HISTORICAL NOTES
Here are some brief notes on a variey of historical topics that have appeared in recent issues of the CHS Newsletter. Just click on the one you're interested in or scroll down to browse through all of them.
Main Street in Cambria's East Village in the 1950s
The Port Orford CedarThe Blue House
The Exotic Trees of East Village
East Village Heritage Park
Santa Rosa Chapel
Piedras Blancas Lighthouse
Piedras Blancas Lighthouse Lens
Heritage Roses
Cambria Historical Society History
The Tea Cozy
Wilfred Lyons
Cambria to Carmel - Highway One
Joe McGee
Souza House
Bucket of Blood Saloon
Hearts Ease
The Squibb House
Julian Estrada
The Guthries
The Bianchinis
Thomas Clendenen Benjamin Franklin
The Red House
The Port Orford Cedar
Among the many hundred-year-old trees on the Guthrie-Bianchini property is the magnificent Port Orford Cedar located near the southeast corner on Center Street near the “blue house”. That’s the tree we decorate at Christmas time. Usually not found this far south, this tree was planted by the Guthries around 1900.
In North America the Port Orford Cedar (Chamaecyparis lawsoniana) was first discovered in its small natural range along the California/Oregon coast in 1851. The total range was only about 200 miles long north and south and about 50 miles deep, shared by both states, about 70 percent in Oregon. It has long been recognized for its characteristic beauty. Port Orford Cedar also grows in Japan and Southeast Asia. The North American population probably floated across the Pacific many years ago. In 1854, seed was collected from Port Orford Cedar near the Coos Bay area and taken back to England for culturing as an ornamental. Many different cultivars of Port Orford Cedar were developed and it became a very popular and widely used tree and shrub in landscaping in Europe and North America.
Port Orford Cedar has been an extremely valuable commercial species, both for its landscaping use and as a finished wood product. It has been used for a wide variety of things from the Hawaiian Presidential Palace to Japanese Buddhist temples, California gold mine timbers and building construction. It was used for high quality boats – Sir Thomas Lipton used this wood for his Shamrock series of 100-foot racing sailboats, built as challengers for the Americas Cup just prior to World War I. When the world famous Rose Bowl in Pasadena was built, the architects specified Port Orford Cedar stadium planks for its beauty, strength and durability. The Japanese highly prize the wood for use in their homes as it closely resembles their native hinoki cedar. Port Orford Cedar is also an important species for traditional use to native Americans who inhabited the range of Port Orford Cedar. It has been used in ceremonial houses and sweat lodges.
Port Orford Cedar, also known as Port Orford White Cedar, Oregon Cedar and Lawson Cypress prefers a mild climate with plenty of rain (40-90 inches annually)! High humidity and misting from the Pacific Ocean are also factors in the healthy growth of this tree in its natural areas. The range has been extended by planting the original and its variations around much of the northern half of the world and in New Zealand.
These large attractive and very shade-tolerant trees grow to 125 to 180 feet in 500 years, with diameters of 3 ½ to 6 feet. A record tree, 219 feet tall with a diameter of 12 feet, standing in Siskiyou, Oregon may be 700 years old. So, our tree is just a baby!
The Blue House
In a recent newsletter there was an article about the history of the Guthrie-Bianchini House which contained a couple of brief references to our next-door neighbor, “The Blue House” a.k.a.”The Mushroom House” or “The Maggetti House”. This house also has a rather interesting history.
A man by the name of James Erdman bought this property from George Proctor and George Davis in 1871 and built the house on it sometime before 1876 when a series of sales occurred in rapid succession ending with the purchase by Louis Maggetti in 1894. Maggetti, a pioneer resident of Cambria, was born in Switzerland in 1864. In 1887 he married Lala (Lyla) Galbraith and they had seven children. One of these children, Cecelia, died of pneumonia contracted after spending the night outside during the great Cambria fire of 1889.
The Maggettis moved into the blue house in 1894 and the upper story was added in 1900 to house the six remaining children. Since only the children lived upstairs, the stairway was made less than two feet wide! Lala Maggetti died of tuberculosis in 1901 and Agnes Irene, the oldest of the children at age 13, took over the job of raising her younger siblings with the help of her maternal grandmother, Maria Galbraith.
In 1910 Agnes Irene married Joaquin (Jack) Modesto Soto and they had four children: Margaret, Joaquin Yrculano (Pico), Lila (named for her grandmother Lala), and Betty. Joaquin was a butcher and owned the market still called “Sotos”.
Louis Maggetti died in 1935 and his daughter, Phoebe Maggetti Storni inherited the house. Sometime in the late 1930s, she rented the house to Rocco Rava and his wife Elvira Bianchini Rava who lived in the house for forty years.
Rocco came to Cambria in the early 1900s and worked as a dairyman and mushroom expert and exporter. He was well known for his method of drying and preserving pine mushrooms which he exported to restaurants in San Francisco. He would gather King Boletus mushrooms in the local forest, slice them, place them on screens, and line them up on the fence to dry. This explains why the “Blue House” was previously know as “The Mushroom House”. Elvira passed away in 1956 and Rocco passed away in 1975. Both are buried in the Old Santa Rosa Cemetery.
After Rocco’s death some people in Cambria wanted to tear the house down to build a parking lot (does this story sound familiar?). However, Phoebe Maggetti Storni sold the house to Marjorie Delyser who was born in Cambria. Marjorie’s family had once lived on Burton Drive in downtown Cambria and she was very anxious own a house in East Village. She paid around $7000 for the house but it was in such poor condition that it took another $7000 to restore it. When the renovation was complete in 1976, Marjorie began renting the house. Her renters have included Rick McWilliams who ran an answering service and local telephone service company called The Cambria Communications Center, Sharon Lovejoy and Jeff Prostovich (owners of Heart’s Ease), Keith and Carol Stuart (local real estate agents), Dennis Sumrow owner of Art Expressions Gallery & Studio, and Linda Finley, owner of ECR Gallery who is presently renting the house.
(The information contained in this article was excerpted from a report prepared for The Cambria Historical Society by Yvette Messenger in 1997.)
The Exotic Trees of East Village
When you think of trees in Cambria, what comes to mind? Cambria pines? Sure, we have lots of them around. But, what are those other trees you see when you walk around East Village? Well, let’s take a little tour and see.
Near the southeast corner of the Guthrie-Bianchini property (near The Blue House) stands a magnificent Port Orford Cedar tree. Usually not found this far south, this tree was planted by the Guthries around 1900. As they often grow for 500 years reaching heights up to 180 feet, ours is just a baby.
Directly across the street, in front of Mustache Pete’s Restaurant, is a coast redwood (sequoia sempervirens). Although this is California’s state tree and there is evidence that it has thrived in California for millions of years, it requires a very special climate to grow naturally. It prefers the humid conditions of the Pacific Coast where fog is prevalent with mild winters and moderate summer temperatures. So, while it does not occur naturally in Cambria, it does quite well here. There is another coast redwood on Main Street just west of the Blue Bird Motel office. There is yet another coast redwood on Main Street in front of The Ollalieberry Inn. This one was planted in 1905 by the German pharmacist brothers Otto and Charles Man der Scheid who started Cambria’s first drug store which they operated from their home.
If you wander up Wall Street, you can see a Dawn Redwood (metasequoia glyptostroloides). It’s located on the left just about where the pavement ends and it has a sign in front of it. This tree was thought to be extinct, represented only in fossil leaf and cone prints from Japan and Manchuria. In 1941, a Chinese forester named Gan observed three Dawn Redwoods in the village of Modaogi in Szechauan Province in China. After a number of seed collecting missions, two Chinese botanists, Hu and Cheng, named the new species. E. D. Merrill, director of The Arnold Arboretum at Harvard secured seeds from Professor Cheng in 1946. Two years later, Dr. Ralph Chaney, a paleobotanist at U. C. Berkeley and Milton Silverman, science writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, brought back seeds and seedlings distributing them to botanic institutions across North America. Dr. Chaney kept eight seedlings for himself but, despite careful nurturing, only four of the seedlings survived. Three were planted at U.C. Berkeley and one of them was given to Mrs. Florence Thatcher, a relative of Dr. Chaney, to plant in Cambria where it survives to this day.
