COLORFUL ENCOUNTER

 

Author's Personal Collection

A visitor on his way to Big Trees Grove in 1913 documented a colorful encounter along the San Lorenzo Canyon route.

"As I was eating my lunch by a spring beside the road, a sound of shouting began to come up out of the canon. It was in a peculiar sing-song drawl, and came nearer and nearer until, when it arrived close to where I sat, I stood up to see what phenomenon was about to appear. There was a creaking and crackling of underbrush, and then the heads of a yoke of oxen rose above the level of the road, and so remained while two pairs of solemn eyes took stock of me and my companion. Gradually six yoke emerged, followed by a man with a goad, who was the author of the melancholy music, and then by a wagon and trailer on which was a single huge log of redwood. They went quartering about from side to side of the road, and when four similar processions had followed them, and they had all come to anchor, the hubbub ceased, half the oxen lay down, and the drivers gathered at the spring for the noon meal. They were swarthy, bullet-headed fellows, and proved all to be Portuguese, speaking no English, so that our conversation was limited. However, it was full of good-will, expressed in a friendly interchange of wine and tobacco."

I personally find this description compelling because I am half Portuguese. Though I do not know of any loggers or lime workers in my family background (so far I only know of dairy farmers), the description of this encounter along Big Trees Road hints at an important part of the history of the Santa Cruz Mountains and the San Lorenzo Valley.

Workers at the Cowell Ranch lime kilns, circa 1890-1910 - Special Collections, University of California, Santa Cruz

Initially the lime industry's labor force was entirely composed of English, Irish, Scottish, and Canadian laborers, primarily from the lime region of Maine. By 1880, Azorean Portuguese immigrants composed most of the lime workforce. The second largest contingent of lime workers were Swiss-Italian while Irish immigrants dominated management positions.*

The Azores Islands are a nine-island volcanic archipelago located 700 miles from the coast of Portugal. By the mid-1600s the islands became overpopulated. As food shortages and poverty increased, a wave of immigration to the New World commenced. By the early nineteenth century, American whaling ships regularly stopped at the Azores to resupply and soon the Portuguese became a large part of the whaling profession. The first Azorean Portuguese in California were those who jumped whaling vessels in the ports of Monterey and San Francisco. By 1880 California was home to 13,159 people of Portuguese descent.

During the nineteenth century the immigrant Portuguese, Italian and initially the Irish, were often seen as "not quite white" and thus ranked lower in society. This was a young workforce with most in their teens into their early thirties. Many Portuguese and Italian workers had little education and many could not speak English.  

Some archeological work at the sites of various lime operations in the Santa Cruz Mountains reveal that the Portuguese and Italian immigrant workers lived in small cabins or bunkhouses, "ate company-provided meals at the nearby cookhouse, but supplemented this food by foraging for local resources like fish, shellfish, and small game animals … they wore American-made work clothing, they drank wine and liquor, they smoked Prince Albert tobacco, and they were self-medicating with patent and proprietary medicines to treat a variety of maladies and complaints." Another uniting factor for the Portuguese and Italian laborers, as well as their Irish managers, was their shared Catholic faith where in local churches they gathered weekly for mass. 

Henry Cowell's I.X.L. lime kilns at Fall Creek - Author's Personal Collection

Though at the lime kilns, the living quarters remained segregated, workers did share communal mess halls. For the most part, these groups worked together without incident. But there was one violent scene in 1889 which, unfortunately, received a lot of attention.

"The most well documented conflict among workers was a violent altercation that erupted between Portuguese and Irish workers at the I.X.L. kiln complex near Felton in 1889. Referred to as 'a conflict of races' in local newspaper headlines, accounts detail how an Irishman named 'Dennis' and an unnamed Portuguese worker got into an altercation at the dinner table in the shared company mess hall. This argument erupted into a wider brawl, with sides being drawn based on ethnicity/nationality, and two Irishmen being badly beaten before fleeing to their cabin. Once account alleges that the Portuguese workers assaulted the cabin by throwing rocks badly damaging the structure and forcing the Irishmen to flee to the woods. Another account claims the Irish went to the Portuguese workers' cabin and beat them with clubs. In the end, two Portuguese and five Irish were arrested."

After 1900 the number of Portuguese lime kiln workers began to decline as they slowly assimilated into society and found better paying jobs. Some became lime kiln foremen. Many left the lime industry altogether, opting for farming, particularly dairy farming, an occupation which they eventually dominated in California throughout the rest of the 20^th century.

* For further and more detailed reading on the lime industry and lime workers in the Santa Cruz Mountains please refer to Lime Kiln Legacies: The History of the Lime Industry in Santa Cruz County by Frank Perry, Robert W. Piwarzyk, Michael D. Luther, Alverda Orlando, Allan Molho and Sierra L. Perry, 2007.

Sources: California Coast Trails; A Horseback Ride from Mexico to Oregon by J. Smeaton Chase, 1913; Life in an Industrial Village: the Archaeology of Cabin B at the Cowell Lime works Historic District, Santa Cruz, California, by Patricia L. Paramoure (Thesis, Master of Arts in Cultural Resource Management, Sonoma State University), July 12, 2010; Lime Kiln Legacies: The History of the Lime Industry in Santa Cruz County by Frank Perry, Robert W. Piwarzyk, Michael D. Luther, Alverda Orlando, Allan Molho and Sierra L. Perry, 2007; Intra-Action, Emergence, and Community-Making in the Industrial Far West: Archaeological Investigations at a Santa Cruz County Lime Kiln, 1858-1909 by David G. Hyde, (Dissertation, Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley), Spring 2019.