Timber, Sail, and Rail: An Archaeology of Industry, Immigration, and the Loma Prieta Mill

Timber, Sail, and Rail

Timber, Sail, and Rail

An Archaeology of Industry, Immigration, and the Loma Prieta Mill

Marco G. Meniketti

First published in 2020 by

Berghahn Books

www.berghahnbooks.com

© 2020 Marco G. Meniketti

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A C.I.P. cataloging record is available from the Library of Congress

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Control Number: 2020937008

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-78920-726-2 hardback

ISBN 978-1-78920-727-9 ebook

Contents

List of Illustrations, Figures, and Tables

Acknowledgments

Preface

Introduction. The Industrial Landscape of Timber

Chapter 1. Logging History in the San Francisco Bay Area

Chapter 2. The Immigration Mosaic of the West

Chapter 3. Laboring at Loma Prieta

Chapter 4. Archaeology at Loma Prieta Mill

Chapter 5. Artifacts: A Window to Life at the Mill

Conclusion. Reading Ethnicity and Class

Glossary

References

Index

Illustrations, Figures, and Tables

Illustrations

0.1    Loma Prieta Mill on Aptos Creek, circa 1891 (Site 1).

1.1    Broadside from a Marysville newspaper advertising a new shipment of circular saws for mills. Saws were regularly advertised in Marysville.

1.2    A rare period photograph of Chinese railroad workers in the Santa Cruz Area.

1.3    Oxen pulling saw logs along a skid road. Before narrow-gauge railroads, this was the only means of delivering logs to the millponds or directly to mills.

1.4    Donkey engine. This particular engine is the Willamette engine on display at Sturgeon’s Mill in Sebastopol, California. Still functional.

2.1    Bok Kai Temple in Marysville. Interior view through front door. First built in 1851, it is the oldest temple still serving the Chinese community at large. Marysville was the scene of significant anti-Chinese violence during the gold rush era.

2.2    Archaeological reconnaissance of the barkentine Jane L. Stanford. Exposing massive hanging knee. The vessel, built at Bendixsen shipyard, hauled lumber on the coast and overseas.

3.1    The author standing next to the double sixty-inch circular saw at Sturgeon’s Mill, which is comparable in size and layout to the saw at Loma Prieta Mill.

4.1    Burned original floor timbers of Loma Prieta Mill documented during initial survey.

4.2    Parallel concrete slabs that were used to form a channel for the steam-engine flywheel. The engine would have been mounted on the timber base, indicated by the bolts at the right in the image.

4.3    Photograph looking west down Aptos Creek toward Loma Prieta Mill, circa 1891. In the foreground is the quarter-mile-long millpond. On the south side are the laborers’ housing and cookhouse (Site 2).

4.4    The brick smithy hearth adjacent to the mill.

4.5    A historical spec sheet in an advertisement for an Atlas steam-mill engine. Loma Prieta Mill probably used a similar engine. The Atlas engine at Sturgeon’s Mill still operates smoothly after a hundred years.

4.6    Brick feature at Site 1. The feature was eventually revealed to be the location of the boiler for the steam engine, in direct line to the concrete slabs shown in illustration 4.2.

4.7    Exposed brickwork and poured mortar flooring at base of boiler. The upper brickwork was likely destroyed during removal of the boiler.

4.8     Boiler at Sturgeon’s Mill as an example. Note the use of firebrick to wedge and support the boiler in its iron chamber. A firebox door as shown in the image was found at the Loma Prieta site.

4.9a   Brick fragment with maker’s mark for Snowball, manufactured in England.

4.9b   Brick fragment with maker’s mark for Livermore, made in Livermore, California.

4.9c   Brick fragment with maker’s mark for T. Carr, produced in England.

4.9d   Brick fragment with maker’s mark for Carnegie, made in California.

4.10   Documenting Feature 25 at Site 2, workers’ housing area. This feature had a brick floor comprising recycled firebrick. The material culture present suggests this was a married worker’s house.

4.11   The floor of Feature 25 exposed. The structure had three levels of brickwork flooring.

4.12   Documentation of a laborer’s collapsed cabin (Site 4).

5.1    An iron belt-wheel at the mill site. With the use of fabric belts, energy from the engine could be transferred throughout the mill to operate a variety of machines.

