The Logging Boom: When Boulder Creek Ran on Timber

For about half a century, the town had one job: cut the redwood and get it down out of the mountains. Rail historian Derek Whaley, whose Santa Cruz Trains project is the best-documented account of this era, writes that Boulder Creek was one of the largest exporters of lumber in the United States from 1885 to 1915. That's not small-town boosterism about a small town. It's the reason the town is here at all, and the near-loss of the forest around it is the reason Big Basin exists.

Here's how a valley of thousand-year-old trees became a lumber capital, and what the boom left standing when it was over.

The forest before the saws

Start with what the loggers found. The Santa Cruz Mountains held roughly 300 square miles of ancient redwood forest, and the Sempervirens Fund doesn't soften it: in the late 1800s, most of it was "logged down to bald hills." Trees a thousand years old and older came down in a few decades.

That forest wasn't wilderness in the empty sense. People have lived in this region for more than 10,000 years, according to the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History, and the Awaswas-speaking peoples here tended the landscape rather than simply occupying it. Their descendants in the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band steward ancestral lands in these mountains today through the Amah Mutsun Land Trust. The logging era wasn't the beginning of human history in this valley. It was a violent interruption of a much longer one.

First mills on the upper river

Commercial logging reached the upper San Lorenzo Valley in the early 1860s, when Joseph Wilbur Peery put up a small sawmill across from Bear Creek. A settlement called Boulder grew up around the milling work, got a post office named Boulder Creek in 1872, and kept the name.

The early operations stayed small and local because they had to. A mill in the 1860s could cut lumber all day, but hauling it down a rough mountain road to Santa Cruz was slow, costly work. That one bottleneck kept the upper valley quiet through its first decade.

The flume years, 1875 to 1885

The first real attempt to break the bottleneck was a wooden trough. A flume company incorporated in August 1874 (Whaley's pages render the name as both the San Lorenzo Valley Flume & Lumber Company and the Flume & Transportation Company) began construction in early 1875, and by that October a V-shaped flume was carrying rough-cut lumber roughly twelve miles from the upper San Lorenzo down to Felton, where it met the railroad to Santa Cruz. The company built a large mill near the confluence of Kings Creek and the San Lorenzo River, upstream of town, and Whaley's company history records that the flume turned the little settlement of Boulder into a much more substantial Boulder Creek.

It also records the flume's problems, and they showed up almost at once. The 40-inch trough couldn't keep up with the valley's lumber output, it leaked, and its water supply ran dangerously low every summer. A severe winter storm in early 1876 damaged it badly. Seventy years later W. S. Rodgers, who had watched it work, put the failure in one line: the flume was never a success, for lack of swift running water.

The contemporary papers push the system earlier than the usual 1875 date and show it running better than its reputation suggests. A branch flume up Boulder Creek and Bear Creek was already being reported in September 1873. By June 1876 the Santa Cruz Weekly Sentinel had it "working like a charm" with about twenty-five men employed on it. And on one Friday in June 1881 the flume moved 116,400 feet of lumber in under nine hours, which the paper called the most work ever done in a single day, noting the flume's capacity had more than doubled in six months.

So the railroad took over. In 1879 the South Pacific Coast Railroad bought the flume company, and in June 1883 it incorporated a subsidiary, the Felton & Pescadero Railroad, to replace the trough with rails. When the narrow-gauge line reached Boulder Creek in April 1885, crews tore out the flume along the route. The trough era lasted ten years.

The boom, 1885 to 1915

The railroad changed the scale of everything. With the first train in April 1885, Boulder Creek became the end of the line and the shipping point for every mill working the upper valley, and Whaley records more than 800 people arriving to support the local industries, many of them living in town year-round. Lumber went out by the trainload for thirty years, the stretch when Whaley ranks Boulder Creek among the largest lumber exporters in the country.

The clearest picture of how industrial it got is the railroad the loggers built for themselves. After the Santa Clara Valley Mill & Lumber Company's mill burned in 1886, brothers James and William P. Dougherty didn't wait for Southern Pacific to extend the branch. In the late winter of 1887 they started building their own narrow-gauge line, the Dougherty Extension Railroad, running north from the Boulder Creek freight yard along the San Lorenzo River.

By 1899 it reached its furthest point upriver, a bend of the San Lorenzo in the shadow of Castle Rock Ridge. Spurs served a string of operations: Ephraim Bradbury Morrell's mill at Two Bar Creek, Cunningham & Company, and the S. H. Chase Lumber Company among them.

The number that conveys the scale best comes from a 1940 retrospective in the Santa Cruz Evening News, written when men who had worked the boom were still alive to be interviewed. In the 1880s and 1890s, it said, the trade supported "no fewer than 25 sawmills within a five-mile radius of the town of Boulder Creek alone," part of more than 300 saw and shingle mills operating in the Santa Cruz Mountains since the 1840s. By 1940 three principal sawmills were left in the region. Treat those figures as an informed estimate from an old logger rather than a survey, but the shape is right: this was not a town with a mill, it was a town inside a mill district.

