History Pages: 15 - Around the New County

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While the business of the brand new County of Santa Cruz was getting underway in the early 1850s, there were still no incorporated towns or other government structure. The Villa de Branciforte had never become more than a long straight road with a few houses. Roads were still so few that they didn’t need official names. As we have seen, however, it was during these years that many persons arrived whose names can now be found on signs. Here are three more of them.

Maine native Hiram Scott was another of those sailors who jumped ship in Monterey and ended up here. Scott arrived in 1846, ten or so years later than the three mentioned in an earlier post. He left for the gold mines in 1848 and apparently found some of the shiny stuff, for he came back to buy Rancho San Agustin from Joseph Majors in 1850. Scott immediately began building a home for himself and his family, who followed him to California in 1853. The Scott House still stands as a museum in the city of Scotts Valley, one of the oldest wood-frame structures in the county.

William Waddell was a Kentuckian who arrived in the county in 1851. In the succeeding years, Waddell built four sawmills in four different lumbering areas. The last of these was built in 1861, along with a wharf, near what is today the northern boundary of the County, on the creek that commemorates his name. At one time there was a community along the creek named Waddell, but it disappeared with the decline of the timber industry, as did so many other small timber-related settlements. Today we know Waddell Creek as a good place for wind-surfing, bird-watching and hiking.

Porter is a prominent mid-county name dating from the same years. Benjamin F. Porter, his brother Edward and several cousins arrived from Vermont in 1853-54. Ben Porter was a tanner by trade and built a tannery operation on the creek in what is now called Porter Gulch (near Cabrillo College). Brother “Ned” Porter opened the first mercantile store in Soquel village, just as the timber/lumber industry was taking off. The main street of Soquel today is Porter Street, and the local library is named Porter Memorial. Descendants of the first Santa Cruz County Porters became prominent philanthropists, especially supportive of education. Because of that, there’s now a Porter College at UCSC and a Porter-Sesnon House at Cabrillo College.

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