Pescadero Memories

Also closeby was the Swanton House, 1890 illustrations of which show a storybook inn, with charming vine and red-red rose covered whiter than white cottages where it wouldn’t be surprising to meet a character from a fairytale.

Everybody knew the secret of its success was the incomparable Swantons, Sarah, famous for her cooking and husband Charles, a one-man-chamber-of-commerce.

The Swanton House was so important that for decades it figured in geographical calculations–as in how many miles from the flagpole in front of Swantons to San Gregorio.

Talk about the 1870s, 1880s, 1890s, the Swanton House was on the tip of the tongue of anyone traveling to Pescadero because that was the choice place to stay. Why? because it was so close to famous, intimate Pebble Beach, and every morning a wagon took elaborately attired guests [bonnets with ribbons, long, bulky dresses, men in suits and hats] to the seashore for a day of serious pebble collecting.

Some of these travelers had come from the East Coast to rummage through the thick hills of shiny, colorful pebbles. And they were colorful. Pretty enough for jewelry, rings and pendants.

It was inevitable that the special pebbles would lead to fanciful rumors…that among ordinary gray stones, there were rubies, garnets and emeralds.

The Swanton House and even more so, Pebble Beach, was the heart and soul of Pescadero.

But by 1919 with both Sarah and Charles Swanton gone, the glory days were gone changing the image to a rundown hotel. Perhaps even seedy.

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Next door to Loren Coburn’s house stood a couple of old, weathered stables. In earlier times, they had been part of Coburn’s “empire.”

Before the automobile handily became “king”, horses were the way of travel, stagecoaches akin to a small bus. When the horse was “king,” Coburn waged a bitter price-war against a popular competitor named Levy, the same family that would opened general merchandise stores in Pescadero and Half Moon Bay–and in San Mateo.

Loren didn’t care what people thought; he didn’t engage in popularity contests. It was always about the bottom line and his mind could easily calculate costs, losses and profits.

During business dealings, one local said he couldn’t call Coburn “a gentleman.”

Revealing his stubbornness, his inflexibility, Coburn didn’t move into sizzling hot automobile era. Instead, unable to grasp the modern era before him, he sold the stables which were converted into garages, where mechanics repaired the new “machines.”

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To the north of the Coburns–closer to the cemetery–stood the quaint white Congregational Church, the oldest church in the entire county.

How ever you arrived in the village–that brought to mind scenes of bucolic New England-the elegantly tapered spire was the first hint that this was Pescadero.

Loren Coburn had traveled west from a New Englandesque state, Vermont, the town of West Brookfield. Although he had been raised in a family of religious revivalists who helped establish the Freewill Baptist Church, Loren said he was a Congregationalist—in name only because he was never seen to set foot in the church steps from his house. Nor did he attend the Catholic or Methodist churches.

…………to be continued….

Pescadero’s first post office was established in 1859. Henry C. Bidwell was appointed the postmaster.

There were four saloons.

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Prohibition was good to Pescadero.

Along with the profitable–but illegal– business of rumrunning, dairying and lumbering prospered. But it wasn’t just the bounty of Prohibition that made life sweeter.

Since about 1914-5, Pescadero had its own county supervisor, 38-year-old Dr. Clarence Victor Thompson–and he represented the town well, bringing in new jobs his constituents would not otherwise have.

He was very good-looking, and the kind of leader who attracted friends who agreed with him.

But Dr. Thompson had his share of non-supporters in the tiny village, folks who eyed his dealings with suspicion. His home was an elegant, large two-story house, the former residence of the rich Chandler family, early pioneers in the area. It stood around the corner from the Coburn’s place.

Dr. Thompson both lived and worked in his home, calling it a “hospital,” but locals said they saw few patients there.

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By June Morrall

It was all pasture behind the shabby Coburn’s house on San Gregorio Street. This part of town was home to a dozen wooden buildings of various sizes and heights.

The road was the only way out of town, north to Half Moon Bay or south to Santa Cruz [traveling behind the fire station).

If you were going “next door” to visit friends or relatives in tiny San Gregorio, you’d pass the old cemetery and then the road twisted and turned past farms, a rural landscape, a couple of miles east of the Pacific Ocean.

Another twisty road led from Pescadero through the otherworldly forest of redwoods [with its shadows and shades of brown and green], over the mountains to Redwood City, the county seat.

