Famous People Who Lived in, Grew Up in or Visited Boulder Creek

Search "famous people from Boulder Creek" and you'll mostly find the same uncited Wikipedia paragraph, copied from one list to the next and never checked. This page is built the other way around. Every person here carries an explicit label for what their actual connection to town is, and anyone whose connection didn't survive checking simply isn't on the page.

Two ground rules run underneath all of it:

• No addresses. We don't publish anyone's home address, parcel, directions, or current routine. A public connection to this town isn't a license to point at someone's house.
• Boulder Creek is not the whole valley. We keep it distinct from Felton, Ben Lomond, Brookdale, Big Basin, and Santa Cruz, because conflating them is exactly how these lists go wrong.

How the labels work

Label	Meaning
Born / Raised in Boulder Creek	Documented childhood here
Former resident	Lived here for a documented period
Publicly documented resident	Currently or recently based here per their own public professional material
Worked / Filmed in Boulder Creek	Came here for professional work, did not live here
Founded a Boulder Creek institution	Built something that existed here
Documented visitor	A specific, dated visit
Awaiting verification	Plausible, not yet proven: do not repeat as fact

Raised here

Pat Burrell: Raised in Boulder Creek

Born in 1976 in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, Burrell grew up in Boulder Creek and played San Lorenzo Valley Little League. He was the first overall pick in the 1998 MLB draft, taken by the Philadelphia Phillies, and won World Series championships with Philadelphia in 2008 and San Francisco in 2010.

One detail gets mangled constantly: there is no Boulder Creek high school. Burrell attended San Lorenzo Valley High School (which is in Felton, the valley's shared high school) for his freshman year, then transferred to Bellarmine College Prep in San Jose, where he graduated. So it's "raised in Boulder Creek," not "went to Boulder Creek High."

Evidence: confirmed. SABR biography

Paul Locatelli, S.J.: Born and raised in Boulder Creek

Born September 16, 1938, Locatelli grew up on the family ranch in Boulder Creek. Obituaries differ on the birthplace itself, some giving Boulder Creek and at least one giving Santa Cruz. His father ran Locatelli Brothers Lumber, and the family also grew walnuts and grapes, an upbringing that sits right at the intersection of this town's timber and agricultural history.

He became a Jesuit priest and an accountant, and served as the 27th president of Santa Clara University from 1988 to 2008, then as its chancellor and as Secretary for Higher Education for the Jesuits worldwide. He died July 12, 2010, in Los Gatos.

One frequently repeated detail needs care. The family's lumber land is reported to lie within what is now Big Basin Redwoods State Park. That's Big Basin, nine miles up Highway 236, not the town, and the parcel history is a research lead we haven't confirmed.

Evidence: confirmed for upbringing and career; the birthplace and the Big Basin land claim are research leads.

Former residents

Cora Evans: Former Boulder Creek resident

A Catholic convert from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Evans was a reported mystic and stigmatist who promoted a devotion she called the Mystical Humanity of Christ. She moved to Boulder Creek in the summer of 1956 and died here on March 30, 1957, at age 52. She completed her final manuscript, I Was a Pilgrim in History, in Boulder Creek.

Her canonization cause is active, and its status is frequently overstated. The Diocese of Monterey opened formal proceedings in 2010, and the diocesan phase closed with canonical rites at San Carlos Cathedral in Monterey on January 22, 2023, sending the documentation to Rome. Her title is Servant of God, the first stage of the process.

She is not Venerable, not Blessed, and not a saint. Anyone writing otherwise, in either direction, is getting ahead of the Church's own record.

Evidence: confirmed. Archdiocese of San Francisco

Christopher Hills: Founded a Boulder Creek institution; former resident

Hills (1926–1997) settled in Boulder Creek in the early 1970s and founded University of the Trees, a non-profit school and communal residence built around consciousness research, which granted its own degrees. University of the Trees Press, founded in 1976, published his books and resident students' research. The institution closed in 1994 for financial reasons, and Hills died in Boulder Creek on January 31, 1997.

He was also, improbably, a major figure in the global spirulina industry, sometimes called "the father of spirulina," with ventures in Santa Cruz, Israel, Taiwan, and Mexico, and donations of the algae to Afghanistan, Vietnam, Ethiopia, and Sri Lanka.

The dates need care. The Stanford finding aid says the Hillses founded University of the Trees Press in 1976 and that the school was accredited by the State of California in 1977; it gives no founding year for the school itself. Secondary sources put that at 1973, which the finding aid neither confirms nor contradicts.

His papers are held at Stanford as the Christopher Hills papers, M2705, in Special Collections. Note the collection title: it's not a joint collection.