Just east of the Bluebird Inn office on Main Street you can see two unusual trees. One is a Monterey Cypress (cypress macrocarpa), many of which were planted in this area in the 1870s. This particular specimen was planted in 1905. The other is a Cow Itch Tree (lagunaria patersonii) planted in 1935. Native to Queensland, Australia, the Cow Itch Tree is part of the mallow family. It has burr-like seeds which were said to have plagued the cattle in its homeland thereby giving the tree it’s common name. During the summer and early fall it is covered with beautiful, hibiscus-like blooms.
Finally, on Burton Drive in front of Sylvia’s Inn there’s a Canary Island Palm Tree (phoenix canariensis). Many of these palm trees were planted along Burton Drive but this is the only one remaining. Several were removed by gardeners to be transplanted to the grounds of Hearst Castle. Another specimen can be seen on Main Street at the Palms Motel.
Some of the material in this article was based on “A Self Guided Tour of Cambria’s Historic Trees” written by Millie Heath in 1984.
East Village Heritage Park
While the restoration of the Guthrie-Bianchini House is a major project for CHS it is actually part of an even bigger project called the Cambria East Village Historic Park which has several aliases including Cambria Commons and Cambria Heritage Park. The concept of a Heritage Park encompassing all of Center Street between Burton Drive and Bridge Street dates back at least to 1980 when Forest Warren, owner of the “White House” and former director of the CCSD, asked the CCSD to begin a feasibility study on using the Guthrie-Bianchini House as a recreation center. He is quoted in The Cambrian as saying, “The house would be a great place for a park, art center or museum with parking around it”.
In 1998, the PROS Commission Ad Hoc Parks Committee recommended three Cambria parks one of which was a neighborhood park including the old CCSD building site, the Forest Warren and Linda Seek (“Red House”) adjoining properties, and the Guthrie-Bianchini property. In 1999 the Historic Downtown Park task force of the PROS Parks Committee formed an action committee to measure community interest, explore funding options, assess the historical and architectural resources, and begin acquisition. Shortly after that Richard Hawley announced that Greenspace had placed the “Red House” property in escrow.
By June of 1999 Architect Brent Berry had presented his plan for the historic park to the Historic Downtown Park task force of PROS and the first annual Heritage Day Celebration was held in East Village to preview the preliminary park plan, to raise funds for it, and to get community input. A “conceptual vision for East Village Historic Park” appeared in the Cambian article publicizing the event.
In August, The Cambria Parks and Trails Committee of PROS generated a formal proposal for a downtown historic park. It lists as supporters the CCSD, District Two County Supervisor Shirley Bianchi, Cambria Historical Society, North Coast Advisory Council, County/Cambria Design Standards Committee, Greenspace, Allied Arts Association, The Cambrian, Forrest Warren, and the following Burton Drive merchants: Kathy and Bob Unger of Moonstones Gallery, Mike and Lynda Adelson of Seekers Gallery, Sharon Lovejoy, Jeff Prostovich, Leslie Gainer of Fermentations, Bruce Black of The Squibb House, and Robin and Shanny Covey of Robin’s Restaurant.
Since that time, the Heritage Park concept has been put on the back burner due to the acquisition of the East West Ranch property and the subsequent development plans for a park in the Rodeo Grounds area. At the present time, the Heritage Park plans are being revived and CCSD is discussing ways to make it a reality.
Santa Rosa Chapel
We believe that the Guthrie-Bianchini House was originally built by Thomas Clendinen around 1870 and, almost simultaneously, the Sante Rosa Chapel was also constructed.
The land on which the chapel was built was part of the lands of the Mission San Miguel (as was all of the Cambria area). When the Mexican Government secularized the missions in the 1830s and 1840s, land grants were given to prominent citizens and Rancho Santa Rosa was given to Don Julian Estrada while Rancho San Simeon was given to Don Jose Ramon Estrada. Don Julian Estrada and his wife, Dona Nicolasa, built a house near the intersection of Highway One and Highway Forty Six and they opened their home, guest quarters and gardens to accommodate the Catholic ceremonies in the area as area residents had no other place to worship. Priests from Mission San Luis Obispo and from Mission San Miguel celebrated mass and conducted marriages, baptisms and funerals in the Estrada compound.
Following the Mexican-American War, Mexican land grants were surveyed by the American Government and the land between Rancho Santa Rosa and Rancho San Simeon was declared public land. One of the first settlers to enter a claim for this land was Jeffrey Phelan. Both ranchos were divided up and sold to various settlers and a town variously called Slabtown, Santa Rosa, Rosaville and finally Cambria was established. Jeffrey Phelan sold the site of the present day Santa Rosa Chapel and Cemetery to Bishop Tadeo Amat of the Los Angeles-Monterey Diocese for 100 gold coins.
In 1871, the chapel was completed on a high hill overlooking downtown Cambria, the present day east village. The building was constructed of locally grown and milled pine and was dedicated to St. Rose of Lima. Aside from the missions themselves, this was the first Catholic church built in California. Priests from both the Mission San Luis Obispo and the Mission San Miguel traveled to Cambria (weather permitting) to conduct services.
Isabella Estrada, daughter of Don Julian and Dona Nicolasa was buried there in 1888 and today, if you walk through the cemetery, you will see many historic names including Phelan, Estrada, and Magetti, owners of the “Blue House”.
Starting in 1935, Santa Rosa Chapel and St. Joseph Church in Cayucos shared a priest who lived in Cayucos and traveled to Cambria every Sunday. In 1960 Santa Rosa Chapel finally became an independent parish. The last mass at this chapel was celebrated in 1963 for it was in that year that the new church, farther west on Main Street, was completed.
After the new church was opened, the old chapel remained empty and unused for many years. In 1978 a committee led by Clementine Newman was organized to restore it. By 1985 the restoration was complete. Brush and trees had been removed and a fence and gate added. Workers raised and restored the foundation, replaced siding on the north and east sides, installed new window panes and a new floor and replaced much of the wainscoting. They rebuilt the floors, communion rail, confessional, side altars, and the iron fence and gateway at the cemetery. The committee restored curbing around family plots and placed redwood markers on unmarked graves. They bought pews from Holy Cross Church in Santa Cruz and even found the original 1871 altar in a Phelan barn.
Today, funds are continuously being raised for restoration and maintenance of the chapel by renting it out for weddings and memorial services. Additional funds are raised by the annual polenta dinner and a Christmas program.
Piedras Blancas Lighthouse
This lighthouse, about twelve miles up Highway One from Cambria, has a very interesting history. The land on which it is built once belonged to indigenous peoples. When the Spanish occupied the area, the property became part of the lands of the Mission San Miguel. Then, when the missions were secularized by the Mexican government, it became part of Rancho Piedra Blanca, a Mexican Land Grant given to Don Jose de Jesus Pico in 1840. After the Mexican-American war was settled by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, a portion of the Rancho was reserved for a light station by President Andrew Johnson on June 8, 1866. In the meantime, possession of Point Piedras Blancas had reverted to Don Juan Castro who vigorously protested the building of a light station on his property. He is quoted as saying in 1874, “I am advised by my counsel that upon the facts of this case the United States have no property rights whatever in the land upon which you are now engaged in erecting a light house; that we are the legal owners of the land and can eject any person interfering with our possession from the premises.”
