PROMOTING THE SAN LORENZO VALLEY

Author's Personal Collection

This lovely circa 1906 Art Nouveau promotional postcard* for the Hotel Ben Lomond touts the area's most important industries and attractions.

The San Lorenzo Valley was one of California’s earliest logging regions. By the late 1860s, the valley supported twenty-two lumber mills with an annual capacity of eleven million board feet of lumber.

For many years Ben Lomond was a vibrant logging town. In the 1880s Ben Lomond began to transition into a resort community. The town’s first resort was Hotel Ben Lomond established in 1887. The original two-story structure contained thirty-five guest rooms and a wide wrap around veranda. The complex included four cottages and several changing rooms near the San Lorenzo River to accommodate bathers. Visitors were enticed with opportunities for fishing, hunting and boating. The hotel also bragged they were only two miles from the world famous Big Trees Grove.

The hotel underwent a long period of unstable management. For a couple of years, it was owned and managed by Joseph Ball, the experienced hotelier who also managed the small hotel at Big Trees Grove. The struggling hotel continued to change hands frequently. In 1914 Hotel Ben Lomond was a victim of arson for insurance purposes.

The Big Trees Grove image used on the postcard is the famous one by McKean and Reese taken during the 1888 return visit of famed explorer John Charles Frémont. The image captured the moment when Frémont along with "sixteen members of the party encircled that immense tree [the Giant], joining hands; then swinging free from it they formed in a circle apart on the cleared ground, showing the immense growth of this gigantic tree …"

* This postcard was mailed to a correspondent in Wantagh on Long Island, New York.

Sources: “The San Lorenzo Valley Flume Chronicle,” by Lisa Robinson, Redwood Logging and Conservation in the Santa Cruz Mountains: A Split History; “Curiosities: Ben Lomond-Area Resorts,” Santa Cruz Trains – Railroads of the Monterey Bay Area, https://www.santacruztrains.com/.