History of Solvang, California
The Beginnings
The Santa Ynez Valley in which Solvang lies today was originally inhabited by the Chumash, identified by Fr. Pedro Font, chaplain of the 1776 Anza Expedition, as an ingenious and industrious people. They had an excellent astronomical system and were good fishermen and hunters. Spanish missionaries who arrived at the beginning of the 19th century succeeded in getting the Chumash to adopt the Spanish way of life and to serve the missions, especially the Mission Santa Inés created in 1804 and located in the center of today's Solvang. Santa Inés was located midway between the missions of Santa Barbara and La Purísima Concepción in Lompoc and the lands were designated the Rancho San Carlos de Jonata. For a time, the mission was a seminary but soon began to deteriorate. It was however repaired by the Donahue family in 1884 and renovated by Fr. Alexander Buckler in 1904.
Danish Pioneers
Between 1850 and 1930, a considerable number of Danes left Denmark which was suffering from poor economic prospects. According to some estimates, as many as one in ten Danes emigrated during this period, mostly to the United States. The most popular destinations for Danish settlers were Utah, Illinois, Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, and South Dakota. In many of the new communities, churches and schools were set up in accordance with the ideas of N. F. S. Grundtvig, an influential Danish philosopher, hymn-writer and Lutheran pastor. In particular, the so-called folk schools introduced a new approach to education based on a spirit of freedom, poetry and disciplined creativity. Folk schools were established in Elk Horn, Iowa (1878–1899); Grant, Michigan (1882–1888); Nysted, Nebraska (1887–1934); Tyler, Minnesota (1888–1935) and Kenmare, North Dakota (1902–1916) and finally in Solvang (1911–1931).
One of the most enthusiastic proponents of the Danish approach to religion and education was Benedict Nordentoft who was born in Brabrand near Aarhus in 1873. After graduating in theology in 1898, he was soon tempted to travel to the United States where he began coordinating relations between Danish Lutheran churches in Michigan, Ohio, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Maine. In 1901, he returned to Denmark specifically to be ordained in Aarhus Cathedral. Back in America, he continued his work as a lecturer at Grand View College, a folk high school in Des Moines, Iowa which was also set up by the Danish Lutheran Church. He was appointed president in 1903, a post which he held until 1910 when disagreements with his Grundtvigian colleagues forced him to resign.
From 1906, Nordentoft, together with Jens M. Gregersen, a pastor from Kimballton, Iowa, and Peder P. Hornsyld, a lecturer at Grand View, had discussed the possibility of creating a new Danish colony with a dedicated Lutheran church and school on the west coast. In 1910, together with other Danish-Americans, they created the Danish-American Colony Company in San Francisco. Later that year, suitable land was found in the Santa Ynez Valley northwest of Santa Barbara. On January 23, 1911, the contract was signed and Solvang was founded. The Danes had bought almost 9,000 acres (36 km2) of the Rancho San Carlos de Jonata land grant, paying an average of $40 per acre.
Among the other early arrivals with Mads Frese were Mr. and Mrs. Sophus Olsen, Hans Skytt, John Petersen and John Ahrenkild. Skytt was to play an important role as the carpenter who constructed many of Solvang's early buildings The first to be constructed was a hotel close to the Mission where new arrivals could be housed. Gregersen became president of the Danish-American Colony Company and Nordentoft was named head and Hornsyld a teacher at the school which opened on November 15, 1911, with 21 students.
Expansion
At the end of 1912 when it became almost impossible to sell any more plots of land, the company's income was vastly reduced. The shareholders persuaded Gregersen to give up his position as Solvang's pastor and travel to Iowa and Nebraska to convince Danish immigrants to buy land in the new colony. He enjoyed considerable success, relieving the colony of any further threats. After Gregersen's departure, Nordentoft became the pastor. Before long, Solvang also had a store, a bank, a lumber yard, a barbershop and a post office with Hornsyld as postmaster. Where there had just been fields, there was now a small town.
The Folk High School
Nordentoft was not content with the little folk school in Solvang. When he was unable to convince Gregersen and Hornsyld that a larger educational institution was needed, he bought them out and started to raise funds for a bigger and better school. The following year, in August 1914, a rejsegilde or topping-out ceremony was held for the impressive new building which Nordentoft called Atterdag College in memory of Valdemar Atterdag who did much to consolidate the kingdom of Denmark in the 14th century. What surprised many of those who came to the celebration was the great similarity the building had with Grand View College. Standing on a hilltop above the village, the new college or folk high school was designed to teach Danish-speaking students in their late teens how to lead more meaningful lives with an emphasis on lectures, singing, gymnastics, folk dancing and fellowship. A difficult period followed as World War I put a stop to Danish emigration to America leading to a reduction in the number of young people requiring a school education. It also became difficult to maintain a Danish-speaking school at a time when American nationalism was steadily growing. Nordentoft, who felt he had achieved his ambitions in America, sold the college to the congregation of the Solvang Lutheran church in 1921 for $5,000 and returned to Denmark with his wife and family. Atterdag College continued to be used as a folk school, a community meeting hall, a performing arts venue, a gymnastics center, a summer school, and a boarding house until it was finally demolished in 1970, making way for the Solvang Lutheran Home.
