The Flume: How Boulder Creek Floated Its Lumber to Felton
Before the railroad, Boulder Creek's problem was not cutting redwood. It was getting redwood out.
The valley had more standing timber than almost anywhere in California and a road down to Felton that a loaded wagon could ruin itself on. The answer, for about a decade, was to float the lumber out on water, down a wooden trough built along the river.
What it was
A V-flume: two planks meeting at an angle to make a trough, carried on trestles, fed by creek water, running downhill the whole way. Rough-cut boards went in at the top and came out at Felton, where the railroad took them to Santa Cruz and the coastal schooners.
The flume company incorporated in August 1874 and the flume opened in October 1875, running nine miles from a headworks just over two miles north of Boulder Creek down to Felton. That length comes from Lisa Robinson's primary-source history of the flume for the San Lorenzo Valley Museum, which pinned the head's location with an 1875 diary. A mural panel in town puts the length at fourteen miles and says it stood over sixty feet high in places; the fourteen-mile figure is a local legend the museum's research retired.
The company's name is genuinely unsettled. Rail historian Derek Whaley's pages render it both as the San Lorenzo Valley Flume & Lumber Company and the Flume & Transportation Company. W. S. Rodgers, recalling it in 1940, called it the San Lorenzo Transport and Flume Company of San Jose, and credited it with being the thing that first opened Boulder Creek to the outside world, improving the road as well as building the trough. We report the variance rather than picking a winner.
It ran earlier than the standard story says
Two items in the Santa Cruz Weekly Sentinel push the system back before the usual 1875 opening.
In September 1873, a branch flume or feeder was reported as planned for extension up Boulder Creek, Bear Creek and the central fork. That is two years ahead of the accepted date, and it suggests either an earlier start or a longer construction period than the tidy version allows.
And in June 1876, with the flume barely a year old by the standard account, the paper reported it "working like a charm," with about twenty-five men employed on it. The same issue noted the road from Felton to Boulder Creek was in splendid condition and being sprinkled for dust, which is a nice reminder that the flume and the road were working alongside each other, not in sequence.
The best day it ever had
The single most useful number for understanding what this thing did comes from the Sentinel of June 25, 1881:
Friday of last week, inside of nine hours, 116,400 feet of lumber were run through the Felton flume. This is the most work ever done in any one day by the flume, and its capacity has probably more than doubled during the last six months.
More than 116,000 board feet, in under nine hours, on water. That is roughly a board foot every quarter of a second, all day, coming out of a mountain valley with no railroad in it.
The same page reports a steam sawmill being finished for Peery four miles above Boulder Creek, sitting right alongside the flume, and Chase & Co's sawmill on Boulder Creek starting up. The flume was not a curiosity. It was the spine that the mills arranged themselves along.
Why it failed anyway
For all that, nobody who used it seems to have liked it much.
Whaley's company history records the problems, and they showed up almost immediately. The forty-inch trough could not keep up with what the valley was cutting. It leaked. Its water supply ran dangerously low every summer, in a place where the dry season is long and reliable. A severe winter storm in early 1876 damaged it badly. An 1881 item notes simply that "the Boulder Creek flume is headless," and a feeder had been carried away by a storm in February 1878.
Rodgers, seventy years later, gave the shortest verdict: the flume was not a success, for lack of swift running water.
The economics settled it. In 1879 the South Pacific Coast Railroad bought the flume company outright, which is what a railroad does when it wants a right of way rather than a trough. In June 1883 it incorporated a subsidiary, the Felton & Pescadero Railroad, to replace the flume with rails.
The day it was cut in half
The end is precisely dated, and it is one of the better small scenes in the valley's record. From the Sentinel of May 16, 1885:
The last shipment of lumber was sent down the flume from Boulder Creek Thursday. The flume has been cut in twain to allow the railroad to cross. Hundreds of thousands of feet of lumber, shakes, etc., have been sent down the flume since it was built, about ten years ago.
Cut in two, so the thing replacing it could get past. The railroad reached Boulder Creek in April 1885, and crews tore out the flume along the new route as they went.
The stretch north of town outlived that demolition. With no rails yet beyond Boulder Creek, the upper-valley mills kept floating lumber down to the freight yard, and the Brimblecom family's account journals record their last flume shipments in early February 1888, the latest documented use. What finally ended it was the Dougherty Extension Railroad, built north from town in 1887 precisely because the flume could not keep up with the biggest mill's output.
Ten years, give or take. Then the trains, which ran for another forty-nine.
What is left
Not much. A flume is trestles and planks in a river canyon, and the San Lorenzo has flooded repeatedly since 1885. There is no maintained public flume trail.
What survives is the shape of the valley's economy. The flume is why mills clustered along the upper San Lorenzo instead of near the coast, and why Boulder Creek was already a lumber town when the railroad decided where to put its terminus. For the rest of that story, see the logging boom and the railroad that replaced the flume.
Frequently Asked Questions
What was the San Lorenzo Valley flume?
A V-shaped wooden trough, carried on trestles and fed by creek water, that floated rough-cut lumber nine miles from the upper San Lorenzo Valley down to the railroad at Felton. It opened around October 1875.
How much lumber could the flume carry?
On its record day in June 1881 it moved 116,400 board feet in under nine hours, which the Santa Cruz Sentinel called the most work ever done by the flume in a single day.
Why did they stop using the flume?
It leaked, it could not keep up with the valley's output, and its water supply ran low every summer. The South Pacific Coast Railroad bought the flume company in 1879 and replaced the trough with a rail line, which reached Boulder Creek in April 1885.
When was the flume torn out?
The last load went down in May 1885. The flume was cut in two to let the new railroad cross, and crews removed it along the rail route.
Can I see any of the flume today?
No public remains are known, and there is no flume trail. Photographs and artifacts are best sought at the San Lorenzo Valley Museum.
Sources: Santa Cruz Weekly Sentinel, September 13, 1873, June 10, 1876 and June 25, 1881; Santa Cruz Sentinel, May 16, 1885; Santa Cruz Sentinel, May 19, 1940, all held by the California Digital Newspaper Collection; and Derek Whaley's Santa Cruz Trains. If you have a photograph of the flume, especially one showing where it crossed a road, we would like to see it.
