Camp Capitola celebrates its 150th anniversary this year, and 150 years since it was named Capitola. Everywhere you look, you can see the influence of the strong-willed women of its founding days, and at least one ghost.
From camp to rancho
Capitola is just one of the names given to this little Eden. It was first named “Soquel” (pronounced “Sokell”) by the native Ohlone people. This is probably Sickel in the Santa Cruz Native American dialect, meaning both whale and rainbow, because whales carry rainbows in water tornadoes. The longer version is “Osokari,” which has Ohlone roots of “uss” (nose), “si” (water), and “calay” (sea), literally meaning “nose of the sea” or “tornado of the sea.” Leon Rowland thought Soquel meant “place of willows.” However, in the local Ohlone dialect, “Ewitak” (pronounced “Eweetok”) is the actual term for place of willows. There may have been an Ohlone place of willows in what is now downtown Soquel, but it was the Soquel River that caused the name Soquel to spread inland.
In 1791, Mission Santa Cruz was established to indoctrinate the natives with Spanish customs, and in 1797, the Spanish colonial town of Branciforte was founded. However, Spanish land transfers were temporary and returned to the Crown upon the death of the transferee, so no one owned the land or its wealth except the King. Mexico then gained independence from Spain in 1821 and began making permanent land transfers in 1833. However, California’s program lasted only 13 years, with 270 transfers made statewide (22 in Santa Cruz County).
The first local land grant in 1833 gave Rancho Aptos to Rafael Castro and Rancho Soquel to his sister Martina Castro Lodge, who received Rancho Rodeo in 1834. Martina became the first woman to hold a land grant, and when she extended her ranch to the top of the Soquel Extension Grant in 1844, she became the largest landowner in the county with 34,370 acres. She was an early shoemaker and now raised cattle for leather and tallow, sheep for wool, and horses for speed, as well as poultry and vegetables. She hired John Hames and John Dobinbiss to build a sawmill for timber production. Martina was a shrewd businesswoman and, along with her Irish husband Michael Lodge, was beloved by all who knew her. Lodge made $20,000 during the Gold Rush, but was murdered in 1849 while trying to bring it back to Santa Cruz.
Distraught at the loss of her soul mate, Martina quickly tried to move on by marrying former sailor Louis DePauw. DePauw could read and write French, Spanish, and English. Martina was illiterate and only spoke Spanish, so instead of being an asset to Martina, DePauw controlled Martina with his short temper and drove his children away from this unhappy home. Martina divided the estate into nine portions for her eight children and herself. However, misfortune and abuse continued, as her husband was arrested as a Navy deserter, they fought in court over ownership of the land, and then she herself disappeared and was found hospitalized in a mental hospital. The children tried to save her, but they found out she was not hospitalized and had been held captive for months because no one spoke her language. In fact, she was later determined to be sane. Martina returned to Rancho Soquel, but soon the land was owned only by her daughter Mary Guadalupe Castro and Mary’s husband Joseph Avelon. Martina spent her final 30 years on the Avellone family’s increasingly gracious estate, feeling the love she deserved as she watched the former rancho grow into a grand dame of California resorts.
Soquel Landing
Along the shore, a place called Soquel Landing was an important shipping port for lumber, potatoes (a boom failed), flour, and porter’s hides (used to make shoes for prisoners at San Quentin). However, it was more efficient to load lumber onto schooners from a pier, so in 1857 the Soquel Landing wharf was built. What was called Soquel Landing was actually on Rancho Rodeo land, west of Soquel Creek, and was served by a wharf road. In 1865 Hinn bought the forested land of the Soquel Extension and helped extend the wharf to accommodate deep-sea schooners. As whales congregated in Soquel Bay, Captain John P. Davenport (who had established a land-based whaling business in Monterey in 1849) moved his land-based whaling company to Soquel Landing in 1865, and then to Davenport Landing in 1867. Other exports were paper, sugar cake, linseed oil and wooden chairs.
Hall’s Camp
Samuel Alonzo Hall was a shipwright who came to Soquel to build a Congregational Church. He leased the riverside flats at Soquel Landing from Frederick Augustus Hearn in 1869. Hall grew crops while completing the Congregational Church in 1870. Soquel had hoped to become the new county seat, but when that did not happen, he offered to have the state capital in 1868. Hall built cottages (around the site of what would later become the Capitola Theatre), and then in the summer people from scorching Fresno asked to camp on his land because of its proximity to Soquel Lagoon and Soquel Beach. Hall thought it would do no harm as long as it did not interfere with his crops. In 1873, his daughter Lulu arrived with her two children. They were happy to be reunited, but the situation turned tragic.