The same account dates the technical shift. By 1876 most water-powered mills had given way to steam mills running high-speed circular saws that could turn out 25,000 to 30,000 feet a day, while bull teams were still dragging the logs to them into the early 1900s.

Demand rarely let up. The San Lorenzo Valley Chamber of Commerce notes that the whole valley ran as a logging center in these years, and that San Francisco's rebuilding after the 1906 earthquake pushed demand for local lumber even higher. The quake and fire that devastated the city barely touched Boulder Creek, and the town spent the next several years shipping the redwood that rebuilt it.

Running out of trees

The boom ended the way every cut-out-and-get-out boom ends. By the early 1900s the big timber within reach of the rails was going fast, and mills began closing as the accessible stands ran out. The Dougherty line's regular service wound down around 1915, and on April 4, 1917, its rails were sold for scrap, feeding the steel demand of the First World War.

Downriver, the Southern Pacific branch hung on with resort passengers and lighter freight, but the direction was set. Passenger trains gave way to buses in 1931, and in January 1934 the last freight train left Boulder Creek.

Whaley's one-line summary of what followed is the fairest one: the town "transitioned begrudgingly from a lumber town to a tourist town." The mills and the freight yard gave way to summer cabins and resort traffic, and the town settled into the quieter shape it still has. Our short history of Boulder Creek follows that longer arc.

The trees that were saved

The logging story has a second ending, nine miles up the road. By 1900, most of Big Basin's old growth was privately owned, and Whaley's Big Basin history notes that businessman Henry L. Middleton had bought up the majority of the basin intending to harvest it. That May, a group led by San Jose photographer Andrew P. Hill camped in the basin, formed the Sempervirens Club, and passed a hat that collected 32 dollars to start the campaign. Two years of lobbying produced a state bill in 1901, and in 1902 California bought 3,800 acres of ancient forest, which the Sempervirens Fund calls the first park established in the current state park system.

Big Basin Redwoods State Park now preserves more than 18,000 acres, including the largest continuous stand of ancient coast redwoods south of San Francisco. The 2020 CZU fire burned through 97 percent of the park, but most of the old growth survived, which says something about what those trees have already lived through. The full preservation story is in our article on how Big Basin became California's first state park.

What you can still see today

The logging era hides in plain sight around town. The San Lorenzo Valley Museum at 12547 Highway 9 keeps the photographs, tools, and records of the mill years, and it's the right first stop if this article leaves you wanting more.

Along the river between Ben Lomond and Boulder Creek, concrete piers and sawed-off pilings from the railroad still stand in and beside the water, though most of the old right-of-way now runs through private property, so look from public road crossings rather than wandering the grade.

And the second-growth redwoods on every ridge around town are the boom's most visible legacy. Nearly all of them sprouted from the stumps the loggers left, which means the forest you drive through on Highway 9 is itself an artifact of the timber years, still quietly repairing the damage.

Frequently Asked Questions

When was Boulder Creek's logging era?

Commercial milling started in the early 1860s with Joseph Wilbur Peery's small sawmill, but the industrial boom ran from the railroad's arrival in April 1885 until about 1915, when the accessible big timber was largely gone. The last freight train left town in January 1934.

How did lumber get out of the valley before the railroad?

From 1875 to 1885, a twelve-mile V-shaped flume floated rough-cut lumber from the upper San Lorenzo Valley down to Felton. It leaked, ran short of water in summer, and couldn't handle the valley's output, so the South Pacific Coast Railroad replaced it with the rail line that reached Boulder Creek in 1885.

Was all the old-growth forest around Boulder Creek cut down?

Most of it. The Sempervirens Fund estimates roughly 300 square miles of ancient redwood in the Santa Cruz Mountains were logged in the late 1800s. The major surviving old growth near Boulder Creek is in Big Basin, which the state began protecting with a 3,800-acre purchase in 1902.

What was the Dougherty Extension Railroad?

A private narrow-gauge logging railroad the Dougherty brothers built north from Boulder Creek starting in 1887 for the Santa Clara Valley Mill & Lumber Company. It grew several miles up the canyon and served a string of mills. Service ended around 1915 and the rails were sold for scrap in 1917.

Where can I see remnants of the logging era?

The San Lorenzo Valley Museum in Boulder Creek covers the period in depth, and concrete piers and cut-off pilings from the rail line are still visible along the San Lorenzo River, mostly viewable from public crossings since much of the old route is private property. Big Basin's old growth shows what the whole range once looked like.

Once you start noticing the mill-era bones, the town gets harder to drive through without stopping. Trace the rest of the arc, from resort cabins to today, in our short history of Boulder Creek, or plan an afternoon around the photographs and tools at the San Lorenzo Valley Museum on Highway 9.