• How am I related to John Hames? How did I find out?
• I've lived in Soquel 30 years and didn't learn until about a year and a half ago that John Hames, founder of Soquel, was my relative, and that his wife, Drucilla, is buried only a few hundred yards from my house in the IOOF Cemetery.
• John Hames is my great great great grand uncle. I'm related to him by marriage. His wife, Drucilla, is my blood relative, and she is my great great great grand aunt. John is one of the earliest American settlers of California.
• A family genealogist and distant cousin, Nathan Haines, who I'd never known, contacted me to tell me that I was related to the founder of the town I lived in. He located me through my sister, who had been talking with him about our pioneer relatives in Oregon, who came to the Willamette Valley in 1845.
• I came with my parents from eastern Washington to California. As a child, I remember going to pioneer picnics in the Blue Mountains of Eastern Oregon. Many of my relatives in attendance at those reunions were related to Drucilla Shadden, wife of John Hames, the founder of Soquel.
• I've known about my family history in Oregon for many years, but didn't know about the Shaddens. Drucilla's maiden name is Shadden. That's the name on her gravestone here in Soquel: "Drucilla Shadden". Her father is my great great great grandfather. My great grandmother, Rose Shadden Walden, is buried in Seaside. She died in 1957. I remember her from my childhood. She sold her homesteaded ranch in Oregon in the 1950s and moved to Seaside. That's all we ever knew about the Shadden family until a year and a half ago.
• I don't know if the Oregon family and the California family kept in close contact. There's nothing in the family oral history to connect the two. When Drucilla died in 1882 my great grandmother and Drucilla's niece, Rose, would have been about five years old, so it's possible that Drucilla knew of my great grandmother. I like to think that there was a living link between the two of them, but there doesn't seem to be any way to verify that. The grandfather of my great grandmother Rose was Drucilla's brother, Jasper. Jasper Shadden and his wife, Maria, were murdered by Mexican nationals in California in the gold rush era, and their daughter, Ellen, was returned by the US Cavalry to Thomas Jefferson Shadden in Oregon who became responsible for her upbringing.
• I've tried to locate other family members close by in Santa Cruz County that I may be related to, but so far have had no luck. Last names change through marriage and people have moved around.
• Most of what I've found out about John Hames is through the pioneer exhibit in the Soquel Library on Porter Street, thanks to Dick Nutter and others who've worked to preserve the history of Soquel.
• John and Drucilla's oldest daughter, Martha or "Mattie", used to come and speak about the Hames family at Soquel pioneer picnics and at historical society luncheons. I believe the last one she attended was in the late 1930s. She also kept a scrapbook which is in the California History Museum in Sacramento. Mattie died in 1944 and is buried next to her mother, Drucilla, here in Soquel.
• I did learn a little more about John Hames' brother, Benjamin, through some long lost relatives that I met through the internet on a genealogy website.
•          Benjamin is the founder of Corralitos. Hames Road is named after him. Brother John built the first mill at Corralitos and then gave it to his brother Benjamin. There are quite a few interesting stories written about Benjamin. One of the most interesting has to do with his daughter, Rebecca, and how her first husband was murdered by a roving band, the roving band was brought to justice by a judge in San Luis Obispo County who had them all publicly lynched, and Rebecca wound up marrying the judge's brother, who was publisher of the town newspaper.
• Many members of Benjamin's family are buried at the cemetery on the grounds of Mission San Luis Obispo.
• I also managed to locate a distant cousin who lives in Reno by the name of Elgen Long who is writing a book about Thomas Jefferson Shadden. Elgen and his wife are aviators and have searched in the south seas for the wreckage of Amelia Earhart and have written and published a book about their discovery. Elgen came to me for information on Drucilla.
• Where did John and Drucilla Hames come from?
• John Hames was born in Osage, New York on March 22, 1811. His father was Benjamin Hames Senior and his mother was named Rebecca Harding.  His father was a surveyor and millwright by trade and a native of New York state. Benjamin came west in the early days of western expansion and settled in  Battle Creek, Michigan, where he built the first mill. He died there in 1850. His mother, Rebecca, was born near Rochester, New York.
