The Night Boulder Creek Burned: July 16, 1891

At half past one on the morning of Thursday, July 16, 1891, a telephone rang in Santa Cruz with news from up the valley. The Santa Cruz Surf printed it a few hours later, before anyone knew how bad it was:

BOULDER ON FIRE. A Late Message Tells of a Big Conflagration. At 1:30 o'clock this morning a telephone message was received which said that Boulder Creek was all on fire. The Central House was burning, and the flames were raging in all the buildings in its proximity on both sides of the street.

By daylight the business district of Boulder Creek had stopped existing. Every building in the town's two central blocks was gone except one, and the town had nothing to fight the fire with. It is the largest single event in the town's history that almost nobody talks about now, and the contemporary record of it is unusually complete.

What burned

The Surf's full account the next day called it "the most destructive fire that ever visited this county." The fire ran between one and three in the morning. The one building left standing was the store originally put up by Cunningham & Co., by then owned by Dougherty & Middleton.

The loss list reads like an inventory of what a lumber town actually needed:

• a large hotel
• six saloons
• a jewelry store
• a restaurant, a candy store and a fruit store
• a livery stable and a blacksmith shop
• several dwellings

All of them frame buildings. Thirteen families were left without a home. Behind the east-side block, fronting the railroad, seven cottages burned as well.

The Surf put the aggregate loss at $40,000, with the individual figures computed by Supervisor W. D. Rodgers. The largest single loss was M. Sarmento's, at $4,000 in building and stock. McAbee Bros. lost a $2,500 stable and a $500 residence.

Papers around the state ran it on the front page the next morning with bigger numbers. The San Jose Mercury-news headed it "BOULDER BURNED... Every Building But One in the Business Portion of Town Destroyed." A Morning Press headline put the loss at $80,000. Both figures were early estimates made within a day, and neither is better evidenced than the other, so we report the range rather than picking.

How it started

The fire was first seen at twenty minutes before one by Mrs. Bigley, who lived on a street overlooking the business district and raised the alarm.

It began in the kitchen behind S. S. Johnson's Enterprise saloon, in a room used as a residence by his bartender, I. O. Fish. Fish said no fire had been lit in that room all day, because the family had eaten a cold supper. On that basis the Surf concluded the blaze "undoubtedly was of incendiary origin."

That is a nineteenth-century newspaper's judgment, not a finding. No arrest or inquest has turned up in the record so far. What can be said is that the paper closest to the event, reporting the day after, believed the fire was set.

Why the town could only watch

One sentence in the Surf's account explains the whole night, and it is the reason this fire shaped everything that came after:

Boulder is well supplied with water for domestic use, but lacking in power for fire purposes. Without any organized fire company and practically without water, there was nothing possible to do but to let the fire take its course.

Boulder Creek in July 1891 had roughly 800 people, a railroad terminus, a freight yard, a $4,000 schoolhouse built the year before, two churches, and no fire department at all.

Two days later the Surf ran an editorial headed "Forty Thousand Dollars", which is the clearest statement of the lesson anyone drew at the time:

...the tuition fee the town of Boulder has paid to learn the lesson that there is no safety for a town or city without water supply for fire protection... a high hill just in the rear of the town from whence any required "head" of water could be secured. All that was required... was to excavate storage cisterns at a cost not to exceed $3,000 and it would have been impossible for Boulder to burn.

The town built what the editorial described, slowly. The Sanborn insurance map of 1892 still records no fire engines, no hose carts, and water facilities rated "not good." By June 1897 the map shows a volunteer company of thirty men with a hose cart and 400 feet of hose, plus nine hydrants. By 1908 there are two concrete reservoirs on the hill west of town, 285 feet above Main Street, delivering 125 pounds of gravity pressure. That is the 1891 editorial, built.

The people who paid the tuition are the same people who built it. Articles of incorporation for the Boulder Creek Hose Company Building Association were filed with the Secretary of State in December 1894. Four of its seven directors, Sarmento, McAbee, Middleton and Hollenbeck, are names on the 1891 loss list. The full story of that is in how Boulder Creek got its fire department.

What happened next, immediately

Rebuilding started before the ashes were cold. The barber, Luke Dennison, had a tent pitched on the site of his shop before noon the following day. A builder had orders to start a new building for John Levick and expected it ready for business by Saturday night. Howard West and M. Sarmento both ordered lumber that same day, for a new hotel and a new store.

They were, after all, standing in the middle of one of the largest lumber-shipping points in the United States. Redwood was the one thing nobody had to wait for.

And it was not the only fire that year

1891 was a bad year in the valley generally.

• July 16: the town fire.
• August 26: fire above Boulder Creek destroyed roughly 800 cords of wood and two bridges. The Surf described the Boulder valley as "a perfect furnace for three days."
• October 26: Dougherty's Mill, near Boulder Creek, burned, at a reported loss of $50,000.

Three major fires in four months, in a town whose entire economy was cut wood.

Where the town stood afterward

The census the town reported to its own insurance mapmakers tells the rest. Around 800 people in the Surf's 1891 estimate; 500 on the Sanborn map of 1892; 500 again in 1897; 700 by 1908. The town lost roughly a third of its population in the decade after the fire, and the redwood trade was slumping at the same time. The Surf itself called 1891 "a dull year for Boulder."

Boulder Creek got it back, and then some. But the downtown that burned in 1891 is not the downtown that stands now, and that is the practical reason so few buildings here are older than the 1890s.

Frequently Asked Questions

Did Boulder Creek really burn down?

The business district did. On July 16, 1891, fire destroyed every building in the two central blocks except one store, including a hotel and six saloons, and left thirteen families homeless. Houses outside those blocks survived, so the town was not wiped off the map, but its commercial core was.

What caused the 1891 Boulder Creek fire?

It began in a kitchen behind the Enterprise saloon, in a room where the occupant said no fire had been lit that day. The Santa Cruz Surf concluded it was "undoubtedly of incendiary origin," meaning arson was suspected. No prosecution has been found in the record.

How much damage did the fire do?

The Santa Cruz Surf put the loss at $40,000. Statewide papers the same week reported up to $80,000. Both were estimates made within a day or two of the fire.

Why was there no fire department?

There simply wasn't one yet. The Surf states directly that the town was "without any organized fire company and practically without water." The department came into being after this fire, and the Hose Company Building Association was incorporated in December 1894.

Is this the same as the 1897 fire people mention?

No. The fire of April 14, 1897 destroyed the neighboring village of Lorenzo, a mile south, and is a separate and much smaller event. The two are easy to confuse, partly because some out-of-county papers filed the Lorenzo fire under a Boulder Creek headline.

Sources for this article are the Santa Cruz Daily Surf of July 16, 17 and 18, 1891, held by the California Digital Newspaper Collection, together with the Sanborn fire insurance maps of 1892, 1897 and 1908. If your family was here for it, or you have papers or photographs from the rebuild, we would like to hear from you.