The 1940 Fire House: The Building the Whole Valley Turned Out For
On the evening of Saturday, May 18, 1940, a reported four thousand people came to Boulder Creek to watch a building get dedicated.
For a town of a few hundred, that is worth sitting with. The valley emptied into Boulder Creek for a fire house.
The day
The Santa Cruz Sentinel led its Monday paper with it: "Crowd Of 4000 Sees Boulder Creek Fire House Dedicated."
There was a parade of fifty floats and vehicles, led by grand marshal Santos Ornes, a descendant of one of the valley's pioneer Spanish families, followed by the Boulder Creek high school band and the Veterans of Foreign Wars. Celebrants turned out in logger and frontier outfits, some of them wearing several weeks of beard for the occasion. The route ran down Central Avenue to Redwood Rest.
Then a potluck dinner, a boxing program, and dancing at Locatelli's.
Dr. G. L. Fleming was general chairman. Clyde Larsen chaired the dedication program itself. Reuben Ralston was president of the fire department.
The building
The fire house cost $13,000 and was built to double as a community center, which is most of why the turnout made sense. A town that had been meeting in whatever hall was available was getting a room of its own.
The Evening News special section of May 17 describes it as a "dignified grey stucco building," designed by architect Lynn Duckering of 27 Front Street, Santa Cruz.
It was built under the supervision of O. P. Berthelsen, described in that same section as a man "who has at one time or another, either constructed or worked on nearly every structure in Boulder Creek."
That sentence deserves a second read. If it is even approximately true, Berthelsen is a single named builder connecting a large share of the town's standing fabric, and almost nothing else about him has been written down. He is at the top of our list of people to research.
The fittings the paper thought worth mentioning say a lot about 1940:
- a reversible furnace that doubled as an air conditioner
- modern spring track doors
- an outdoor alarm box that triggered the siren
- a siren that could also be set off by telephone
- an American LaFrance engine in the bay
And the donations say a lot about the town:
- landscaping given by Ray Hartman of Leonard Coats Nursery, Santa Cruz
- Venetian blinds by the Boulder Creek Improvement Club
- the flagpole by H. B. Spencer and Dr. W. E. Stires
Duckering turns up once more the following year, advertising himself in the Sentinel as "Architect for new Boulder Creek fire house and reconstruction of Boulder Elementary School, making it earthquake proof." That dates a seismic reconstruction of the school to roughly 1940 or 1941, very likely under the Field Act, California's school safety law passed after the 1933 Long Beach earthquake. Worth confirming before anyone states the Field Act connection outright.
What was on display
The department brought out its history. Alongside the new American LaFrance and an old Ford outfit sat the first fire-fighting equipment the town ever had: a secondhand hose cart donated decades earlier by R. C. Kirby of Santa Cruz.
The Sentinel used the occasion to explain where the department came from:
But it was fire, the uncontrolled outburst of 1891, which burned off a solid block of buildings and threatened the whole village, which brought about the fire department.
Somewhere behind the new building, in a shed, sat the McKinley Bell, waiting for a campanile that would hold it. It had hung over the old firemen's hall for years. Its name comes from President William McKinley, who rang it electrically from Washington, D.C. to open a San Francisco fair in the winter of 1897, before the Hose Company bought it in August 1898. The full account is in the fire department's history.
The oldest man in town said something worth keeping
The dedication is also the occasion on which Boulder Creek's origins got recorded, more or less by accident.
W. S. Rodgers, then 87, community leader, historian, and one of the town's first school trustees, still holding that position after roughly seventy years, told the crowd he had arrived in Boulder Creek on May 11, 1870. And he settled a naming question:
Some say that this used to be called Dogtown. I deny that. But it did have the name of Stumptown until we got busy and cleared out the stumps, built houses and made a real community out of it. Then we got a new name, Boulder Creek.
He described settlers building a little redwood schoolhouse with donated lumber and labor, and one settler's wife teaching for six months without pay so the community could qualify for state aid. He said the first cash money in the valley came from tanbark sold to the Santa Cruz tanneries.
Both of those check out against records found separately and much later. A county apportionment table from November 1872 shows a funded Boulder Creek school district drawing state and county money, which is exactly the aid that unpaid stint was aimed at. And an 1879 report on tanbark peelers in the valley documents the trade he remembered.
Two of the town's first pupils were still alive to be named that day: Fred Brimblecom and George Notley. Alongside Rodgers, Santos Ornes and Mrs. Catherine Cahill were honored as the oldest surviving pioneers.
Rodgers is also the source of a mistake worth flagging, because it shows how these recollections work. He put the railroad's arrival in 1884. The contemporary record has construction under way in March 1885 and passenger service being advertised at the end of that April. He was a year out, which is about what you would expect from a memory seventy years deep, and it is a good reason to check the charming parts of his account against paper wherever possible.
What we still do not know
The database does not establish whether the 1940 building is the structure now standing on Central Avenue or was later replaced or rebuilt. The 1931 Sanborn sheet, which would help, was never digitized. This is a question the fire district itself can almost certainly answer, and it is worth asking before anyone points at a building.
Frequently Asked Questions
When was the Boulder Creek fire station built?
The fire house was dedicated on Saturday, May 18, 1940, at a cost of $13,000. It was designed as a combined fire station and community center.
Who built the Boulder Creek fire house?
Architect Lynn Duckering of Santa Cruz designed it. Construction was supervised by O. P. Berthelsen, who the 1940 papers say had worked on nearly every structure in Boulder Creek.
How many people came to the dedication?
The Santa Cruz Sentinel reported a crowd of 4,000, with a fifty-float parade, a potluck, a boxing program, and dancing at Locatelli's.
Was Boulder Creek once called Stumptown?
According to W. S. Rodgers, who arrived in 1870 and spoke at this dedication, yes. He also specifically denied that it was ever called Dogtown. More on the town's names in how Boulder Creek got its name.
Sources: Santa Cruz Sentinel, May 19, 1940 and May 17, 1941; Santa Cruz Evening News, May 17, 1940, all held by the California Digital Newspaper Collection. If your family has photographs from the 1940 dedication, or knows what became of the McKinley Bell, please get in touch.