• John sailed on the ship Phoenix. around Cape Horn, after living and working in Chile, Ecuador and Peru for a year or two. He worked as a ship's carpenter. His brother, also named Benjamin, arrived in Chile a year later and married a Chilean. John continued on to California and landed first in Monterey in May, 1843. His brother Benjamin stayed in Chile another year or two before also coming to Monterey.
• John Hames was Soquel's first American-born citizen. He was not the first English-speaking resident. That distinction went to Michael Lodge, who arrived in Soquel in 1833 from Ireland and married into the Castro family. Daubenbiss came to Soquel in 1843, a few months after John Hames.
• John built his first lumber mill at Niles Station, California, in 1844-45 for General Vallejo.
• John met his future wife Drucilla in either Monterey or Sutter's Fort (Sacramento). They were married in Monterey in 1846, when Drucilla was 13 years old. Drucilla was born in 1833 in Arkansas. Drucilla's family, headed by Thomas Jefferson Shadden, had come out from Lee Creek, Arkansas in 1842. They were a roving family. They first went to Oregon, then took a ship to California and stayed for seven years. They arrived at Sutter's Fort on July 8, 1843. At the time, there were less than 500 Americans west of the Mississippi. The Shaddens first lived in a tule hut built by Indians on the banks of the Cosumnes River.
• John Hames was only two years younger than his father-in-law, Thomas Shadden. Thomas moved to McMinnville, Oregon and left Drucilla behind after she married John. This was the big split in my family history whereby I never knew of Drucilla until 2002. In fact, it seems that nobody in my Oregon family branch had known of John and Drucilla for perhaps 140 years!
• Over the years, the Shaddens came to California and returned to Oregon several times. They came once for gold, made a fortune and returned to Oregon to buy more land. A housing development has just been built near the Shadden family plot in the Masonic Cemetery in McMinnville, Oregon. It's called "Shadden Estates".
• John and Drucilla were married in Monterey. The official ceremony was conducted by Thomas Larkin. Drucilla gave birth to the first American male born in California. Ben was born at Sutter's Fort on  April 9, 1847 and I'm told a monument still stands there and mentions the fact. She had eleven more children after that.
• Why did John Hames come to California?
• Thomas Larkin had articles circulated in newspapers in New York, asking people to come settle out west so that it would become part of America, as other countries such as Spain, Mexico, England and Russia were starting to lay claim to different parts of it. Larkin headed the Mexican consulate in Monterey and was a giant in the lumber industry.
• Several commercial enterprises had come west to make money off the fur trading business, primarily in the Pacific Northwest. This had caught the imagination of the American people back east, who were beginning to think in terms of a Manifest Destiny: that the whole nation should extend from shore to shore, and that occupation of the land would figure heavily in determining which country would possess the west coast.
• John Hames was apparently caught up in that vision, as he came to California with high ideals and lots of energy.
• Half a generation or so later there were other tycoons who came to this area and made great fortunes. People like Frederick Hihn and Adolph Spreckels, for example. I think that John Hames came to make his fortune, but also to help settle California and bring it into the union. The risks in coming to California at that time were huge. Very few people could speak English. There were grizzly bears walking around all over the Santa Cruz Mountains. So coming here and starting a lumber mill in the 1840s was no easy task. You would have to be driven by a higher purpose than just coming to make easy money.
• What did John Hames do?
• John became acquainted with Thomas Larkin, the Mexican consulate in Monterey. John had apparently learned how to build water-powered mills from his father back in New York. (The father eventually moved to Battle Creek, Michigan and started the first mill there). John came to Soquel and acquired land from Martina Castro to build his first lumber mill on Soquel Creek. The lumber mill was located right about where Tampico Kitchen is located now, across the creek from Soquel Elementary school.