In spite of Castro’s protests, construction of the light station began on June 8, 1872 with an appropriation of $75,000 for a first order light and fog signal. By 1874, work began to blast off the top of the rock at the tower site but the rock turned out to be very hard and nearly impossible to drill into. For this reason it was decided to save money by modifying the plan for the tower and, instead of removing the rock down to the bottom of the tower, it was removed only down to the level of the floor and that portion of the tower below the floor was simply constructed around the remaining rock During this same year the iron work for the tower was completed as was the brick work. The lantern and lens were on site and they were assembled on top of the tower around the beginning of 1875. On February 15, 1875 the lighthouse itself was completed and put into operation.
During the construction of the tower, the workers lived in shanties which they constructed before beginning work on the tower. Plans for the light station included a dwelling for the keepers but, when the tower was completed, there was not enough money left to build the dwelling. In 1874 the lighthouse board requested an additional $10,000 from congress to complete the dwelling along with a cistern and out-buildings and, in the meantime, the keepers lived in the shanties which were now abandoned by the construction workers.
In 1906 the fog signal was finally installed at Piedras Blancas. According to the Lighthouse Board, the addition of the fog signal required an additional keeper so a frame dwelling was also constructed for the head keeper.
In 1960, the Coast Guard razed the original keeper’s dwellings and built four homes for the keepers and their families. The head keeper’s house was purchased from the Coast Guard by Kitty Lawler for the token sum of one dollar. The house was sawed into quarters, horizontally and vertically, and moved from the station to Chatham Street in Cambria where it currently resides. After several changes in ownership, the house was remodeled and restored in 1989 by Cambria contractor Sandy Dustman who totally gutted the kitchen and added a two car garage. In 1993 the house was purchased by Mary Therese Clark and her mother and sisters and is now a vacation rental.
Piedras Blancas Light Station was originally built by the United States Lighthouse Board in 1874 and was transferred to the Coast Guard in 1937. On October 12, 2001, Piedras Blancas Light Station was officially transferred to the Bureau of Land Management. A formal transition ceremony was held on May 25, 2002 and that very night a new aero beacon was first illuminated. BLM is now in the process of restoring Piedras Blancas Light Station to its former glory.
Piedras Blancas Lighthouse Lens
In 1872, Henri Lapaute of Paris, France completed manufacture of the first order fresnel lens for the Piedras Blancas Light Station consisting of 336 glass lenses and prisms. The seven tons of lenses, prisms, motor and mechanism, cast iron housing and other components were disassembled, crated and carried by horse drawn cart to a French port. The crates were then carried around Cape Horn (or via the isthmus of Panama) on a wooden sailing ship to Point Piedras Blancas. There the ship was unloaded and the crates taken by wagon to the site where the light was reassembled and hoisted to the top of the waiting tower. There is some evidence that a boat landing already at the site may have been used to unload the ship.
In the center of the lens assembly was a light source consisting of a pool of lard oil, and later mineral oil (kerosene), with five concentric wicks in it. Rotation of the lens was enabled by a clockwork mechanism directly under the lens which was, in turn, driven by a drum with a 3/8 inch steel cable wound around it. The cable ran down the entire height of the tower and around a pulley fixed to the top of the weight and thence back up to the first landing on the stairway. When the mechanism was unwound, the weight resided in a well at the bottom of the tower. After the mechanism was wound up raising the weight all the way up to the first landing, gravity would drive the lens around for about four or five hours and if the weight was raised only to the top of the well, the mechanism would run for about two hours. By the 1940s an electric motor was used to rotate the lens but was so unreliable that the Coast Guard reverted to using the weight.
The rate of rotation was regulated by a centrifugal governor acting on feathering air vanes. Each night the rotation of the light was adjusted by measuring the time required for a mark on the large gear under the light to pass and return to a pointer mounted on the stand using a stopwatch. To slow the rotation, the vanes on the governor were adjusted to have more air resistance and, to speed up the mechanism, the vanes were adjusted to have less air resistance.
The light mechanism operated in this fashion for nearly 75 years until the lens, lantern room, ornate railing and the upper portion of the tower were removed by the U. S. Coast Guard in 1949 when they judged that the tower could no longer safely support the lantern room due to a large crack about 25 feet down from the top caused by a magnitude 4.3 earthquake centered about six miles west of the tower. They placed a rotating aero beacon on the top of the shortened tower. Before the Coast Guard was able to make a decision about what to do with the components from the site, four members of the Cambria Lions Club, Byron (Bing) Boisen, Eddie Shaug, Guy Bond and Roland Houtz, obtained permission to remove the lens and clockwork mechanism. Since the Coast Guard was unable to give or sell the lens to the Lions, they arranged to loan it to them and they reassembled the parts on a concrete pad at the Pinedorado Grounds on Main Street in Cambria’s west village.
After about forty years the lens and mechanism began to show damage from the elements since the lantern room had not been reconstructed around it. In 1990, Norman Francis, Jr., son of the last head keeper at Piedras Blancas, launched an effort to restore and protect the lens. The lens was cleaned and restored by the Coast Guard at their station in Monterey, California. Alex Lazrevich, a retired machinist, spent countless hours refurbishing the clockwork drive and other pieces in his garage. The Friends of Piedras Blancas Lighthouse, led by president Bob Lane, constructed a new lantern room which has housed the lens and clockwork at the Pinedorado Grounds since 1996.
Heritage Roses
While there has been a lot of discussion in the CHS newsletter about restoration of the Guthrie-Bianchini House, the historic gardens surrounding the house are also important. Among the many rare and irreplaceable plants found on the property are seven varieties of heritage roses, all at least 100 years old. Rose enthusiasts and horticulture experts have been studying these roses for years and, so far, none of the species has been definitively identified. Except for the two Bell of Portugal Roses and the Hedge Roses, all the roses have been removed to the safety of our nursery until the construction on the house is sufficiently complete to allow their return.
The Hedge Roses can be found intertwined with the privet and blackberries which form the hedge on the Burton Drive side of the property. They are believed to be of the Gallica family which is one of the oldest and most highly evolved of all roses ever bred.
Two Bell of Portugal Roses are currently growing in the front (Burton Drive) yard. These roses were brought to the area by Portuguese settlers, possibly those engaged in the whaling trade near San Simeon near the end of the nineteenth century. Their name derives from the tendency of the flowers to hang upside down like little bells all over the stems.
A rose, possibly a Rugosa, was growing on the Burton Drive side, right next to the house near the front door.
The Moss Rose (at left) was at the corner of the house nearest to the corner of Burton Drive and Center Street. It gets its name from the moss-like growth which covers the stems and buds, but its exact variety is unknown.
The rose that was on the Center Street side of the house, near the Port Orford Cedar, is thought to be a Boursalt Rose. This is a small and almost forgotten group of roses of which only a few remain in cultivation.
Two roses found on the southeast corner or the property nearest to the Blue House appear to be Rugosas. This is a group of old roses brought to Europe from China, Korea and Japan in the late 1700s.
There was a China Rose located on the east side of the property in the back yard near Soto’s Market. China Roses (sometimes called Tea Roses) were brought to America from China and these particular roses may have been brought by members of the Chinese community whose association hall is across the street from the Guthrie-Bianchini House.
All of these magnificent roses will be returned to the exact location where they were originally planted, probably by Sarah Guthrie before 1900, and they will form the centerpiece of the heritage gardens which will surround the restored Guthrie-Bianchini House.
Much of the information used in this article came from Mike Rice.
Cambria Historical Society History
The Cambria Historical Society was founded by Ken Cooper, owner of the Bluebird Inn. Ken was trying to learn about the history of the Lull House which is the inn’s centerpiece. In the process, he learned that Paul Squibb had collected a lot of memorabilia about Cambria’s history so he approached Paul’s widow, Louise, about obtaining access to it. Louise said she would donate it to the Cambria Historical Society but, since no such society existed, Ken set out to invent it. He got Joan Broadhurst, an attorney, to do the incorporation work but Louise died before CHS was actually born and the material was left to a nephew, Ed Squibb. Ken asked Ed to donate the items but Ed would only deal with Wilfred Lyons so Ken drafted Wilfred into the society and CHS was on it’s way.