5.2    One of several glass artifacts (lavender color). This could be a vase. Other non-bottle glass includes stemware, kerosene-lamp bases, and tumblers.

5.3    Two types of ceramic cups. Type A is more robust, and the base has a slight decorative feature. Type B is thinner and lacks any styling. Neither has a maker’s mark, but both likely conform to the makers indicated by plates as a set.

5.4    Various plates and saucers recovered near the cookhouse feature. Items A, B, C, D, and F are all plates, and E is a shallow bowl.

5.5    Representative sample of bottles. A: blank clear druggist’s panel bottle; B: Ross Belfast torpedo soda bottle, brown patina; C: molded brown beer bottle with applied lip; D: Lea & Perrins Worcestershire sauce; E: clear square druggist’s bottle.

5.6    Additional beverage bottle types from privy. A: clear; B: light blue; C: dark green wine bottle. All were mold made.

5.7    Assorted jeans rivets (Levi Strauss & Company, San Francisco), brass clasps, buttons from privy.

5.8    Two leather shoe toe ends. Note the brass nails. Several shoe parts were recovered, including tongues, heels, and panels. A few lacing hooks were also recovered.

5.9    Minerva intaglio cameo. This image is deep red. The copper alloy piece may or may not go with the cameo, but it seems likely since they were recovered in the same unit and strata. Minerva represented crafts and arts.

5.10   Pocketknife. One of three recovered from Site 1 and Site 2.

5.11   Shard of glass bottle with embossed Kanji letters. Recovered from the laborers’ housing area.

5.12   Pipe stem with the word McDougal showing. On the obverse is the word Glasgow.

5.13   Teardrop-shaped glass gravitating stopper. Lettering states patent 1887. These stoppers were common for bottles with contents under pressure, such as soda water.

5.14   One-quarter of a whetstone found near cookhouse location.

5.15   An intact whetstone of the same size as the one in illustration 5.14 mounted in its water trough. A larger whetstone is in the foreground at right. These could be used at this scale to sharpen knives and cleavers. The larger ones were used for axes. Saws were sharpened with files.

5.16   One of many narrow-gauge Shay engines operating at Loma Prieta Mill.

5.17   Butchered bone from Site 2 near the cookhouse. Ends were sawn.

5.18   Butchered bone from Site 3. All shown are beef.

5.19   Ceramics from Feature 25, possibly from a married laborer’s house. A: blue and red annular-ware; B: cream color with red annular stripe; C: porcelain teacup rim, red paint; D: pale-blue flora-decorated white-ware.

5.20   Yellowware mixing bowl and gray stoneware storage vessel. Each was recovered in the workers’ housing area near privies.

Figures

0.1    Map of the central coast of California in 1856. The Loma Prieta Mountains are visible just to the right of the large letter A in Santa Cruz.

0.2    Schematic topographic map showing the location of the study area.

1.1    Schematic map of the creeks, gulches, and locations of various mills mentioned in the text.

1.2    This schematic map of the central California coast shows the various railroad lines serving the mills near Aptos.

4.1    Site plan for Loma Prieta Mill (Site 1).

4.2    Site plan for the workers’ housing area (Site 2).

5.1    Two unit profiles from more than forty excavated. These units illustrate evidence for episodic flooding and mudslides at the mill site.