• John Daubenbiss also arrived in Soquel about the same time as John Hames. Daubenbiss came across the plains on the same wagon train as Drucilla, who came with her father Thomas Jefferson Shadden. Together Hames and Daubenbiss cooperated on a lot of projects and shared the same sentiments.
• John Hames acquired a large piece of land from Martina Castro, one of the first generation members of the Castro family, who obtained her land grant from Spain. In one article I read about John Hames it said that his land extended from roughly Soquel High School to across Soquel Creek, and extended downstream to the high-tide mark at Capitola Beach. He and Daubenbiss also owned a piece of land that extended from Moran Beach at 26th Street and up into the Rodeo Gulch area. He obtained three parcels over the years from three different members of the Castro family. He sold part of one of the land grants to Daubenbiss, and then took in Daubenbiss as a business partner on the first mill he built in Soquel. Together they turned the redwood into plank and board. The lumber from his mill shipped to faraway places like the Hawaiian Islands.
• Here are a few of his most noteworthy accomplishments:
• He was the father of about a dozen children and started the first school in Soquel. I believe it was right where Soquel Elementary school now stands.
• He served on the first Board of Supervisors for the County of Santa Cruz, and was the chairman of it in 1850.
• He initiated and managed construction of the Old Soquel Road, which was the first road into Santa Cruz County from Santa Clara County. I believe it was a toll road and went right past his house.
• He was a friend of James Marshall's and was at Sutter's Mill in 1848, the day that gold was discovered, while he was working on the mill. To quote the words of Drucilla Hames: "The Mormon boys were working at the mills for Sutter with Marshall as foreman. One of these brothers found the gold and handed it to Marshall, who in turn gave it to Sutter, who sent it to San Francisco, where it was pronounced gold."
• He was the first person to raise the stars and stripes in San Jose, California. It was a small banner about six feet long. He put it on a little willow pole that surmounted an old adobe building.
• He knew the most powerful and influential people in northern California at that time. For example, one night General Sherman of civil war fame slept in John's mill on Soquel Creek.
• He served in Capt. Charles M. Weber's Company of California Volunteers during the war with Mexico. He served from July 15, 1846, to February 10, 1847. Weber was the founder of Stockton, California.
• He went gold mining in Mazatlan, Mexico, where he became sick, so that his brother Benjamin had to come and get him.
• Aunt Drucilla was kind and generous according to the history records. She taught people around here how to speak English and learned to speak Spanish. She worked at different jobs to help John buy machinery in San Francisco to install in his mill.
• What happened to John Hames?
• Over the years history has sort of forgotten about John Hames. How could he go from being such a great early-American hero to being almost completely forgotten?
• He built a house near Soquel High School and the area known as O'Neill Ranch, which is the tall hill behind the high school. It used to be known as "Hames Hill". In a rainstorm one winter the graves of two of his infant sons were washed away from that hillside and into Soquel Creek. The Porter family, the largest land-owners in the state of California, eventually acquired his land.
• J.J. O'Neill eventually owned a part of Hames' land and lived in the house Hames had built. The house was destroyed in 1947, and I'm guessing that it stood where O'Neill Street intersects the Old San Jose Road, near the high school.
• John Hames lost his first lumber mill when he left Soquel to go fight the War of 1846. When he returned, Martina Castro and her new husband, Michael Lodge, had taken it over. John fought for legal ownership of it in San Francisco, but the laws of the time were very sketchy because of the slow transition from Spanish and Mexican to American laws. There was a lot of confusion about which laws applied and to whom they applied. This same confusion contributed to Martina Castro losing a large piece of her land as well. Only the San Francisco lawyers understood the laws.
• So he built a second mill on Soquel Creek, upstream about 100 yards or so from the current Bridge Street foot bridge. If you hike up Soquel Creek from Bridge Street you can find some old concrete pilings that locals up there say are left over from the mill.
• Frederick Hihn and the Porter family eventually got nearly all of John Hames' land. This was probably due to the fact that John was "a nice guy". He was trusting, didn't particularly like squabbles and was quickly exhausted by legal disputes.
