looks similar to other signs along the Southern Pacific's routes warning people to stay away from the tracks and trestle.

A northbound double-header taking an excursion group to Davenport, c. 1950. (Hamman)

Wilder Creek now travels through three separate culverts under the right-of-way, one under the former trestle near its eastern end, and two east of the former trestle through additional culverts. The filled trestle can be easily viewed from the Wilder Ranch State Park property as a steep hillside just south of the former houses of the dairy farm. No evidence of the physical trestle remains, though the tracks continue to pass over the top of the fill. The right-of-way is currently owned by the City of Santa Cruz as part of its Iowa Pacific-operated Santa Cruz & Monterey Bay Railway project.

Citations:

• Donald Clark, Santa Cruz County Place Names: A Geographical Dictionary (Scotts Valley, CA: Kestrel Press, 2008).
• Rick Hamman, California Central Coast Railways (Santa Cruz, CA: Otter B Books, 2002).
• Bruce MacGregor, South Pacific Coast: An Illustrated History of the Narrow-Gauge South Pacific Coast Railroad (Howell-North Books, 1968).
• Walter Rice & Emiliano Echeverria, Images of Rail: Rails of California's Central Coast (Arcadia, 2008).