As a child, Lulu loved music, poetry and independent thinking. Both she and her father inherited the fiery eyes and outspoken attitude of their ancestor, Oliver Cromwell. Lulu was educated at the state’s first seminary for women from 1863 to 1866, and later taught at the State School for the Deaf and Blind. In 1868 she moved to Soquel, where she founded a Sunday school with Narcissa Parrish and later helped organize the Soquel Congregational Church. The school had a reading room where books and periodicals were available, often featuring the provocative serials that Lulu loved, such as “The Hidden Hand,” a hit in the New York Ledger that year.
Lulu taught at the nearby Mountain School until she married Harvey Green in 1871 and moved to the secluded North Shore town of Pescadero, where she gave birth to Herbert and Mattie. But in 1873, she went to live with her father in Soquel Landing. Her husband had just been murdered in Pescadero, and she was afraid to raise her children in such a remote home. Her way of healing from the trauma was to throw herself into work, helping her father with farm work and hosting summer guests. As always, Lulu came up with some solutions, but her strong will would not let them go. Her father must have said, “You’re just like Capitola.”
Capitola is the heroine of the novel The Hidden Hand, serialized from 1868 to 1869. It tells the story of a poor boy who survives among beggars and street children in New York. He is actually a cross-dressing young woman named Capitola Black, whose disguise gives her a decent job and protection from the “wolves”. Major Warfield learns that she has been taken to New York by her mother, who fears for her safety. Warfield finds Capitola and brings her home, but must fend off kidnappers and assassins (the Hidden Hand). However, she shows feminine cleverness, strength and independence.
Capitola’s struggles and character seem to resemble those of the writer Eden Southworth, whose husband had abandoned her two children, and who began writing to support her family and become quite independent. Like her friend Harriet Beecher Stowe, Southworth supported social change and women’s rights, and in her novels she challenged society’s restrictive roles for women. Of her 60 books, “The Hidden Hand,” featuring Miss Capitola as the main character, was her most popular.
So on June 18, 1874, what was originally “Hall’s Camp” was renamed “Camp Capitola” after Lull’s alter-ego, and opened with great fanfare on the Fourth of July. Many assumed this was because Soquel was a candidate for the state legislature, but perhaps Lull was joking. But the name was fitting, for like Miss Capitola, the camp became “a popular resort, especially with those who prefer to ‘camp out’ in tents or shabby board huts.” It was for the unpretentious, and the Sentinel reminded the campers of fledgling mining camps, a collection of tents and unpainted huts. Despite this sleazy advertising, 500 people visited in the summer of 1874, and in 1889, the Surf concluded that “Capitola, like the little heroine for whom it is named, has long made a place in the hearts of many of her admirers.”
Hin’s Railway
Meanwhile, landowner and now state representative F.A. Hinn was struggling to form a coalition to build a railroad to Santa Cruz. Watsonville did not like the idea of paying a subsidy to build something for the benefit of the city of Santa Cruz. After all, just across the Pajaro River, the Southern Pacific Railroad had a stop at “Watsonville Junction” that connected Watsonville to the state railroad, but it did not connect to the rest of the county. By the time Hinn formed the coalition, he had built a railroad along the coast, connecting his land, but not through places that would oppose the line. He had plans to bring the line into the county two miles south of Watsonville. This finally brought the Watsonville leaders to the negotiating table, and the line was connected to Watsonville.
Camp Capitola was little more than a resort on Soquel Beach in Soquel. In 1875, Hinn built a trestle bridge across Soquel Creek and established the first station near the railroad overpass on Wharf Road. It would be a freight railroad, which would be cheaper than shipping by sea. But the Halls saw the potential for railroad tourism at Camp Capitola. Carolyn Swift writes that tent campers stayed for free or rented cabins for $1.50 and paid to store their horses in Hall’s stables near the trestle bridge. But the stables were damaged by the 1877 drought, which caused hay prices to soar. Hinn, a landowner, pooled money to build a small hotel at Camp Capitola and donated lumber for a bathhouse, outbuildings, and wooden walkways.
But when the Halls’ lease came up for renewal in 1879, Hinn raised the rent more than the Halls could afford, so they left to manage several resorts in the area that became Sea Bright. But Martina Castro Lodge and Lulu Hall were visionaries who saw something much more in this paradise, much like Miss Capitola, even though she was only a vision on printed paper.
Watch for free
“Little City Under Canvas” will run through the end of December at the Capitola Historical Museum (410 Capitola Ave.), Friday through Sunday from noon to 4 p.m.
Further reading
“City of Capitola Historical Background Statement” by Carolyn Swift, 2004.
