Lorenzo: The Town Boulder Creek Swallowed

Town & History
Written By Adrienne Gaughan

Boulder Creek used to have a rival, close enough to walk to. About a mile south of the village then called Boulder sat a second town with its own sawmill, its own hotel and store, and for a decade, the upper valley's lumber trade. It was called Lorenzo. Boulder Creek didn't beat it in any dramatic way. It got the railroad, and then, slowly, it got everything else.

Two villages, a mile apart

Rail historian Derek Whaley describes the area before unification as two rival villages: Boulder, on the north side of the creek that gave it its name, and Lorenzo, about a mile south (Railroads of the Santa Cruz Mountains, p. 243). They were separate places with separate ambitions, and they competed for everything, down to the post office.

The naming side of this story is covered in how Boulder Creek got its name. This article is about the town that lost.

Peery builds a town

Both villages trace back to the same man. Joseph Wilburn Peery built his sawmill north of Boulder Creek in the early 1860s, which is roughly where the settlement of Boulder began. In 1868 he moved the mill two miles south, and there, per Whaley (p. 246), he later built his town.

The town itself came in January 1875, laid out on land Peery bought mostly from Frank L. Pitt, who owned the lumber mill immediately north of the site. Local historian Lisa Robinson's The San Lorenzo Valley (Arcadia Publishing, 2012) sketches what grew there: a hotel, a store, a few dwellings, and Peery's own sawmill, known as Silver Mills (p. 19). Small, but complete. A town, not a camp.

The valley's shipping point

The timing wasn't an accident. That same year, 1875, the San Lorenzo Valley flume opened, the wooden waterway that carried sawn lumber down the valley to the railhead at Felton. And when the flume company set up its local station, it put it at Lorenzo, south of Boulder.

That decision mattered more than any other in Lorenzo's short life. The station made Lorenzo the place where the upper valley's lumber met its route to market, and for the next ten years the trade ran through the rival town down the road. Our history of the San Lorenzo Valley flume tells that whole story; in 1875, whoever held the flume held the valley's commerce.

The post office feud

The rivalry wasn't polite, and the clearest evidence is what happened to the mail. Whaley and Robinson give different years for the sequence, so this account keeps to the decade.

In the mid-1870s, a storekeeper named Charles Cottrell succeeded Peery as Boulder Creek's postmaster. Cottrell's store was in Lorenzo, so he took the post office with him, moving it about a mile south to his own counter. Robinson adds the detail that made it a scandal: liquor was sold on the premises (p. 19). Residents up the road now walked a mile for their letters, to a store in the rival town, over a bar.

They didn't take it quietly. Seventy-two residents signed a petition to the postmaster general in Washington demanding the office come back, and it did, when David Hossack replaced Cottrell as postmaster. The dates remain disputed. Robinson puts the affair at 1874 to 1876 and Whaley runs it a year or two later. The Santa Cruz Weekly Sentinel of 3 March 1877 still describes J. Peery as the Boulder Creek postmaster, and reports him planning a notion store. That report names Peery as postmaster in March 1877, but does not by itself rule out an intervening Cottrell tenure. Postal appointment records are still needed to settle the sequence.

The railroad picks a winner

What the flume gave Lorenzo, the railroad took away.

When the Felton & Pescadero Railroad pushed up the valley in the mid-1880s, its terminus was the prize. Whichever town got the freight yard got the future, and Lorenzo, the established shipping point, should have been the favorite. It lost for two reasons, per Whaley (p. 247). The surveyors found the site too small for the large freight yard the railroad wanted, and Lorenzo's own residents, seeing the railroad coming, raised their land prices in hopes of an easy profit. The railroad declined to pay and continued to a vacant timber tract just south of Boulder.

Then it built its own town on it. James F. Cunningham was hired to clear and stump the 160-acre redwood tract, the felled trees became railroad ties, and the railroad sold the lots beside its new yard for businesses and homes. The station took its name from the nearby Boulder Creek Hotel, and the name quickly spread to the whole community on both sides of the creek. The rival villages hadn't merged so much as been outgrown by a third thing, the one with the railhead.

Robinson's The San Lorenzo Valley Flume records the end of Lorenzo's shipping era: on May 14, 1885, the last load of lumber ran down the flume from Lorenzo to Felton, and crews began pulling that stretch apart (p. 55). Three weeks earlier, on April 26, the first train had reached Boulder Creek. A decade as the valley's shipping point ended in one spring.

The long fade

Lorenzo didn't vanish in 1885, and the "town that burned down" version you'll sometimes hear doesn't hold up either. The village kept its station and its village life for decades. It took real damage in the kitchen fire of April 1897, but insurance surveyors mapped a standing, functioning town two months after the fire, and again in 1908 it was larger rather than smaller, with three churches and a skating rink. Our name-origin article walks through that evidence.

What 1885 decided wasn't whether Lorenzo would exist. It decided which town would grow. Boulder Creek got the yard, the lots, the mills, and eventually the name for the whole district, a story our short history of Boulder Creek picks up. Lorenzo got a slow slide into being the south end of somewhere else. No original Lorenzo building is known to survive, and the surest trace is the name itself, still on the river, the valley, and the old townsite land south of downtown where the historical society places it.

For where these events sit among everything else, see the Boulder Creek history timeline.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where was Lorenzo?

About a mile south of the original village of Boulder, in what's now the southern approach to Boulder Creek. No original buildings survive, so there's no "there" to visit.

Who founded Lorenzo?

Joseph Wilburn Peery, the same sawmill man whose first mill anchored the settlement of Boulder. He moved his mill south in 1868 and laid out Lorenzo in January 1875 on land bought mostly from Frank L. Pitt.

Why did the railroad skip Lorenzo?

Two reasons, by Whaley's account: surveyors judged the site too small for a major freight yard, and Lorenzo's residents raised their land prices hoping to profit from the railroad's arrival. The railroad bought a vacant 160-acre tract near Boulder instead.

Did Lorenzo burn down in 1897?

No. The April 1897 kitchen fire did real damage, but the Sanborn fire insurance maps show the village standing in June 1897 and still growing in July 1908. Lorenzo faded over decades rather than ending in one night.

What's left of Lorenzo today?

The name, mostly, still on the river and the valley the town was named after, and on the townsite land the historical society identifies at the south end of town. If you know of a marker, a street, or a family connection to Lorenzo, we'd like to hear about it.

For the rest of the town's past, see the short history of Boulder Creek and the history timeline. Today's town lives in the business directory. Corrections and family stories are welcome, especially anything with a date attached: tell us.

Sources

Links checked 16 August 2026.

Adrienne Gaughan
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