Articles of Incorporation for CHS were filed with the California Secretary of State on January 29, 1990 by Joan Broadhurst acting as its attorney. Later that same year, the Articles were amended by Ken Cooper, President and Wilfred Lyons, Secretary. The first set of bylaws was dated March 15, 1990 and was also signed by Wilfred Lyons.
Wilfred and his wife, Hazel, were issued the very first membership Some other people who were early members are: Bill and Shirley Bianchi, Vernon and Althea Soto, Walter and Florence Warren, Suzy and Angela Ficker, Jim and Olga Buckley, and George Keenan.
The first Board of Directors contained the following names:
| Ken Cooper | President |
| Roger Arnold | President Elect |
| Betty Fiscalini | Vice President |
| Nancy Shawver (Carr) | Secretary/Treasurer |
| Wilfred Lyons | Honorary Historian |
| Howard Kahn | Director |
| Annabel Royer | Director |
| Clay Singer | Director |
| Kathe Tanner | Director |
| Forest Warren | Director |
Here’s a list of those who attended a CHS meeting on September 6, 1990: Millie Heath, Art Briggs, Ken Cooper, Betty Fiscalini, Elaine Traxel (Evans), Roger Arnold, Nancy Shawver (Carr), Kathe Tanner, Mary Warren, Peter Rossi, Florence Burton, Bebe Edison (McInerney), Annabel Royer, Cathy Odell, Elena Newfield, Dana Arnold, Claudia Hodges, Joy Craig, Bill Beals.
The Tea Cozy
Previous issues of the CHS newsletter have included articles about the history of the Guthrie-Bianchini House and the Piedras Blancas Lighthouse. Well, there’s a connection between these two histories and it lies in the history of the house which now contains The Tea Cozy on Bridge Street.
The property on which The Tea Cozy house is built has had more than a dozen owners but the house was built by Henry Williams in the late 1870s. Williams was a carpenter born in Wales and his wife, Sallie, was from England. Williams purchased the property from Jeffrey Phelan in 1877.
In 1897 Williams died and, since his wife had preceded him in death, he left the house and three other lots to Samuel Guthrie, a local merchant. Guthrie and his wife, Sarah, lived in the Guthrie-Bianchini House, of course. Samuel Guthrie died in 1905 but Sarah continued to own the house on Bridge Street until 1914 when she sold it to Margaret Thorndyke. This was the same year she sold the G-B House to Eugenio Bianchini.
Margaret Thorndyke, at right, was born Margaret Jarmon in Wales, Wisconsin, one of fourteen children. One of her older sisters, Mary Jarmon, was married to Thomas Evans who had purchased part of the Rancho Piedra Blanca and set up a ranch near Point Piedras Blancas. In 1879, another of her sisters, Elizabeth, came to California to visit and married Captain Lorin V. Thorndyke, head keeper of Piedras Blancas Light Station for thirty years from 1876 to 1906. Elizabeth and the Captain had two sons, Lorin V. Thorndyke, Jr. and John Emory Thorndyke. Elizabeth died in 1886 and, after a brief second marriage, the Captain married Margaret Jarmon who had also come to visit her sister in 1897.
When Captain Thordyke retired from the lighthouse, he and Margaret moved into a small cottage behind what is now Sebastian’s store in San Simeon. Both the store and the cottage were owned by Lorin, Jr. at the time. In 1914 they moved to the house on Bridge Street and in 1917 the Captain died. In 1922 the title of the house was transferred to her two stepsons but Margaret continued to live there until her death in 1928. She is buried in an unmarked grave within the Thorndyke plot in Cambria cemetery.
George Bright purchased the house in 1929 and it stayed in his family until the 1970s when it was purchased by a real estate firm which owned it for about 10 years. In the mid 1980s Dr. Gerald and Marty Main bought the house and it became Robin’s Restaurant. Robin’s soon moved to the Souza house on Burton Drive replacing The Grey Fox Inn restaurant which went out of business. Marty Main then opened a restaurant in the house called The Little House on Bridge Street. In 1995, they leased the house to the Sewells who opened The Tea Cozy there.The Tea Cozy is presently owned by Barry Went.
Wilfred Lyons
One of the founding members of CHS, Wilfred Lyons once held the title of “Historian Emeritus” because he knows more about the history of Cambria than practically anybody.
Wilfred’s grandfather worked in the coal mines of Pennsylvania and he was developing black lung disease so he and his wife and five children sailed around Cape Horn to Gaviota and they settled in a small town in the Santa Ynez valley called Ballard. Wilfred’s father was born in Pennsylvania in 1872 and was a school teacher in Cayucos while his mother was born here in San Luis Obispo County in 1882.
Wilfred, one of four children, was born in Cambria in 1912 in the manse of the church on Bridge Street which is now The Bridge Street Inn. In 1935, Wilfred married his wife, Hazel, and they moved to a small house on Center Street which is now Cambria Bicycle Outfitters (not the building that was Ian’s but the little one closer to Robin’s). Wilfred payed $2,000 for the seven year old house. They lived in that house for 29 years before they moved to the house on the west side of Bridge Street almost across the street from the house he was born in.
Wilfred worked at Hearst Castle and for his father in the Red and White Store located where The Sow’s Ear is today in a two story brick building owned by Senator Rigdon. Generally, Wilfred says, there were only two places to work in the area and they were Hearst Castle and the Oceanic Mercury Mine. The elder Lyons bought the store in 1909 and sold it in 1948 at which time Wilfred went to work for Soto's Market. In 1952 the building burned down. Wilfred remembers his father’s white truck which was used to haul merchandise from San Simeon wharf to the store. In the early days, Wilfred says, we had gas jets for lights and the store had a carbide plant in the back that manufactured the gas.
Wilfred was a member of the local school board from 1944 to 1959 and was a member of the fire department for 33 years. He was a good friend of Paul and Louise Squibb who lived on Lee Street (now Burton Drive). He was also a friend of the Bianchini family remembering “...Jimmy, we’d call spider and Walter who we called weasel and Bill who was a World War I veteran and then Palmira and Elvira.” Elvira married Rocco Rava and later moved into the “Blue House” next door to the G-B House.
Remembering the early days of the Cambria Pines Lodge, Wilfred says they had an arena in the center and on Saturday nights they built a bonfire there and had amateur acts and community singing organized by Robert Waltz who started The Cambrian. This was a major event in Cambria. Later they built log cabins around the perimeter and rented them out for a dollar and a half.
Today, Wilfred resides at Casa de Flores retirement home in Morro Bay.
Cambria to Carmel - Highway One
The building of California State Highway One along the Big Sur coast can be traced back at least to April 21, 1894 when the S. S. Los Angeles ran aground near the newly constructed Point Sur Light Station about 25 miles south of Carmel. When Dr. John L. D. Roberts, a medical doctor living on the Monterey Peninsula, raced to the scene in his horse-drawn wagon taking three and one half hours to make the trip, he became convinced of the need for a road along the coast all the way to San Simeon. In 1897 he made the trip from Monterey to San Simeon on foot and estimated the cost of a road to be $50,000. As he was a land speculator and entrepreneur, his motives may not have been entirely altruistic.
Roberts gained a powerful ally for his proposal in the form of Elmer S. Rigdon, Cambria’s State Senator and a member of the California Senate committee on roads and highways. Rigdon promoted the road for its military value in the defense of California with the appropriation being included in the “Military Highway Bill”. A $1.5 million bond issue was placed on the ballot but the intervention of World War I delayed its approval until 1919. Construction of the road began in 1922, the same year Rigdon died.
