A BUCKEYE'S OPINION

Author's Personal Collection

Thanks to the search capabilities of historic documents now online, mentions of Big Trees Grove can be found in some of the most unlikely places. The resort gets a brief but interesting description in the book The Western Reserve of Ohio and Some of Its Pioneers, Places and Women’s Clubs, by William G. Rose, 1914-1915.

 

"At Santa Cruz … we were driven over a six-mile wagon road up the beautiful [Powder Mill] canyon to the Big Tree grove. This has 100 trees, from ten to twenty feet in diameter. The largest is 310 feet high, 63 feet in circumference, 21 feet in diameter, and 100 feet to the first limb."

 

"Our driver, who has been fifty years in California, said this one tree would, if made into cordwood and placed on a wagon, would reach over two miles; also that the lumber in it would build forty houses of six rooms each."

 

"The trees are well proportioned; there are several clusters, but the black and charred stumps tell of a destruction wasteful and extravagant. Everybody of our party spoke in favor of Congress preserving these trees. No time or money can restore them, and when once gone no imagination can supply their place."

 

"It is of the sequoia variety and is unique, of solid structure, tall, straight trunk and built as if to stand for centuries. All other woods seem trifling and ephemeral. Congress has saved for us Niagara and the Adirondacks, and the Yosemite; let it also save the big trees of Santa Cruz."

 

By the time this Ohio author reflected upon the need for preservation of the redwoods, Big Trees Grove had been preserved and open to the public as a resort for over forty-five years. Like many visitors to the resort after 1900, he noted the stark contrast between the logging scarred hillsides of San Lorenzo Canyon and the pristine beauty of Big Trees Grove, one of the last untouched groves of coast redwood giants in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Though the much larger, newly established state park, Big Basin, contained more and larger trees, the extra fifteen-mile journey to it was often not taken by time conscious tourists until the 1920s. 

 

Though this Buckeye's hope for the preservation future of Big Trees Grove did not involve the Federal government, the grove did finally attain government protection, first through Santa Cruz County in 1930 and then permanently through the State of California in 1954 as our beloved Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park.