Tables

4.1    Bricks on Sites 1 and 2 with identifiable maker’s marks.

5.1    Nonindustrial domestic artifacts, Site 2.

5.2    Faunal specimen, all units (totals, not MNI).

Acknowledgments

I would like to first extend my sincere appreciation to Mark Hylkema, archaeologist of California State Parks and past president of the Society for California Archaeology, for providing access and guidance in the park and for his inspirational natural history lectures for the field school students. I wish to thank historian Kevin Newhouse and curator John Hibble, both of the Aptos History Museum, for their generous support and opportunities for public outreach. I thank the Santa Cruz Archaeological Society and San Jose State University Department of Anthropology. I also want to acknowledge the contributions of Jorge Aguilar for his compilation GIS data of railroad lines, and Juliana Cheng for her translation efforts. I wish to acknowledge the conversations with Sylvia Fisher concerning Sturgeon’s Mill. I would like to express my appreciation to the editors of the Journal of the Society for Industrial Archeology for graciously allowing the use of research that previously appeared in the SIA Journal, which has been thoroughly expanded in this book. I would like to thank the librarian of the University of California, Santa Cruz Library, for permission to use the Santa Cruz Oral History Project interviews conducted by Elizabeth Calciano. I wish to extend special gratitude to the many field school students for their enthusiastic labor in the forest from 2015–2017. Field staff: Arianna Heathcote, Colin Jaramillo, Marissa Massaro, and Rebecca Spitzer. Crews: Gibran Adham, Danci Bert, Eliane Bauer, Ethan Brooks, Jessica Brooks, Jonathan D’Sa, Berglind Erlingsdotter, Harrison Foo, Erika Harvey, Elizabeth Hill, Leslie Hoefert, Emily Jackson, Danielle Jacobsma, Amanda Jorgenson, Megan Leckie, Rodrigo Martinez, Alyssa Pappas, Celeste Ramos, Tim Rodriguez (our drone pilot), Elliot Summers, Aaron Van Valen, Edwin Victorine, Colette Witcher, and Emily Yuriar, Special thanks to Lisa Stapleton for tracking down data on silent era films in the Loma Prieta area, and to my capable lab assistants who diligently explored the origins and uses of many of our artifacts: Duffy Barrett, Lucy Chiem, Sean Davis, Tor Heggelund, Steven Simpson, and Kanya Yoshihiro. Finally, I want to express my sincere appreciation to the external reviewers and copy editors of early versions of manuscripts whose feedback and constructive critique undoubtedly improved this book significantly.

Preface

KILT, n. A costume sometimes worn by Scotchmen in America and Americans in Scotland.

—Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

The constructs of race, ethnicity, heritage, and culture over the past three decades have increasingly become enmeshed in the world of historical archaeology under a rubric of identity. The general public, politicians, and—far too often—archaeologists themselves are likely to conflate one or more of these terms, use them interchangeably, or imagine these highly charged concepts immutable. My choice of Ambrose Bierce, the Wickedest Man in San Francisco, as he was sometimes known (Bean 1968, 246), to open this preface serves dual purposes: First, his acerbic wit and perceptive intellect, although deeply flawed by bitter self-loathing, frequently cut through the issues of his day, some of which resonate with the social conflicts of our own times. Second, his definition of kilt highlights the problems of associating material culture display too closely with ethnicity or identity.

The issue of ethnicity has long been a concern of mine. As an American of both Italian and Irish/Scottish heritage I have been keenly aware of externally derived identity and preconceptions. Perhaps parentage is a better word than heritage. Since childhood I have been cognizant that definitions and use of the terms race, ethnicity, or heritage are fluid and often downright incorrect. I am the descendant of immigrants, as indeed we all are unless a person’s ancestry is from one of the First Nations. My paternal grandfather came to the United States about 1909. As I type this manuscript, I am drinking coffee from a mug emblazoned with the Nichols crest, a nod to my mother’s Scottish heritage. My mother’s people; as she liked to say, arrived in the 1690s in Virginia as dirt folk, meaning as poor indentured farmers. Her family did not stray far and she was eventually born in a coal-mining town in Virginia in the 1920s. My mother used to say that her family was shocked when she married, not because she, raised a Protestant, had married an Italian Catholic, but because she had dared venture west and married a Californian! The mentality of her relatives was such that they accepted their class as a given. When she pursued a college degree to become a school teacher—one of the few professional occupations open to women in her day—she was accused by an aunt of trying to get above her station. This sentiment, my mother used to say, has kept many generations of families in the mines. Family tradition held that we were related to Sir Walter Raleigh. Intensive genealogical study by my mother’s uncle did not substantiate this story, and it appears I was the only one of my relations to be disappointed. Links to June Carter Cash, however, thrilled many of my Appalachian relations.

Until quite recently I had never been to Italy, do not speak Italian, and my only real flirtation with my Scottish roots are when I occasionally wear the family tartan to the Scottish Games held annually in Pleasanton, California. I have been to clan gatherings where I witness varying degrees of ethnicity on display. I have yet to visit Scotland or Ireland. How can I be referred to, then, as either an Italian American or a Scots/Irish American? Are terms like ethnicity, heritage, and culture being conflated with DNA? Is there a gene for ethnic identity? What is heritage in this case?