The work proved to be extremely slow and difficult and in 1924 it stopped completely. It resumed in 1928 when convict labor was employed solving the overcrowding problem at San Quentin Prison as well as the labor shortage caused by the remoteness of the project. Construction of the road required building 33 bridges including the famous Bixby Bridge or Rainbow Bridge. This bridge, 718 feet long and 260 feet tall, is one of the world’s highest single-span concrete arch bridges and is located about five miles north of the Point Sur Lighthouse.
On June 27, 1937, a gala celebration was held at Pfeiffer Redwoods State Park to commemorate the opening of the highway with Governor Frank Merriam, Dr. Roberts, and Public Works Director Earl Lee Kelly in attendance. It was called the Carmel-San Simeon Highway but was better known as the Roosevelt Highway in honor of the then current President. It was incorporated into the state highway system as California Highway 1 in 1939. Actual cost of the construction was around $10 million, a bit over Dr. Roberts’ original estimate.
Repairs and improvements to the road were subsequently made and the process continues to the present day. Tourism began to grow rapidly in the area and, in 1958, when Hearst Castle opened to the public, it became a tidal wave. Since the highway ran along Cambria’s Main Street and Moonstone Beach Drive, enormous congestion was created which was finally relieved in 1964 when the present day bypass was completed.
The portion of Highway One from the Carmel River to the San Luis Obispo County line was declared California’s first official scenic highway and later the portion from the county line to Cambria was also made a state scenic highway. The entire road is also designated as an All American Road by the U. S. Government.
Joe McGee
Jim Lilly was a young U. S. Coast Guard seaman in his early twenties who was assigned to Piedras Blancas Light Station immediately after World War II when Norman Francis was the head keeper. This is the story of Joe McGee told in Jim’s own words at his home in Pinole, CA in 2003. Jim passed away in 2005.
“We had a cat there. Well, there were a lot of cats - no dogs, but cats. We must have had a half a dozen cats and this one old gray and white cat particularly - his name was Joe McGee and Joe and me were pretty good friends. He was one hell of a gopher catcher. Boy he’d go out there and he’d see where the gopher was coming up and he’d sit kind of astraddle of that hole with a paw on each side and when that gopher would come shoving that dirt up Joe would grab him and pull him up out of the ground. Of course a gopher is practically helpless when he gets out in the open. He’s pretty good in his hole but out of that hole he ain’t worth much. And he’d eat him and when you picked Joe up it was like a sponge. The fleas just squirted out of him he had so many fleas on him because gophers just absolutely eat up with fleas.
“Well, anyway, as I say, me and Joe was pretty good friends and you talk about what we did for past time, I made a big kite. That kite must have been about six feet tall and four or five feet wide. It was a diamond shaped thing. I don’t remember where I got the materials but I saved up sticks and paper. I think maybe I used oil cloth to cover it, I don’t remember. Anyway, I had some pretty strong twine and I put a tail on it and I climbed up to the top of that lighthouse with old Joe under my arm and I tied him to that kite and I went out on the hurricane deck which is, well on these lighthouses the hurricane deck is this deck right here [pointed out hurricane deck on a model lighthouse...ed]. And I sent old Joe aloft. He squalled and he screamed and he raised hell and I looked up and here come [Norman] Francis down Highway One coming back to his lighthouse.
“Well, I reeled old Joe back in. When I got down to the foot of the lighthouse Francis was standing there waiting. You talk about a guy getting chewed out, oh, boy. I don’t know what hurt him the worst - the fact that we would do something like that while he was gone or we destroyed the dignity of his lighthouse. I don’t know which it was....He didn’t care about the cat. The cat was never friendly with me after that! Somehow or another he lost interest in me.”
Souza House
Diagonally opposite the intersection from the Guthrie-Bianchini House, on the southwest corner of the intersection of Burton Drive and Center Street, stands the historic building that is now occupied by Robin’s Restaurant. However, this is not the first building to occupy that site.
The land itself, like all of Cambria, was owned by Don Julian Estrada who received a Mexican Land Grant called the Rancho Santa Rosa in 1841. Nearly the entire rancho went to Domingo Pujol, an attorney, who, in 1862, foreclosed on a loan he had made to Estrada. Pujol subdivided the rancho and sold the pieces to new settlers. This particular plot went to George E. Long in 1866, then to Samuel Pollard in 1867 and, in 1868, to George W. Proctor and George W. Davis. Eventually it came to be owned solely by Proctor who sold it to Charles and Mary Ivins in 1878 and they built a house on it which was located approximately where Robin’s garden is today. After their death, their son, Ernest, sold the house to Emma Anderson in 1901. After Emma’s death, her son, Charles, sold the house to Milton Mayfield in 1920. It was Mayfield who built the house on Center Street behind Robin’s in which Wilfred and Hazel Lyons lived for thirty years and which currently houses a portion of Cambria Bicycle Outfitters.
In 1934, Mayfield’s heirs sold the property to Frank and Mabel Souza. Frank was born in Cambria in 1899, the son of Manuel Souza who had come from the Azores to San Simeon to work as a whaler for Captain Clark. Mabel was also born in Cambria in 1905 but moved to San Jose when she was twelve to live with her grandparents after her father died of a heart attack. After graduating from the University of California at Berkeley and completing two years of graduate school at Stanford, she was involved in an automobile accident which ended her banking career before it even got started. She moved back to Cambria and married Frank in 1932.
Frank and Mabel tore down the Ivins house and built the present structure in 1935 where they lived for thirty years along with Mabel’s mother. According to Mabel’s meticulous records, the entire cost of building the house was $2625.81 including five cents for sandpaper but not including the $42 charge for demolishing the old house. Frank worked on the construction of Hearst Castle and, in 1937, he was injured in a fall into the empty Neptune pool which crippled him for life. He died in 1964 and Mabel moved to her cattle ranch in Harmony where she lived until her death in 1993. In 1974, she sold the house to Dan and Shirley Miller who turned it into The Grey Fox Inn, one of Cambria’s finest restaurants. They closed off the front entrance and added the entry room and steps. It was the Millers who added the deck on the south side which was designed by local architect Warren Leopold, and the trumpet vine which engulfs the deck to this day.
Shirley Miller Doerr sold the restaurant business to Bob and Edie Anderson in 1982 and they sold it to the Clegg family. It was later bought by Robin and Shanny Covey who moved their restaurant into the old house. Robin’s began as a health foods store in the building now occupied by Chenoa on Main Street near the Bluebird Motel, and then became a restaurant occupying the Thorndyke House on Bridge Street and finally moved to its present location in the mid 1990s.
Bucket of Blood Saloon
The building at the corner of Bridge and Center Streets has a long and colorful history with the present structure being the second one built on the property.
As far as we know, the first business to occupy the site was a paint store established in 1868 by James Gooch. Sometime later, Dr. Russell Parkhurst practiced medicine there until he relocated his practice in 1879. At this time, Oliver McFadden and Ritner Dodson returned the building to being a paint store along with other decorative materials. They were wiped out in the great fire of 1889.
After the fire, John McCain (no, not that one) built the present structure around 1893 or 1894 and opened a saloon there. In 1902, the building was purchased by William Phillips who leased it to John Eubanks who conducted a blacksmith business there for at least 12 years. Phillips then leased the facility to Clyde Meacham who used the building to publish The Cambria Courier whose first edition appeared on June 6, 1916. Meacham’s son, Wilfred, was named after Wilfred Lyons who had the very first membership in the Cambria Historical Society. Although he had published several newspapers prior to this, the newspaper lasted less than two years and The Cambria Courier published its last edition on January 4, 1918.
In the same year, the property was purchased by James and William Bianchini, two of Eugenio’s sons. At one point it was used to house the Bank of Cambria while the brick building on Main Street was being built. By the early 1930s, a restaurant had been opened in the leased building by James Stewart (no, not that one) and his wife, Alberta Dodson.
Shortly after World War II, the restaurant got new owners, Rip Rohrberg and William Riley, who called it Rip and Riley’s. Every Saturday night they held a dance there complete with ladies of the evening, fist fights and other forms of entertainment. It was these events that caused Cambrians to start calling the place "The Bucket of Blood Saloon", a name which persists to this day.
