Boulder Creek's Main Street in 1891, Building by Building

Nobody ever wrote a directory of Boulder Creek's business district in the 1880s. What exists instead is a list of what burned.

When fire destroyed the town's two central blocks on July 16, 1891, the Santa Cruz Surf printed a building-by-building inventory of the loss, in order, walking down one side of the street and back up the other. It is an odd way to acquire a streetscape, and it is the most detailed picture of downtown Boulder Creek available for any date before the insurance maps start in 1892.

Here it is, in the order the paper gave it.

The west side

Starting at the corner opposite the Cunningham store, which was the one building in either block that survived the night:

1. George H. Holloway, saloon
2. A vacant store room
3. J. A. Bernheim, jewelry store
4. W. G. Sawin, fruit store. Sawin was the local agent for the Santa Cruz Surf and other papers, which is very likely why this list is as good as it is.
5. A vacant lot, 20 feet wide
6. The Central Hotel, owned by Howard West, occupied by Lew Weber. This is the "Central House" named in the first telephoned bulletin at 1:30 that morning.
7. The Enterprise Saloon, S. S. Johnson, with the residence of his bartender I. O. Fish behind it, a barn, and a disused shooting gallery. The fire started in the kitchen behind this building.
8. John Levick, saloon and club rooms
9. Andy Baldwin, restaurant and lodging house
10. Levick's residence

The east side, fronting Main Street

1. Herring & Daveley, butchers
2. Wm. Walker, saloon
3. A barber shop. The barber was Luke Dennison, who had a tent pitched on this spot before noon the next day.
4. A shoe shop, with rooms behind
5. M. Sarmento, saloon, club house and residence. Sarmento's was the largest single loss of the fire at $4,000.
6. Dougherty & Middleton, hay barn
7. McAbee's residence and livery stable

Behind that block, fronting the railroad, stood seven cottages, all destroyed.

The streets named in the report are Main, Oak and Railroad.

What the list tells you about the town

Count the saloons. Holloway, the Enterprise, Levick's, Walker's, Sarmento's, and the paper's summary elsewhere puts the total at six. In two blocks.

That is a lumber town at the end of a railroad line, with a floating population of mill and woods workers coming into town with pay. It is also the practical background to a thing people repeat about early Boulder Creek without a source: the "Dodge City of California" nickname. We have not found that phrase in an original newspaper, and we are not going to assert it. But six saloons in the two blocks that burned is a documented number, and it sits alongside another one: after the town incorporated in 1902 and its council raised the saloon license fee twice, the count came down to eight.

Notice also what is not on the list. There is no drug store, no bank, no church, no school. Those existed or arrived, but not in these two blocks. The town's $4,000 schoolhouse had been built the year before, and the Methodist and Presbyterian churches were elsewhere. The absence of a drug store turns out to matter, and we come back to it below.

And notice the mix. A jewelry store and a candy store sat between saloons and a livery stable. This was not a camp. It was a town with 800 people in it that expected to keep growing.

The map picks up where the list stops

The first Sanborn fire insurance map of Boulder Creek was surveyed in June 1892, eleven months after the fire, and the town is caught mid-rebuild. Four storefronts on prime Main Street frontage of block 29 are labeled "Vac. S." for vacant store. By the 1897 survey, all four are occupied.

The 1892 map also carries the best single annotation in the whole series. The general store at the north end of block 30 is marked with 100 fire buckets distributed on the roof, two roof hydrants, a roof ladder, and three lengths of hose. A merchant was running a private fire brigade on his own roof, one year after the fire, in a town whose own map cover said it had no fire appliances at all.

Two other continuities are worth having:

• The hotel was renamed, not rebuilt. "Morgan Ho." on the 1892 map occupies the same footprint as "Alpine Ho." in 1897 and 1908.
• A Chinese laundry stands on the same block south of Lomond in 1892, 1897 and 1908, which pushes the documented Chinese business presence in Boulder Creek back sixteen years from where we previously had it.

The corner the fire did not touch

One absence on the loss list turns out to matter. There is no drug store among the burned buildings, and there is a good reason: it was a block away, and it stayed put for the next sixty years.

A drug store holds the same footprint at the southeast corner of Main and Forest on the 1892, 1897 and 1908 maps, with saloons opposite it in every one of those years. The 1892 sheet stacks three labels into that one building: Drugs. / Dr's. Off. / White Laundry T.C., with a wash room behind. By 1897 it is down to the single word Drugs.

The name follows in the papers without a break. J. H. Armistead purchased the Boulder Creek Pharmacy on July 28, 1896, and a purchase means the business was already older than that. The same Armistead becomes the town's first treasurer when Boulder Creek incorporates six years later. From there the chain runs to new owners in July 1931, Victor Zahlout that August, the Elgins selling in June 1937, a modernization that November, and Jep and Pat Anderson in May 1941.

The detail worth keeping is from November 4, 1931: "Dr. Johannes will keep office hours at the Boulder Creek pharmacy Monday and Wednesday mornings." The town had no resident physician, so the drug store was where you saw a doctor, two mornings a week. And the 1892 map shows that was not an improvisation. There had been a doctor's office in that building forty years earlier.

So this corner is a story about continuity, not turnover, which makes it the exact opposite of the two blocks that burned. One caution before anyone calls the standing building Victorian: the store was rebuilt in the autumn of 1937, and a one-storey building went up adjoining it in April 1938. Whatever is there now has that seam in it.

One trap worth naming for anyone trying this at home. Do not align by street number. The numbering in these eras is nothing like today's five-digit addresses, and the "Main St" of the 1908 map is the street now signed as Central Avenue and Highway 9. Align by footprint, corner and neighbor, or you will confidently place a building a block from where it stood.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many saloons did Boulder Creek have?

Six burned in the two central blocks in the July 1891 fire. After incorporation in 1902 the town council raised the saloon license fee twice, and the number in town fell to eight. Those are the two documented counts we have.

Was Boulder Creek really called the "Dodge City of California"?

The phrase gets repeated locally, but we have not traced it to an original newspaper, so we do not state it as fact. If you have seen it in print somewhere with a date, please tell us.

Did the pharmacy downtown used to be a saloon?

The record says no, at least for the corner of Main and Forest. A drug store occupies that footprint on the 1892, 1897 and 1908 insurance maps, and the Boulder Creek Pharmacy name runs continuously in the newspapers from 1896 onward, so there is no gap in which a saloon stood there and was later replaced by a druggist. Saloons were across the street, not on that corner.

What is the oldest building in downtown Boulder Creek?

Uncertain, and contested. The historical marker at Grace Episcopal, built 1906, calls it the oldest surviving building in town, but other markers from the same body date buildings to the 1890s. What is clear is that the 1891 fire is the reason so little downtown fabric predates the 1890s.

Where can I see these maps?

The Sanborn fire insurance maps of Boulder Creek for 1892, 1897 and 1908 are digitized and free at the Library of Congress. The 1931 sheet was never digitized.

Source: Santa Cruz Daily Surf, July 17, 1891, held by the California Digital Newspaper Collection, and the Sanborn fire insurance maps of Boulder Creek for 1892, 1897 and 1908 at the Library of Congress. For the night itself, see the 1891 fire. If you know which present-day storefront sits on any of these footprints, that is exactly the knowledge the maps cannot supply, and we would like to hear it.