But when the younger locals went to Half Moon Bay or Purisima, they went there to dance, the popular entertainment of the times. That, and during prohibition, music, dancing and some glasses of whiskey from the stills of Half Moon Bay or Pescadero. It was good to personally know the man who made the whiskey.

…to be continued…

By June Morrall

[Note: Loren Coburn died a few days after the end of WWI–the war ended at 11 a.m. on Nov. 11, 1918. A few hours later, in Europe, my grandfather, a German soldier–father of two, and a musician by trade– was “mistakenly” shot and killed in Alsace Lorraine.)

To observers, it seemed like Loren Coburn’s greatest pleasure in life was litigation: suing other people. At one time he held the unofficial title as the “most litigious individual in California.” He knew and used many of the practicing attorneys in the Bay Area. He had to know them all because he didn’t pay his fees on time, or at all. So they sued him.

Aside from his obsession with courtrooms, everybody believed the Coburns were very rich and that their home would reflect that–like the famous palaces of Hillsborough on the other side of the mountain.

Not so. The furnishings in the Coburn house were simple and the carpets not fine Orientals but a cheap fabric, faded and worn. To the officials collecting clues after Sarah’s murder, the house was simply rundown.

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Talk about money and the Coburns always brought to mind Loren Coburn’s penny-pinching ways In some circles he was called “the poor little rich man of Pescadero,” compared to Shylock, the money-lending character in Shakespeare’s “Merchant of Venice.”

There were all kinds of stories about Loren’s spending habits. Here’s a typical one:  Loren brought his wife and a dozen doughnuts to a restaurant and ordered one cup of coffee–to be shared between the two of them.

As the largest landowner in the area–and once the biggest in all of San Mateo County–Loren engaged in tenant farming. The arrangement called  for one-quarter of the crops to be turned over to Coburn.

Precisely 25%. The crops were meticulously weighed before Loren would accept his share and the tenants complained the he was so cheap he refused to give them some nails to fix the fences on his property.

All of the acreage Loren Coburn owned had once belonged to the rancheros–and it was even rumored that he got them drunk on cheap whiskey and then moved, to his advantage, the property boundaries (which in the mid 1850s could be a rock or some other geographical feature, easily moved by hand).

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[Note: I think this is Chapter 2. ]

The crowd standing in front of the Coburn house talked among themselves. Sarah never entertained. But this morning felt different. Even the old Magnolia trees that cast their crooked shadows across the exterior of the house appeared less ominous. Instead of discouraging visitors, their twisted limbs seemed to welcome everyone.

Inside the cheaply furnished home, District Attorney Franklin Swart, a self-made man, Sheriff Michael Sheehan, known as “the terror of criminals,” and Coroner William Ansyl Brooke, a former physician employed by the Ocean Shore Railroad, contemplated the safe. It was big and occupied the best spot in the dining room. How much cash and gold did it hold? Far more, they thought, than any of them had in the bank or hidden under a mattress.

It was Swart who opened the safe and looked inside, disappointed to find only $1600 –the only indication of disappointment was his wrinkled brow.

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By June Morrall

Life in the Northern California coastal farming village of Pescadero would never be the same after Wednesday, June 4, 1919.

[And decades later some folks squirmed or refused to answer my questions about the events leading up to that grim day].

June 4, 1919 unfolded with San Mateo County officials investigating a murder: the D.A., sheriff and coroner motored from Redwood City on the other side of the redwood-studded mountains to sift the Coburn house for clues, fingerprints and evidence.

Other parked cars belonged to D.A. White, San Francisco’s Chief of Police and detectives Frank McConnell and Charles Gallivan. They were accompanied by Eustace Cullinan, one of Sarah Coburn’s attorneys.

Private detectives and reporters milled around outside the gloomy house. The chilling news of Sarah Coburn’s murder had quickly spread through the tiny village–and even though the locals were advised to stay away, a small curious crowd stood rooted on the street. They waited to hear anything from the police, a slip of the tongue, anything….

Even before Loren Coburn’s death, attorneys had warned the Coburns that both their lives were in danger. In 1910 the Coburn’s San Francisco attorney Archibald Treat learned that two Pescadero ranchers had been offered $5000 to kill the couple. The motive? The Coburn’s wealth came from the extensive lands they owned….

….to be continued….

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