From the late 1940s until 1960, the building was leased by Phil Paradise who used it for his art studio. The next occupant was Mr. Tysinger who made furniture and cabinets there. Sometime in the mid 1980s, Wood Specialties Shop was opened in the building by Frank Broad who had a furniture refinishing business there until 1994.
The building is currently owned by Tom Gerst and Jim Evans and is leased to Steve Crimmel who has had his Painted Sky Recording Studio there for more than ten years. At present, the property is up for sale and Steve would like to find an interested party to partner with him in buying it and preserving the building.
Hearts Ease
The historic building located directly across Burton Drive from the Guthrie-Bianchini House is today known as Heart’s Ease, purveyor of herbs, plants and gardening supplies and owner of one of the most beautiful gardens in Cambria. But, since the house was built in the early 1870s, there have been around twenty different owners.
One of the early owners was George Proctor who moved to Cambria with his second wife, Lucinda Morris in 1861. It was Proctor who built the three-story Proctor Hotel on the southwest corner of Bridge and Main Streets where Bob and Jan’s Bottle Shop currently stands. He was also part owner of the Souza house across the street which is presently Robin’s Restaurant.
In 1880, the house was purchased by the Taylor brothers, John and James, who were born in Scotland, emigrated to New York state and then came to California via the Isthmus of Panama. By the time they purchased this property, they owned land in various parts of the county and John owned all of what is now called Happy Hill, Park Hill and Lodge Hill. After he died, it was his descendants who sold all of this property to The Cambria Development Company in 1928. They subdivided the property into the now famous twenty-five foot lots and built the Cambria Pines Lodge to house prospective land buyers during their visits to Cambria.
In 1925, John Taylor’s heirs sold the house to Jeanette and Alexander Campbell who rented the house and adjacent Mr. Carroll’s Blacksmith Shop building to a variety of tenants until they died in the mid 1940s. The Campbells lived in a two-story home located where the Redwood Center is today.
After that, there were a string of owners who bought the property, rented out the buildings and soon sold to the next owner. Among the many owners during this period was actress Angela Lansbury in the 1970s, whose relatives, Pat and Caroline Pullen, had an antique shop there.
Lansbury sold to Sharon Lovejoy and Jeff Prostovich in 1986 and they moved their Heart’s Ease business into the building from what is now The Old Stone Station in west village. Sharon is currently a recognized garden expert and a nationally famous garden and nature writer and she and Jeff led the effort to save the Guthrie-Bianchini House from being torn down in 1987 and 1988. Sharon Lovejoy sold the business to Susan Pendergast, former shop manager, in 1994 but retained ownership of the building itself. In 2005, Kathryn Clayton, who is the current owner, bought the business from Susan and she bought the building from Sharon and Jeff.
The Squibb House
Early on, the property on which The Squibb House presently stands was owned by “the usual suspects”. As part of Don Julian Estrada’s Rancho Santa Rosa, ownership reverted to Domingo Pujol, a San Francisco lawyer, in 1862 when Estrada defaulted on a loan. Pujol sold the property to George Long in 1866 and he sold it to Samuel Pollard the following year. In 1868, the property was purchased by George W. Proctor and George S. Davis and Proctor eventually sold it to Fred E. Darke in 1876.
In 1877, Fred Darke built the house which stands on the site today. Mr. Darke was born in Carbondale, Pennsylvania in 1845 and, after serving in the union army, he came to San Luis Obispo County in 1868. He held several teaching positions and taught at the Hesperian school in Cambria from 1870 to 1882. He later became county Superintendent of Schools and, subsequently, county Rrecorder. He lived in the house with his wife, Agnes, also a teacher, and their eight children until 1889 when the house was sold to Alexander Paterson.
Mr. Paterson was a cabinet maker who made a wide variety of items out of wood including coffins which allowed him to serve as the local undertaker as well. He ran his business out of a large building which he moved from the south side of the house to the north side and then added a false front. Today, Bruce Black runs the “Shop Next Door” in this building which he has carefully restored to look much like Mr. Paterson left it.
On Mr. Paterson’s death, the property passed to his son, Alexander Paterson, Jr., and his wife, Amy, who became postmaster of Cambria. In 1919, they sold the house to Earl Van Gorden who used it to operate a general store. Interestingly enough, Van Gorden also became Cambria’s postmaster. After it sat vacant for a few years, Paul and Louise Squibb bought the property in 1953.
Paul had been founder and headmaster of Midland School in Los Olivos, a prestigious private high school. When he retired, the Squibbs moved into the house in 1954. Paul was much interested in history and was a member of the San Luis Obispo County Historical Society for many years, serving as its president part of the time. So, he not only expended considerable effort to preserve the old house but he also documented much of the history of Cambria including interviewing many of the town’s “old timers”. Both Paul and Louse had a habit of picking up trash whenever they went walking through Cambria. This is the origin of the term “Squibbing” which means picking up trash, a custom still practiced by many locals.
Paul died in 1984 but Louise continued living in the old house until her death in 1991. Just before she died, Ken Cooper, owner of The Bluebird Motel, approached her asking if he could have Paul’s historical papers. Louise replied that she would donate them to the Cambria Historical Society and, since no such organization existed, Ken invented it. Since Louise still didn’t completely trust him, Ken enlisted the help of Wilfred Lyons who joined CHS as it’s first member and recipient of the papers.
In 1993, Paul’s nephew and niece sold the property to Bruce Black, the current owner. Bruce is a licensed contractor and is also deeply interested in history. He turned the house into a bed and breakfast called, of all things, The Squibb House and, in the process, restored the structure making only the minimum required changes in order to preserve the integrity of the house.
For more information about The Squibb House and The Shop Next Door as they exist today, go to their website
Julian Estrada
The first individual to hold title to the land on which the Guthrie-Bianchini House presently stands was Don Julian Estrada but he was not the first owner. That honor would go to the Mission San Miguel. When the Spanish began to colonize California in the late eighteenth century, they assigned much of the property that we know as California to the twenty one missions. The property of the Mission San Miguel extended from the ocean to the Sierra Nevadas and for eighteen miles north and south of the mission which certainly included present-day Cambria.
After Mexico declared its independence from Spain, the mission lands were broken up and given to important citizens. Governor Juan B. Alvarado granted the Rancho Santa Rosa to Don Julian Estrada on January 18, 1841. According to Estrada’s original diseño (sketch map), his rancho extended from the ocean to the mountains and was bordered on the north by San Simeon Creek and on the south by Arroyo Aquage which ran approximately through the present-day town of Harmony and contained three leagues or about 13,290 acres.
Don Julian was born in Monterey, California in 1813 and he belonged to the rich and powerful Estrada family which owned many land grants in California. Between Don Julian, his brothers, and brothers-in-law alone, the family controlled eight ranchos amounting to more than 90,000 acres. One of his brothers, Jose Ramon Estrada owned the Rancho San Simeon and his first cousin, Jose Joaquin Tomas Estrada owned the Rancho Santa Margarita.
When the rancho was actually surveyed by the U. S. Government in 1858, it was found to contain much more than the original three leagues so smaller borders were established which actually contained 13,184 acres. These borders began at a point near Leffingwell’s Landing and followed the coast south to a point a little south of Harmony. From here, the border followed a straight line about to Harmony and then another straight line to a point about a mile northeast of Harmony. At this point, the border followed a straight line northwest to Santa Rosa Creek and then down the creek to a point behind where Cambria Tax and Financial Services is, across Main Street from Heart Glass Gallery where Hampton’s 76 station used to be. The border then ran in a northerly direction, parallel to Bridge Street, to a point about a half mile northwest of Scott Rock and then due west to the point of beginning.
