Author: June Morrall

Hatch’s Mill, circa 1910. Photo: Ken Fisher

“The Purisima” (pardon me for spelling two different ways: Purissima, now Purisima) is located south of Half Moon Bay and west of present day tree-lined Skyline Blvd near somewhat remote Kings Mountain.

Purdy Pharis’s mill stood in the middle of nowhere and the frustration of moving large bundles of shingles to market quickly led to experimentation. After a while Purdy sought the services of an outside engineer who built a mile-long tramway and cable, with a lift of 1,000 feet, which transported hundreds of shingles from the depths of the beautiful canyon to the breathtaking mountaintop. But serious accidents put an abrupt end to the experiment.

Purdy wasn’t working alone in the Purisima. Besides his tough crew, in the immediate vicinity stood the famous George Borden and Rufus Hatch lumber mill. South of the top of Kings Mountain stood “Grabtown”–a temporary “village” and resting place for tired loggers moving wood from the dark green canyons to the busy port of Redwood City. To the west in the direction of the Pacific Ocean, where the forest abruptly ended, farmer Henry Dobbel was busy planting rows of potatoes that would be shipped to San Francisco.

After handling hundreds of thousands of shingles, Purdy Pharis was crowned the “Shingle King.”

But apparently the notoriety didn’t spoil him. When Purdy’s employees tried to demonstrate their esteem for him by shining his dirty boots, according to “Sawmills in the Redwoods,” Pharis seemed embarassed and looked for the nearest dust piles to dirty them once again.

…To Be Continued….

It was the fall of 1853, and the stunning madrone trees’ berries were turning red when Purdy Pharis first set foot on Kings Mountain.

According to legend, he lost his way hiking in the trail-less forest. After wandering about all night, Purdy stumbled into a camp at sunrise and met a friendly fellow who was busily making shingles with a saw and axe. He was producing them from the redwood scraps left behind by the loggers–leftovers the lumbermen considered worthless.

The encounter led Purdy to conclude that a single person could handle the shingle business–in stark contrast to the lumber mill owners who had to hire different crews for each step, from the loggint to the finished lumber. Most enticing about shingle-making ws that not only could one person produce them, one person could carry them out of the isolated canyon riding a pack horse. By contrast, lumber mill owners had their hands full maneuvering the huge logs from the forest to market.

The book, “Sawmills in the Redwoods”, published by the San Mateo County History Museum in 1967, tells the story of the men who occupied the Peninsula’s redwood forest in those early years. Author Dr. Frank M. Stanger demonstrated how one man easily could manage the shingle business. In the book, he described how Purdy Pharis could have helped himself to a tree, chopped it down, sawed it into a shingle or shake-length blocks, and finally split the blocks into finished shingles or shakes.

After meeting that man in the logging camp, according to local lore, Purdy Pharis went into the shingle business for himself. He started on a small scale but when outside demand increased, Purdy expanded by establishing a shingle mill, with bunk and cookhouse in the beautiful and isolated, deep and narrow Purissima Canyon.

…To be continued…

In 1884 a coroner’s jury determined that Sheldon Purdy Pharis had taen his own life at his Kings Mountain home–but some friends and neighbors remained skeptical, suspecting that the 55-year-old “Shingle King” actually might have been murdered.

At the time of his death, Purdy Pharis was a well-respected mill owner who had resided in the San Mateo County redwoods for more than three decades. He was a lifelong bachelor,a solitary fellow who loved the outdoors.

Purdy Pharis was 25 when he made the trek from his native New York to California in 1853, via the Isthmus of Panama. There was the mandatory short stint in the gold fields but Purdy never mined a nugget–the majestic redwoods south of San Francisco would shape his future.

A different kind of “gold rush” was taking place in the “City by the Bay”. There was an insatiable appetite for lumber to build houses, stores, hospitals and more.

The lumber was in a beautiful but remote forest of redwood trees on the Peninsula, next door to San Francisco. (Redwood, a treasured wood, is soft, resistant to rot and insects, and easy to work with).

A few lumber mills already had appeared, but getting the lumber out of the deep, narrow canyons was a monumental challenge–and the man who solved that problem could make a fortune.

…To be continued…