As I undertook Loma Prieta Mill project to reconstruct the industry in early California, I continually discovered intersections between my heritage, my family links, and the experiences of the immigrant groups that populated the mill camps. It would be misleading to suggest that these intersections offered significant insights for analysis, but they did provide a deeper understanding of the trajectories different groups followed that landed them in the forests.

Ordinarily, an author of a research project such as the study presented in this book remains outside the narrative, but after consulting with colleagues I decided to remain attached, and to insert pertinent commentary whenever intersections are evident that underscore the outcomes of the immigrant experience. I am the product of immigration. My family is a result of immigrant groups merging, and it would be disingenuous to suggest the experiences of my immigrant lineage play no part in my life. These were not the motivations for this book, but a realization of the processes exposed in the study. My paternal grandparents emigrated from Italy in the first decade of the twentieth century while my mother’s family has been in Virginia and Kentucky since before the Revolution, having emigrated from Scotland and Ireland. My mother was born and raised in coal-mining towns. Learning, for instance, that Italians tended to be in the sawmills helped explain to some extent my wife’s paternal grandfather’s role at Pacific Saw Works. The path to America of many Portuguese in California, arriving on whaling ships, and particularly Azoreans by way of Hawaii, matched her maternal grandmother’s parents, who were Portuguese from Hawaii. Little by little the intersections added up to the point where it was not possible to examine the timber industry without seeing immigration and labor as the cornerstones of the study.

As I write this in 2018, the issue of immigration is subject to considerable divisive politics. The tenor of the polemic and the nature of the attacks on immigrant groups have been harsh, ugly, and violent. Yet the arguments, the rhetoric, and the characterizations of immigrants are not new. As will be made evident in this volume, many of the vitriolic and disparaging diatribes used by politicians and by anti-immigration sectors are nearly word for word what I found in historical sources. The arguments against groups today resonate with the arguments of the past; both are inspired by fear. The groups being targeted and that are suffering from the onslaught have changed, and then only marginally. Fears that a particular group represents a threat to the livelihood of working-class men and women or to our way of life, or that particular groups refuse to assimilate used as an excuse to discriminate against them were as common a hundred years ago as today. Such a stance, however, denies the genuine contribution immigrants from everywhere have made and continue to make to America and to its continuing prosperity. In California, with its tumultuous beginnings as an American state following the gold rush, the population has always been comprised of immigrants, yet here too the anti-immigrant rhetoric is shrill. In this book I attempt to shed light on one small aspect of the immigrant experience through an examination of the many communities associated with the timber industry and how they came to labor in the forest.

The timber industry in California was a capitalist enterprise. Regardless of the size of the milling operations, capitalization, and the means of getting the highly desired commodified natural resources to market were crucial elements in success. The larger companies often had deep-pocket investors and a few owners shared ownership of other mills. As the industry developed, so too did related industries. Shipping grew with the need to get lumber from the forests to the markets, cities grew as forests were cut to construct homes from the redwood, fir, and pine. Rail increased the speed and volume with which lumber could be delivered and lumber supported the rails. Population growth was matched with an increase in milling and forests were harvested at a quickening pace into the early twentieth century. At each step the better-capitalized companies profited. At each step success depended on immigrant labor.

The Gilded Age that overlaps my period of study was one where rampant unchecked capitalism reigned and economic monopoly was the goal of industrial power. An example I provide in this book was the way Claus Spreckels integrated timber, shipping, rail, and capital to become one of California’s richest men. His story intersects with Loma Prieta Mill through capital interest, investment in the Southern Pacific Railroad, and his importation of Japanese laborers for work in the forests and at his sugar factories. The exploitation of immigrant labor by Spreckels and others like him often purposely cast workers of different nationalities against one another and catalyzed raw emotions that savaged early California labor relations.

Organization of This Book

There are three threads braided together in this study. The first is the history of technological and capitalist development of an extractive industry that profoundly influenced communities and engineered environmental change. The communities are manifest in two forms: as towns, and as distinct populations with shared immigrant status. The second thread is a contextualized examination of the many immigrant groups that came to California and found their way into the timber mills. These groups, whose ethnic identities were derived from their foreign nationalities, can be understood best from the perspective of diasporic communities whether forming true communities or not, often defined externally as not part of Anglo America. The third thread running throughout the study is the very question of ethnicity and its itinerant relationship with concepts of class and class affiliation.