• He went to Mazatlan, Mexico, to hunt for gold, and presumably planned on buying back more land around Soquel to re-establish what he had lost. The written history is a little fuzzy on the order of events that happened next, so I'll just sort of toss them out with that in mind:
• In 1883 he moved to Bradley, California, in southern Monterey California, below King city. There he owned 10,000 acres and raised sheep. He seemed to enjoy the peace and serenity of the area, but somehow I get the feeling that Drucilla did not and may have remained in Soquel.
• It might have been at this time that he went to Mexico to look for the gold, so he could buy back land he'd lost in Soquel.
• Frederick Hihn owned the second mill, a flour mill, John Hames had built in Soquel, and Drucilla lived nearby. While John was in Mexico, Drucilla and her children were evicted from wherever it was they were living. She took refuge in the old flour mill. Hihn had allowed her to do so. She got sick and died there in 1882.
• Meanwhile, John Hames got sick while in Mexico. His brother, Benjamin, went to Mexico and brought him back to Peachtree, in Monterey County. Peachtree is a grand old mission-style mansion built on a cattle ranch by the famous cattle baron Henry Miller. Apparently Peachtree was a place where people could go and rest in luxury, somewhere between a sanitarium and a resort. I think this is where John Hames died. I corresponded with the current caretakers of the Peachtree ranch, but they wouldn't answer back, but there is supposedly a cemetery there. I've looked in other cemeteries and registries in the area, and the next most likely place would be the mission at San Luis Obispo, where many of brother Benjamin's people are buried. There is also a cemetery in Bradley that I haven't investigated yet.
• What is left behind for us?
• It is surprising how much one man did so early on in California history and yet so little remains to be known about him. It's a miracle that I found out about him at all.
• What is in the pioneer exhibit in the Soquel library contains almost all the information I've given you. There is nothing anywhere that I've seen in Soquel in the way of landmarks, street names or monuments that mentions the name of the town founder. The historical mural in the Soquel post office mentions nothing about him. I have found no other family members in the area but me.
• An article in a 1962 issue of the California History Magazine gives a casual, single reference to John Hames, stating that he built the first lumber mill on Soquel Creek.
• I went to Bradley, California in December, 2002, to see what else I could find about the life of John Hames. There is an old farmhouse along Highway 101 at the Bradley turn-off. I found that John Hames built that house in the 1880s. I learned this from my long lost cousins. The oldest living person in Bradley, a woman in her 90s who is the town historian, told me that the house was old when she was a little girl and that nobody knew who built it. So I told her the story.
• The house is now on a ranch owned by the Porter family. Yes, the same family that had acquired John Hames' land in Soquel. The people living there in 2002 were caretakers for the ranch. They let me come inside, look around and take pictures. I went through locked gates to an old family cemetery, where many Porters are buried, and looked for John Hames' grave site, but couldn't find one.
• The ranch is now planted in wine grapes. It's located in a valley called Hames Valley. A winery on the land is called : "Hames Valley Winery". It says on their label that the valley was named after "some long-forgotten man from New York".
• I searched through Monterey County records for a death certificate, and the clerk told me that was too long ago and no records were kept back then.
• An old article in the Santa Cruz Daily Surf, dated 1883, says that he moved to San Francisco, but I've found no other records yet.
• An interesting side note: The old "Last Supper" wax museum on Ocean Street, which a few old-timers may remember, was created by John Hames' grandson, Harry Liston, who was the son of Mattie Hames. Also, Charles Langley established the community of Prunedale, near Salinas, and according to the family records he was John Hames' grandson through daughter Lucretia.
• My long lost cousin in Reno, Elgen Long, expressed some interest a year ago in having a new gravestone and monument put up for Drucilla.
• The presentation today is being captured on videotape and a few copies of it will go into the pioneer exhibit in the Soquel library.
• I am really thankful for the efforts of the people who have preserved the history of my ancestors because without that it would all be forgotten. It would be nice for each of us to reflect back on this early history and do what we can to help preserve it for posterity.