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44
winter
|
spr ing
Gum San
, the “land of the golden mountain” – California – they needed employment after
the completion of the railroad. Some of them ended up in Montecito working on what an
1891 newspaper article referred to as “a huge building of stone...especially built for lemons.”
In fact, some Chinese are documented in Santa Barbara laboring on local roadwork in the
late 1860s, and by the 1870s they had established a Chinatown near the old Presidio. The
Chinese workforce at the Crocker-Sperry Ranch camped in the area known as China Flat,
immortalized by the road of the same name that wends through the golf club today.
“We put in the foundations for the first houses built on China Flat Road,” recalled Oswaldo
(Ozzie) Da Ros on a recent visit to the former packing house. A specialist in stonework and
masonry, his company was engaged to work on the conversion of the Crocker-Sperry Ranch
to Birnam Wood Golf Club. “The foundations were all hand-dug back then, and the workers
were finding old Chinese coins, the round ones with square holes in the center.”
But such discoveries were made long after Will Crocker’s endeavors, chronicled in an article
that appeared in
The Daily Press
on October 11, 1891, which informed readers that: “Only
a while ago he spent a hundred thousand dollars in buying a ranch of several hundred acres
near Santa Bárbara. It is called the Las Fuentes, and is near the sea.” After a few more lines
analyzing the culinary buying habits of San Francisco millionaires, the reader is presented
with evidence of the exotic bounty of Crocker’s Montecito crops: “Of these there will be—
and in fact they are approaching ripeness—cherimoyas, strawberry guavas, lemon guavas,
passion fruit, bananas of five varieties, including the most dainty; dates of two sorts, mangoes,
pineapples, mandarines [sic], tangerines and navels of a rare quality; in fact everything is
golden in the morning and leaden at evening.”
The article went on to detail what would be the centerpiece of the Crocker-Sperry Ranch,
In a photo that may
have been taken circa
1894, workers pose
at the Crocker-Sperry
Ranch office, as
denoted on the roof.
Note the small monkey
in the front left, with the
sitting man holding its
leash (photo courtesy
Gledhill Library, Santa
Barbara Historical
Museum).