The Introduction offers an overview of how these three areas of study intersect, and probes the concepts of ethnicity, immigrant workers, and the societal landscape the workers found themselves in and to which they contributed their labor. Timber as an extractive industry is explored and contextualized within a capitalist framework.

Chapter 1 narrows the scope somewhat to examine the immigration of different groups to the United States and the diverse motivations bringing them to California. The history of timbering from the Spanish period through to the early Anglo period is outlined, and the ascendancy of the industry in the state is presented with a focus on the San Francisco Bay Area and the mills in Santa Cruz County beyond the San Francisco Bay with Loma Prieta Mill serving as a case study.

Chapter 2 shifts the focus to intersecting industries through the lens of shipping and the carriage trade in moving timber from forest to market, and explores occupational stereotyping based on perceived ethnic attributes while examining the role of organized labor in maintaining divisions.

Chapter 3 describes the composition of the labor force and characterizes the many occupations that constitute the timber industry ranging from fallers to sawyers. The position of timbering in the industrial labor hierarchy is discussed to demonstrate how capitalists’ maintained control over labor and fostered tensions between groups. The way in which specific occupations became associated with particular ethnic groups and the stereotyping of occupations along ethnic lines is examined. The impact on the natural environment of unsustainable forest clearing and unbridled timber operations is emphasized in historical perspective.

Chapter 4 presents the archaeology of Loma Prieta Mill as it unfolded over three seasons and our efforts to reconstruct the mill landscape, to understand the remains and scale of operations, and the fieldwork carried out to locate the laborers’ housing area. Environmental data is presented to corroborate documentary evidence for various episodes of flooding and landslides experienced at the mill.

Chapter 5 describes and assesses the material culture recovered from three sites associated with Loma Prieta Mill, with a focus on domestic and personal items of the workers. In this context the subjects of ethnicity and class are investigated as the various artifact categories are addressed. The premise of detecting ethnicity and class through material culture is revisited to reveal that discerning ethnicity remains problematic.

The concluding chapter is an analysis of the timber industry and returns the discourse to the concepts of ethnicity and class as it emerges in the context of this study and revisits the difficulties of ascribing material culture to the ethnic categories while synthesizing the findings. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the way in which class, ethnicity, and labor intersected in the lumber mills, with class a dominant factor.

As is the case with most industrial operations, the timber industry and its laborers have their own unique and colorful jargon, slang, and often opaque terminology for various processes or pieces of equipment. While some mechanisms may bear the name of its inventor, other equipment might be descriptive and related to function. Take the term misery whip, for example. One can conjure up an impression of the tool without seeing it in action. In other cases, the terminology is simply vulgar, stemming from the bigotry of the day. I provide a glossary for common terminology used historically in the timber industry. Not all terms in the glossary are used in this book but are included to be thorough. Some terminology has infiltrated the mundane world and is in use colloquially in modified forms, such as skid row, derived from skid road, suggesting a close relationship between the early timber industry and urban life. Perhaps the regular passage of timber labor between the two worlds influenced the adoption of terms into the vernacular. The movement of labor between the forests and the towns, which may also have been a vector for industrial language making its way into common use, will be illustrated in the chapters as the story of immigration, ethnicity, and industry is brought to light.

INTRODUCTION

The Industrial Landscape of Timber

Narrative at times has the power to transcend fragmentation across social settings and through individual time, and to chart the different ways in which individuals act and are acted upon.

—Giovanna Vitelli, 2013

She was born in Wright’s Camp on 23 April 1908, and named Regina. Her birth certificate states her parents were both Italian, recent immigrants to California: Her father was a farmer and her mother was a housekeeper. Wright’s was one of several lumber camps nestled into the mountains of Santa Cruz in an area near what is today a forested state park.¹ She grew up in a region of active timber milling at a significant period in the expansion of timbering throughout the state. Although a farmer, her father also worked in the forest as a contract timber cutter. Her story and that of thousands of others who journeyed to California in the nineteenth century offers insights into the immigrant experience in the extractive industries that propelled California’s economic growth at the start of the twentieth century.

Immigration has been an important area of research within many social science disciplines but few have explicitly examined the issue in the context of timbering or in terms of the contribution various immigrant groups made to the prosperity of