Norah Hills, his wife from 1950 until her death in 1995, is widely described as co-founder of University of the Trees. That billing is thinly sourced, and we label it awaiting verification. Not because it's implausible, but because the pattern of erasing women from institutions they helped build is common enough that it deserves real evidence rather than a repeated line.

Evidence: well documented; founding year and Norah's role are research leads. Stanford finding aid

Jonathan Franzen: Awaiting verification

The novelist (The Corrections, which won the 2001 National Book Award, plus Freedom, Purity, and Crossroads) is a documented Santa Cruz resident. Published interviews describe him leaving New York for Santa Cruz full time in the 2010s without fixing a year. The Boulder Creek connection is separate and much weaker: a local-press account that he and his partner Kathy Chetkovich "first lived together in Boulder Creek," beginning around the time he started spending time in these mountains in October 1998.

No published source gives years for a Boulder Creek residence. Until one does, we're not claiming a period, and we're not treating "lives in the Santa Cruz Mountains" as equivalent to "lived in Boulder Creek."

Evidence: research lead.

Publicly documented residents

Nick Herbert: Publicly documented resident

A physicist and author based in Boulder Creek from at least the early 1980s, Herbert wrote Quantum Reality (1985), Faster Than Light (1988), and Elemental Mind (1993) here. He was part of the Fundamental Fysiks Group, the Berkeley-area circle of the late 1970s that pushed on the philosophical foundations of quantum mechanics, and later served as Fringe Science editor at Mondo 2000. He was also a figure in a Boulder Creek poetry scene known locally as the Bistroscene.

His most consequential idea is also the one most often described wrongly. Herbert's FLASH proposal (First Laser-Amplified Superluminal Hookup) suggested amplifying one photon of an entangled pair so its polarization could be read without collapsing the state, which would have allowed faster-than-light signalling.

It does not work. It was published in 1982 in Foundations of Physics on the recommendation of referee Asher Peres, who knew it was flawed and argued the flaw would be instructive. He was right. Rebuttals by Wootters and Zurek, and independently by Dieks, showed the required perfect copying is impossible, and those 1982 papers are what established and named the no-cloning theorem, now foundational to quantum information science. A 1970 paper by James Park had already proved the same impossibility and gone unnoticed.

So the accurate framing isn't "Boulder Creek physicist invented FTL communication." It's that a productive, publicly refuted error from a Boulder Creek desk helped produce one of quantum mechanics' load-bearing theorems. Sources disagree on whether he was a core or peripheral member of the Fundamental Fysiks Group.

Evidence: well documented; FLASH history confirmed. Scientific American

Jordan Hubbard: Publicly documented resident

A co-founder of FreeBSD in 1993, Hubbard wrote the Ports collection, the package tools, and sysinstall, later served as Apple's Director of Unix Technologies, was CTO at iXsystems, and now works at Nvidia. The Boulder Creek connection comes from his own self-listed professional location.

That's genuine but not independent. We list him as a documented resident and flag the sourcing, and we'd like an interview or a published profile that establishes it directly.

Evidence: well documented, self-reported.

Martan Mann: Publicly documented resident; works in Boulder Creek

A jazz pianist and educator with a master's from San Jose State, Mann is a past Improvisation Chairman of the Music Teachers' Association of California and the author of Jazz Improvisation for the Classical Pianist, New Age Improvisation for the Classical Pianist, and Improvising Blues Piano. He teaches privately from Boulder Creek and has served as house pianist for the Jazz Society of Santa Cruz jam, the latter in Santa Cruz, not here.

Evidence: well documented via his own professional material.

Institutions and the people who came to them

DigiBarn Computer Museum: Founded a Boulder Creek institution

Founded by curator Dr. Bruce Damer and Allan Lundell, DigiBarn housed a personal-computing collection inside a 90-year-old old-growth redwood barn at Ancient Oaks Farm in Boulder Creek. The collection ran from a 1962 LINC through the homebrew era to 1990s networked computing, and included a Cray-1, a Xerox Alto, and Apple and Atari machines, many kept in working order.

It survived the CZU fire. DigiBarn's own site puts it plainly: "The DigiBarn survived the 2020 CZU fire inferno!", and adds that "the fire was stopped a mile from here." That near miss changed the project's direction. Damer credits the Internet Archive for storing the museum's Apple documents collection during the emergency, and the museum has since turned toward digital preservation, "starting with an initiative to scan and preserve the rarest documents, all to be provided to you online."

A Boulder Creek barn full of irreplaceable computing history, saved by a mile of fire line, is one of the better CZU near-miss stories, and one you rarely hear.