Like most rancho owners, Don Julian Estrada had great wealth in land and cattle but very little ready cash. In the 1850s he got into financial difficulty due to the declining cattle business and increasing property taxes. Using the rancho as security, he borrowed $7,900 from Domingo Pujol, a businessman from San Francisco, but he was unable to repay the debt. In 1862, Pujol and Estrada struck a deal in which Pujol gave Estrada an additional $12,000 and took possession of the rancho except for a 1500 acre square which included Don Julian’s house which was located on the present Highway One about half way between Cambria and Harmony. Pujol quickly divided the rancho into smaller parcels, selling them to many of the first settlers in the Cambria area. In 1866, George E. Long bought three parcels from Pujol one of which included virtually all of what is now Cambria.
Estrada was elected San Luis Obispo County Supervisor in 1860 and again in 1861. Don Julian Estrada died in December of 1872 leaving behind his wife of thirty years, Nicolasa Gajiola together with three sons and five daughters.
The Guthries
The reason our house is called the Guthrie-Bianchini House is that these two families owned it for a combined period approaching 100 years.
On April 18, 1883, Benjamin H. Franklin sold the house, together with the three lots it was sitting on, to Mrs. Sarah E. Guthrie for $1,000. He made this deal only ten months after he had bought the lots and the smaller “saltbox” house for $500 so it is believed that Franklin was the one who built the addition to the house that faces Burton Drive.
Samuel Guthrie, Sarah’s husband, was born in Scotland in 1840. At the age of fourteen he went to Australia, where, for seventeen years, he was engaged in the mercantile business in Melbourne. In 1871 he traveled from Melbourne to San Francisco, and remained in California for the rest of his life.
During 1875 he was employed at the Grant, Lull and Co. store on the southeast corner of Bridge and Main Streets, where Cambria Village Pharmacy is today, as a general bookkeeper. Two years later he was promoted to manager and, in 1883, he became a partner in the firm. The partnership was dissolved in 1887 and, during the next two years, Guthrie was employed in a wholesale dry-goods house in San Francisco. He returned to Cambria in 1889, right after the great fire of that year, at which time the firm of Lull, Guthrie and Co. came into existence. The store became the largest in Cambria and had in stock a general line of merchandise valued at between $l5,000 and $20,000. In addition to the ownership of the store, the firm also owned large tracts of land in San Luis Obispo County where they raise stock for the markets.
Guthrie was one of the organizers of the Cambria Fire Company and was its foreman for many years. During the years that mercury mining was at its peak, he was employed as accountant for the Oceanic Quicksilver Mining Co. He was a member of San Simeon Lodge of the Masons becoming master and secretary.
On March 23, 1879, Samuel Guthrie married Sarah Emma Woods in San Luis Obispo. At the time, he was 38 and she was 23. She was born in Oregon and was the second oldest of eight children born to James M. and Almira L. Woods, both of whom were from Pennsylvania. The Woods family moved to Cambria when Sarah was an infant so she grew up here. Her parents were early farmers on Santa Rosa Creek Road and her four younger siblings were all born in Cambria. Samuel and Sarah apparently had no children.
Besides the house on the corner of Center Street and Burton Drive, they also owned a house at 4286 Bridge Street which Sarah sold to Margaret Thorndyke on April 11, 1914. Margaret was the third wife of Captain Loren V. Thorndyke who was head keeper of Piedras Blancas Lighthouse from 1879 to 1906.
Samuel Guthrie retired in 1903. He died two years later at the age of 64 after a sudden illness. In 1918, Sarah Guthrie married A. L. Lissok.
The Bianchinis
The last issue of this newsletter included an article about the Guthries, one of two families who owned the Guthrie-Bianchini House for nearly 100 years.
On April 22, 1916, Sarah E. Guthrie sold the house to Eugenio Bianchini. The deal was witnessed and notarized by W. M. Lyons, father of Wilfred Lyons.
Eugenio Bianchini was born on July 20, 1861 in Gordevio, in the Swiss Alps near Lake Maggiore about ten miles from the Italian border. At the age of fourteen he was apprenticed to the stonecutter's trade and, for the first three years, received one dollar a month and lived at home with his parents. The trade did not particularly appeal to him, and he looked about for other opportunities.
In 1878, he sailed for the United States and arrived in Cambria on February 17. He was not familiar with the English language and had very little money when he reached his destination, but he found employment at once and, for the next four years, milked cows on various ranches in the area. He saved his money and, in 1882, leased land from Ed Shaw in Green Valley. He sold out his stock in 1886 and opened a butcher shop in Cayucos where he remained for six years. His next move was to engage, for twelve months, in mining for quicksilver at The Oceanic Mine, and then he returned to the butcher business, opening a shop in Cambria and running it one year. He then leased five hundred acres on Santa Rosa creek about eight miles from Cambria and began dairying. In 1902 he purchased the ranch, and continued at dairying, with fifty cows, besides raising stock. He continued dairying until 1914 when rented the ranch and purchased the residence in Cambria.
However, when World War I broke out, the demand for mercury increased and he decided to take up mining once more. In partnership with A. Luchessa and William Bagby, he purchased the Klau mine and he was put in charge of operating it. By 1917 the mine was averaging a flask a day.
Eugenio Bianchini also bought a small home and a 100 acre ranch at the mouth of Pico Creek, where his daughter, Elvira, and her husband Rocco Rava lived later. The Bianchini family kept the ranch, which included several acres of oceanfront land, until 1949, when they sold it for $24,700 to Walter Southall's development company. Today it is known as San Simeon Acres.
Eugenio Bianchini won recognition and distinction at barbecuing meats, and after 1902 he was in charge of the barbecues of importance in the county and was always much sought after for that purpose.
When prohibition began in the United States in 1920, Eugenio Bianchini became a bootlegger. Illegal whiskey was imported from Canada and landed just south of Piedras Blancas Light Station. It was then transported to the Guthrie-Bianchini House for storage. During the restoration of the house, four large jugs were discovered embedded in a concrete wall in the basement. The whiskey was then retailed through Doc (Billy) Randall who had a drug store on Main Street where Linn’s Restaurant is today. People would come to the drug store complaining of a bad knee, grippe or some other malady and Doc Randall would sell them some “tonic” to cure their ailment.
On September17, 1889, Eugenio Bianchini married Louisa Bezzini. She was born in Avigno, Italy, on the Swiss border less than twenty miles from where Eugenio was born. She came to California in 1888. They had had nine children: Henry (also known as Andrre), Elvira, Palmira, WilIiam (nicknamed “coyote”), Thelma (also known as Mary or Tillie), James (also known as Joseph and nicknamed “spider”), Walter (nicknamed “weasel”), and two others who died when young.
At one time, all four boys worked at the Oceanic Mine as their father had before them. As one of the area's largest, most successful and long-running mercury mines, it was a major employer in the area, along with the construction of the Hearst estate in San Simeon.
Eugenio Bianchini suffered from diabetes and was confined to a wheelchair after he had one leg amputated. Although he and Louisa lived in Cayucos at the time of their deaths, he died of a cerebral hemorrhage in San Luis Obispo on December 24, 1942. Louisa died on October 15, 1940. Both Eugenio and Louisa are buried in Cayucos.
Palmira Bianchini married Robert Scott and she died in 1949 after they had six children. None of her siblings had children. On his death, Eugenio’s will established a trust which divided ownership of the G-B House equally among his seven children. However, they all died intestate (except Thelma)leaving the court to decide how to divide the property among the surviving siblings and Palmira’s six children. This situation, combined with some legal complications, resulted in one of the longest probate cases in California history, beginning with Palmira’s death in 1949 and ending by mutual agreement of the parties in 1999. The Cambria Historical Society bought the house from the estate in 2001.
Thomas Clendenen
In the last three issues, we have included articles about three owners of the Guthrie-Bianchini property - Julian Estrada, Samuel and Sarah Guthrie, and Eugenio and Louisa Bianchini. Another of the important owners was Thomas Clendenen.
