Trescony, Alberto
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Alberto Trescony, born in Italy, came to Santa Cruz in the 1870s (in a UC Davis oral history interview, son Julius says it was 1876), and remained for several years before returning to Monterey County, where he died in 1892 (while staying at a hotel in Salinas). Clark (Santa Cruz County Place Names) mentions that Trescony lived in Monterey as early as 1841.
It appears that Alberto Trescony's small farm/estate on the Westside (which was still rural in those days) was perhaps originally intended at least partially as a semi-retirement move. The drawing in Elliott's 1879 Santa Cruz County Illustrations (p.f52) shows what looks like an enclosed garden/orchard, so it's fitting that some of the estate is now a community garden at Trescony Park. Either by design or because of changed circumstances, much of the Trescony Santa Cruz land was soon subdivided. Sentinel real estate transaction notices of the 1880s and 90s contain numerous references to "Trescony's Addition" or "Trescony Building Lots".
There's a short bio of Trescony on the Monterey County Historical Society site. He had quite an extensive career in the Monterey-Salinas-Salinas Valley area, including ownership of Rancho San Lucas, and later other lands in the same area - the upper end of the Salinas Valley.
Today, there's a turnoff from Hwy 101 to the small town of San Lucas in the southern Salinas Valley. In 1891, Trescony donated land for a cemetery in San Lucas, where he was buried the next year. His monument in that cemetery is shown at right. Son Julius has a bio in Guinn.