Two things to be clear about, because most write-ups aren't:

1. It never kept regular walk-in hours. DigiBarn ran scheduled public open houses that anyone could sign up for, and outside those, access was by arrangement with the curator: scholars, computing figures, serious press.
2. The physical collection is on long-term loan to the Computer Museum at System Source in Hunt Valley, Maryland. That's DigiBarn's own statement, current as of its 2022 site update rather than confirmed for this year. The virtual museum at digibarn.com remains online.

So this article doesn't tell you that you can visit. If you want to see the collection, it's in Maryland.

On the founding date. DigiBarn's own about page dates the museum to May 7, 2001, when Bruce Damer, JM Valera, and Allan Lundell bought the first pieces of the collection. The barn itself was bought in August 1998, which is what the site's "our 25th year" line for 2022 counts from.

Evidence: CZU survival, the Maryland loan, the May 2001 founding date, and Damer's role are confirmed by DigiBarn directly. Note the site's front page still presents itself as current for 2022, so it confirms status as of then, not today.

Steve Wozniak: Documented visitor, December 14, 2006

The Apple co-founder visited Ancient Oaks Farm and DigiBarn on December 14, 2006, for a Discovery Channel interview shoot and his first tour of the collection. Present were the Discovery crew, curator Bruce Damer, Allan Lundell (who had worked with Wozniak on the 1982 US Festival), and Sellam Ismail of the Vintage Computer Festival. Filming took place among the redwoods and inside the barn, around the Cray-1, the Xerox Alto, and the Mac collection. He signed a newly delivered 24-inch iMac on his way out.

It's the best-documented celebrity visit in modern Boulder Creek history, because the host published a dated, photographed account of it.

Evidence: confirmed by primary source. DigiBarn's own record

Worked and filmed here

Beatriz Michelena: Worked and filmed in Boulder Creek

One of the first Latina stars of American silent film, and co-creator of the Poverty Flat movie set built outside town in 1915. She headed her own production company from 1917 to 1920. Full profile.

Mary Pickford: Filmed in Boulder Creek

The biggest star in the world in 1917, when she shot exteriors for Cecil B. DeMille's A Romance of the Redwoods on the Poverty Flat set. She did not live here. Full profile.

Historical figures

Joseph Wilbur Peery: Early settler; founded a Boulder Creek institution

Built a small sawmill across from Bear Creek in the early 1860s, around which the settlement of Boulder grew. He became the first postmaster when the Boulder Creek post office opened in 1872, the act that fixed the town's name. In January 1875 he founded Lorenzo, the rival town a mile south that the railroad ultimately doomed. See how the name was settled.

Still to verify

• Aric Cushing, actor and director
• Samuel H. Rambo, California State Senator
• Winfield Scott Rodgers
• Henry L. Middleton, the landowner behind the Poverty Flat set
• Josephine Clifford McCracken, writer and conservationist

Help us get this right

If you're on this list and want your entry corrected, expanded, or removed, contact us and we'll handle it. If you know of someone missing, tell us what the actual connection is and how you know: firsthand, family knowledge, or something you read. All three are useful, and each one gets labeled for what it is.

For more on the people and places behind these names, read how Boulder Creek got its name and the story of the Poverty Flat movie set that drew Hollywood into the redwoods.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is the most famous person from Boulder Creek?

Pat Burrell is the most widely known person raised here: first overall pick in the 1998 MLB draft and a two-time World Series champion. Paul Locatelli, S.J., who grew up here on the family ranch, led Santa Clara University for twenty years.

Did Steve Wozniak visit Boulder Creek?

Yes, on December 14, 2006, for a Discovery Channel shoot and a tour of the DigiBarn computer museum. The visit is documented with dated photographs by DigiBarn itself.

Can I visit the DigiBarn museum?

No. It never kept regular walk-in hours; visits came through scheduled open houses or by arrangement with the curator. DigiBarn states that the collection is on long-term loan to the Computer Museum at System Source in Hunt Valley, Maryland. The virtual museum remains online at digibarn.com. The barn itself survived the 2020 CZU fire, which stopped about a mile away.

Is Cora Evans a saint?

No. Her title is Servant of God, the first stage of the canonization process. The diocesan phase of her cause closed in January 2023 and the documentation went to Rome. She has not been declared Venerable, Blessed, or a saint.

Did Jonathan Franzen live in Boulder Creek?

Possibly, briefly, in the late 1990s, but no source gives dates, and he is a documented Santa Cruz resident. We list it as an unverified claim rather than a fact.

Why does this list have so many caveats?

Because the alternative is repeating other people's mistakes. Small-town notable-people lists get copied without checking, and a claim survives for decades on nothing but repetition. Labeling the evidence is the whole point of this page.