Category: Coastside History

A part of this flood washed over San Mateo County. Little towns knit together. Presently the Southern Pacific paralleled the Camino. Maybe a single block of stores, hotels and saloons. Then scattered cottages of early commuters.

Stores still featured the Western false front. Brick began to be used and was popular until the 1906 earthquake. With most of the square false fronts lying in the streets, it speedily became much less esteemed.

San Francisco’s wealthy, always conscious of the weather that in 1817 caused the Franciscans of Dolores Mission to build a place in the sun for their chilled staff to recuperate at San Rafael, began to move down the peninsula. The warm eastern slopes of the hills charmed them.

William Ralston spearheaded the move. Even before the railroad was built, he had a palace of wooden lace erected at Belmont. There with fast horses and continuing demands for good roads, he became the first commuter. First in what a flood!

This was a time uninhibited by social restraints as the days of the French Louis’. Huge fortunes had been swiftly made in silver, in railroads, in shipping, sugar and pineapple. Taxes were negligible. Labor was cheap.

Exuberant, fantastic and lavish palaces and chateaux rose like mushrooms in the favored hills.

…to be continued..

(Photo: Galen Wolf works on the family car in Half Moon Bay, circa 1912).

For a century, the Spanish century, little changed along El Camino Real. Nothing could be called a town. Horsemen sauntered or gaily, wildly raced.

Under the oaks the poppies bloomed, the “cup of gold” of the Spaniard. Cattle lazily grazed. Elk moved among them in the easy truce of the herbivorous.

On occasion, a grizzly might lurch from a scrub thicket to break the neck of a young bull. Sometimes a panther dropped like a stone from his tree perch. At night, the coyote sang hysterically to the stars.

Cattle had little value except for hide or tallow. The Indian got his fill of meat and the Spaniard in joyous fiesta and ceremony counted his long and serene days.

No one foresaw the changes the gold find was to bring. No one saw the endless caravans and the fleets of windjammers that would populate the state a hundred fold in a few years. And would change the government and way of life for all time.

…to be continued…

“St. Matthew’s Land,” Part II by Coastside Artist Galen Wolf

On the riders’ left hand rose the blue and misty ridge of a wooded range. Beyond the ridge lay the sea.

The salt smell of marshes and the glint of a great bay was to their right. Brown frocked Franciscan brothers rode the mules. Ragged and patch Indians accompanied them.

The cavalcade camped at the creek of San Francisquito, and again at a stream that emerged from low hills and flowed through the present San Mateo. They passed on to the founding of Dolores Mission.

It was a peninsula over which the riders travelled. It had the joy and excitement that waters bring to a land.

No one could forget that across the world wide sea lay the Tropic Isles, China and Japan. In its deeps lived huge whale and myriads of fish. Men lived here that set forth to sea for adventure and livelihood.

Captains built high white houses. Fishermen assembled huts of beach drift.

Hills ran like a spine the length of this land. They were blue with forest and with haze. In the midst of a taming land they remained wild. With their deer, bear and panther, their turbulent lumber camps, with creeks cool in fern choked canyons, they were a remote island between two growing populations.

…to be continued…

“St. Matthew’s Land” by Coastside artist Galen Wolfe written to accompany a series of paintings of Peninsula landmarks on display at the San Mateo Library in 1961.

Part I

St. Matthew’s land is San Mateo County.

A county is more than a political subdivision, more than its acres and population and improvements.

It is always, and foremost, a great human story. The eventful lives of its people, the legends and traditions, make the tale, make the rich personality of this land.

Unlike the Sierra, San Mateo County had no gold and little traffic in six guns. [I have never heard of this term, “six guns.” Anyone know?] But to offset the brash and rowdy thrill of this hectic and short-lived world, our county has a history more than twice as long. And far more varied.

It roughly divides into two parts, each looking over a century. The first was passed in the tranquil sleep of the Spaniard. The second awoke to the accelerating pace of an American state.

Years before the shots at Lexington were fired, the tiny hooves of mules were trudging ankle deep in the alluvial dust of the peninsula. They tinkled in the stony dry creek beds.

El Camino Real was being etched by these patient hooves, a road that was to be the ribbon of life in California for a hundred years. And in the county which became, for another hundred years. Amid changes inconceivable to the humble cavalcade of its beginning.

…to be continued…