In September, 1869, Clendenen bought a lot from George W. Proctor and George S. Davis which ran between Center Street and Proctor Lane (commonly known as the alley behind the house). In December of that year he bought two more lots from them giving him ownership of all the land between Center Street and Proctor Lane and extending 125 feet east from Lee Street (Burton Drive). In early 1870, Clendenen built the original “saltbox” house on this property. That is the portion of the house which was disassembled in 2004 and reassembled during the past year or so.
Thomas Hamilton Clendenen was one of eleven children born to John Clendenin and Margaret Hamilton, John’s second wife. Thomas was born in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania and the family later moved to a farm near Sweetland, Iowa not far from Davenport, where both of his parents died.
In the early 1850s, Thomas set off to find gold in California. It was at this time, apparently the result of a rift with his parents, that he changed the spelling of his name so that it ended in “en” instead of “in”. He went first to Placerville and then to Diamond Springs where he married Rhoda Inman in 1857. Rhoda was the daughter of Samuel Inman who had five brothers. One of the brothers, Dolphin Inman, married Mary Leah Barnhardt in Illinois in 1854. Mary Inman later married George Lull in Cambria. Lull was a partner in the firm of Grant and Lull who opened one of the first general merchandise stores in Cambria where Samuel Guthrie worked. Later, Guthrie and Lull formed a partnership to run the business. When Lull retired he built a house for Mary which is now the center of the Bluebird Inn on Main Street. In fact, we have it on good authority that Mary Inman still lives in that house and occasionally makes appearances as the ghost of the Bluebird Inn, haunting the entire facility.
Thomas and Rhoda moved to San Luis Obispo in the late 1850s and by 1861 they were farming along Santa Rosa Creek Road a few miles east of Coast Union High School. About two years after they bought the Cambria property and built the “saltbox”, they sold the property to Winfield Scott Whitaker and Job Apsey and moved to Weedpatch, near Bakersfield. They later moved to Yolo County and then to Tehama County and then to Oregon. Thomas and Rhoda Clendenen are shown in the picture after nearly forty years of marriage. Thomas Clendenen died in the Bakersfield area on December 12, 1921.
Thanks to Stephen Overturf, a CHS member, who did the research on the life of Thomas Clendenen.
Benjamin Franklin
No, not that one. We’re talking about Benjamin H. Franklin who bought the “saltbox” house in June, 1882, built the addition on the Lee Street (Burton Drive) side, and then promptly sold the property to the Guthries in early 1883.
Benjamin Hubes Franklin was born in Philadelphia in 1856 and was the eldest of nine children born to Colonel William H. Franklin and Morgiana Hubes Franklin. The Colonel, a civil war veteran, was a native of New Jersey as was his father, Benjamin Franklin (no, not that one). This Benjamin Franklin was the son of the Benjamin Franklin (yes, that one) who was the first Postmaster General of the United States and a signatory to both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
Benjamin H. Franklin was raised and educated in San Jose and was a graduate of the business college, high school and normal school there. In 1876 he came to Cambria where he taught school for two years. For a time he was engaged in real estate and money lending and purchased county warrants. He was appointed Postmaster in 1882, but was removed by the administration of President Grover Cleveland, who was first elected in 1884, and re-installed by Benjamin Harrison who was elected President in 1888. He was a member of the County Board of Education. For five years he was a clerk for the firm of Grant & Lull and at the same time he was telegraph operator and Postmaster.
In 1885, Franklin opened a variety store which grew until, within six years, it became the largest in town. When the great fire of 1889 broke out, he owned 100 feet on Main Street including the Franklin Theatre building, a building rented to the Granger Saloon and his store. At that moment, he was totally uninsured and was negotiating for a new policy. The fire originated behind the Proctor Hotel, a block from him, and he succeeded in saving $2,000 worth of goods. The rest, except for his residence, was a total loss, amounting to about $10,000. The morning after the fire he opened his store in the parlor of a dwelling house, and in five days, he moved into a 26 by 40 foot building where he conducted the only mercantile business in town.
In addition to his Cambria properties, Franklin owned a 500 acre ranch on Santa Rosa Creek seven miles from town, on which there were 100 head of cattle. He also owned a residence in Cambria which today houses the Olallieberry Inn, and a business block in San Luis Obispo containing three stores which he rented.
In 1876, the year he came to Cambria, the twenty-one year old Franklin married Mabel Runyon, age seventeen, a native of Colfax, on the Sacramento River. She was the daughter of Alexander Runyon, a rancher and horticulturist from New York. They had four children, all born in Cambria, including three sons, Benjamin H., Raymond and Alexander, and a daughter, whose name is not known, and who was the youngest.
In 1892, Franklin married Blanche Music of Cambria. Blanche was the daughter of Benjamin Franklin Music, born in Virginia, and Martha Music, a Cambria native of a prominent Cambria family. This marriage produced eight children: Grover, Lew, Blanch, Charles, Albert, Pauline, Mildred, and another who died.
Benjamin H. Franklin died of apoplexy at age 56 on August 6, 1913 in San Luis Obispo. He is buried there at the Odd Fellows Cemetery.
The Red House
Across Center Street from the Guthrie-Bianchini House (and a little to the east) lies the property purchased by Greenspace - The Cambria Land Trust in 1999. This property was once the focus of the Chinese community in Cambria, whose members were mainly employed harvesting seaweed and abalone for shipment to China or in the local mercury mines. The Chinese community included several buildings on an “L-shaped” piece of property running south from Center Street to Santa Rosa Creek and along the creek to Bridge Street and at least one building on the other side of Bridge Street as well. Until 1926, Bridge Street extended south to Santa Rosa Creek though there was no bridge there across the creek.
Between 1873 and 1919, the Center Street property was owned by three Cambria merchants: George Rothschild, Abraham Gans, and Samuel Frank, although the Chinese used it from at least 1880. By 1886, a large one and one-half story dwelling, probably built by Rothschild, was on the property facing Center Street but, by 1913, it had disappeared. By 1919, the Chinese had abandoned the area and the property was purchased by William Warren. Most of the buildings were in poor condition and were torn down leaving only the “Chinese Temple” also called the “Joss House” located at the south end of the property near the creek and another four-room building facing Center Street which was built around 1900. The “Joss House” would be more accurately described as an association hall.
Around 1919, a one-room structure was moved from somewhere else in Cambria, possibly the southwest corner of Main Street and Burton Drive, and joined to the back of the building facing Center Street at the southeast corner. Warren moved into this five-room structure with his wife, Lilly, and four children. In 1925, the Chinese temple was moved north from the creek and it was joined to the back of the original structure at the southwest corner. This combination of three structures became a single, six-room house, commonly called the “Red House”, which was occupied by the Warren family until 1970. It was in this house that William Warren operated the private Cambria Telephone Company.
In 1936, William Warren’s uncle, Clarence Stilts, purchased the property and lived there with his wife, Bettie, and her daughter, Clara. When Clarence died in 1944, Forrester Warren and his brother, Stuart, inherited it and, in 1953, Forrester moved into the house with his wife, Mary Ellen, and their children, Forrest and Linda. The family moved to the “White House” next door and used the “Red House” for storage but, in 1959, Linda Warren married Brad Seek and they lived in the “Red House” until 1964. From then on, the house remained unoccupied. When Forrester Warren died in 1992, the property was left to Linda and Brad Seek and they sold it to Greenspace in 1999.
In 2001, the dilapidated portions of the house were demolished leaving only the association hall which continued to be called the “Red House”. This is the only remaining structure built by the Chinese in this area and is one of only five nineteenth-century Chinese temples existing in California.
On June 29, 2007, Greenspace moved the association hall to a place nearer to its original location near Santa Rosa Creek and are lovingly restoring it, including building a new foundation. The property will ultimately be open to the public as part of the Cambria Historic Park which will embrace all of Center Street between Burton Drive and Bridge Street.