Articles from Sentinel

Articles from Sentinel

www.santa-cruz.com/archive/2000/April/30/local/stories/4local.htm

Soquel native lived in interesting times

By CAROLYN SWIFT
Sentinel columnist

What happened to 5-year-old James Swann was every mother’s nightmare. In 1880 he was sent on a train to visit some relatives — and vanished. For days, no one even knew he was missing.

Meanwhile, young Swann stayed with a family that spoke in a strange language. The experience formed one of his earliest memories, a marker from which he traced the other major events of his life.

Born in Soquel, James and sister Martha spent their infant years at Valencia, near Aptos. They returned to Soquel and lived on the old family farm with their grandparents after their parents separated.

Two uncles, ranchers in the San Joaquin Valley, invited James to stay with them awhile, so the grandparents made travel plans and sent notice ahead about the arrangements for the journey. Curiously, little Martha, who was just a bit older than her brother, got the chore of mailing the letter and, for reasons untold, decided to stash it under the front porch.

Unaware of this ominous twist in plans, the family blithely drove their wagon to the train station at San Jose and secured James a ticket to Sacks, near Delano.

After a tag was put on his back listing name and destination, he was turned over to the watchful eye of the conductor. But no one came for him at Sacks. The boy waited on the platform until the station agent grew anxious and finally asked a local Mexican family to look after the lad for awhile.

Nearly two weeks passed before the uncles straightened things out and arrived to claim James, just as he was coming down with measles.

"The only cure they knew was to put me to bed with a lot of covers and after about a week upstairs in an unsealed house and an outside temperature of around 100 degrees, this is the one thing I will never forget," Swann recalled.

The story was among many narrated by Swann in the late 1950s, when he was in his 80s. A copy eventually made it into the hands of his old chums in Soquel, who remembered him not only as a longtime friend but also as a direct descendant of Soquel pioneers John and Sarah Lard Daubenbiss.

Swann’s grandfather, John Daubenbiss, was called "the father of Soquel" because he was a founder of the community and a developer of local industry and agriculture. Before the Gold Rush, Daubenbiss and John Hames acquired most of the Rancho Arroyo del Rodeo from Alexander Rodriguez and built a trio of mills at various sites along the stream known as the Soquel River.

Daubenbiss established his 1,100-acre farm homestead in 1847, shortly before he and Sarah were married. Her family had been in a wagon train that had, for part of the journey west, attached itself to the Donner-Reed Party. Fortunately for the Lards, their band split off before reaching Donner Lake, and they arrived through the Sierra Nevada without suffering the horrific tragedy of the winter of 1846.

Built up by the Daubenbiss family and other pioneers who came after the Gold Rush in 1848, Soquel was robust in the first decades of statehood. By 1868 a road crossed through town from San Jose all the way to the coast, while another came through from Santa Cruz to Watsonville. Soquel boasted five sawmills, a planing mill, a chair factory, two tanneries, a wool and leather factory, and all kinds of produce.

About that time, Daubenbiss was finishing a landmark home that still stands on the knoll along Soquel Drive toward 41st Avenue.

Designed by architect Thomas Beck, it was reasonably situated above the flood plain. The home, surrounded by a nine-acre pasture and eight acres of fruit trees, faced the main road through Soquel. Farmlands were planted in hay and grain, and the banks of the creek "fairly bristled" with spires of corn.

Wagon tracks from the mills, tanneries and sawmills to the wharf at Soquel Landing cut deep grooves down Porter Street.

Daubenbiss had built one of the first schools, donated land for the cemetery, served in local politics and had seen the town grow to become the county’s third largest. By the time grandson James Swann was born, however, Soquel’s destiny had shifted.

When the Santa Cruz-Watsonville narrow-gauge railroad was built in the mid-’70s, the Soquel Depot promised by Frederick Hihn was delivered to a site on the west end of the trestle at Soquel Landing. It was a convenient spot near the same road that had given Soquel access to shipping at the wharf. But while the rail line was a blessing, the timber resources that gave the town a rich boost at its beginning were receding like a thinning hairline.

Swann grew to adulthood with no visions of a life connected to tanning or the timber industry. He left Soquel School midway through the seventh grade because he was anxious to begin his life as a farmer.

"When I look back for 70 to 75 years I think what a wonderful age to live in and now to see all the changes that had taken place," he said in 1959. "I do not regret the past of my boyhood on the farm."

At age 14, Swan got a job at a fruit ranch near Highland in the Santa Cruz mountains and learned to care for orchards and vineyards. Deciding it made sense to complete his education, the teen-ager enrolled at the Chestnutwood Business College in Santa Cruz, earned a diploma, and decided it was time to have his "fling on the old family farm."

Next week: The adventures of a young man in turn-of-the-century Soquel.

Carolyn Swift is the Sentinel’s history columnist. Her Flashbacks column runs Sundays. She is director of the Capitola Museum and an author and historian. She lives in Capitola.