The Danish Church
The Bethania Evangelical Lutheran Church was initiated by the Danish pioneers in 1912. For a number of years, church services were held in the school building until, in 1928, a new church was built by Hans Skytt and his colleagues. Solidly constructed in ferro-concrete with walls a foot thick, it was based on a photograph of a Gothic-styled Danish church and resembles one of the hundreds of rural churches in Denmark which were built or restyled in the 14th century. Its interior contains hand-carved woodwork on the altar, pulpit and altar rail. Services used to be mainly in Danish but apart from a Christmas service in Danish on lillejuleaften (December 23) each year, all the other services are in English.
Danish-styled Architecture
Initially, most of Solvang's buildings were built in the same style as others in the area. The Lutheran church was the first to be based on Danish architecture and bears a close relationship to Danish equivalents. But after World War II, interest grew in the concept of a "Danish Village". The pioneer of the Danish Provincial style, as it came to be known, was undoubtedly Ferdinand Sorensen, originally from Nebraska. In the mid-1940s, after returning to Solvang from a trip to Denmark, he first completed Møllebakken, his Danish-styled home, and then went on to build the first of the village's four windmills. A little later, Earl Petersen, a local architect, gave the older buildings a new look, adding facades in so-called "Danish Provincial" style. Buildings in the half-timbered style of Danish rural houses proliferated, creating a new tourist attraction. While much was done to create an "authentic" Danish atmosphere in the town center, it has been pointed out by Scandinavians that fake thatched roofs and artificial timbering are largely a result of local interests in general rather than those of the Danish immigrants themselves. The older buildings have simply been restyled to look Danish even if there was nothing Danish about them originally.
Tourism
Thanks much in part to its unique half-timbered architecture, Solvang has become a major California tourist attraction, with over one million visitors per year. Tourists were initially attracted to Solvang by the visit of Denmark's Prince Frederik in 1939. But it was in 1947, following a feature article in the Saturday Evening Post, that they began to flock to the town. In particular, today's visitors appreciate the Danish windmills, the statues of Hans Christian Andersen and the Little Mermaid, the half-timbered houses, the Danish rural church, the Round Tower as well as Danish music and folk dancing. In addition, several restaurants and pastry shops serve Danish specialities. A replica of a 19th-century Danish streetcar, the horse-drawn Hønen ("the hen"), takes visitors on sightseeing tours around downtown Solvang. Partly as a result of the 2004 film Sideways, which was set in the surrounding Santa Ynez Valley, the number of wine-related businesses in Solvang has increased appreciably, attracting oenophiles to the downtown area.
Danish Days
Since 1936, Solvang has celebrated Danish folk traditions at its annual "Danish Days" event, usually held during the third weekend in September. Led by a "Danish Maid," the program consists of æbleskiver eating competitions, music, dancing, and processions through the downtown area with floats, marching groups, marching bands, folk dancers and singers. A Danish Days breakfast on Sunday morning features medisterpølser, a spiced pork sausage recipe of Danish origins, and æbleskiver.
Festival Theater
One of Solvang's attractions is the 700-seat open-air Festival Theater, which was built in 1974 following the success of a makeshift performance of Hamlet in 1971 in the town park. Strong support from the local business community, Donovan Marley (director of the Pacific Conservatory of the Performing Arts), and Earl Petersen (a local architect), allowed the structure to be completed in record time. Recent productions have included West Side Story and Les Misérables. The style of the exterior is reminiscent of both Danish and Elizabethan architecture.
Royal Visits
On April 7, 1939, Danish Crown Prince Frederik and Princess Ingrid visited Solvang; at the time, a large number of the town's 400 residents were Danish immigrants. They drove through the grounds of Atterdag College and attended a Good Friday service at Bethania Church. The crown prince spoke of their reception favorably: "To find out traditions in our fatherland in new surroundings makes them only more beloved to us. We have been bathed in sunlight ever since we began this memorable day and now we have driven into a bit of Denmark tucked into this beautiful California."
On June 5, 1960, Princess Margrethe of Denmark paid a visit which included a reception at Palacio del Rio, lunch at Bethania Church and a tour of downtown Solvang. She returned on May 23, 1976 as Queen of Denmark together with her husband, Prince Henrik. After a formal luncheon in the Parish Hall, the couple visited Bethania Church and the Solvang Lutheran Home before greeting residents on Copenhagen Drive. Shortly after her visit, the queen awarded Solvang developer Ferdinand Sorensen the Order of the Dannebrog for strengthening ties between the United States and Denmark.
100th Anniversary
Solvang celebrated its centennial in 2011. The first event in this connection was a visit by the Danish ambassador to the United States, Friis Arne Petersen, on 11 July 2010. Mr Petersen took a walking tour of downtown Solvang and visited the Mission. The mayor, Jim Richardson, greeted the ambassador with a private reception at the Elverhøj Museum. "I wanted him to see the people of our town, and the Danish community in particular," he explained.
The program for the centennial year started with the official launch on January 7, 2011. Centennial plans also included Christmas and New Year celebrations, including the proposed Julefest Parade on Saturday, December 3, 2011. Among the highlights were the Tour of California Time Trial on Friday, May 20 and the visit of the Aalborg Police Band for Danish Days during the weekend of September 16 to 18.
Henrik, Prince Consort of Denmark, visited Solvang on June 11 which also happened to be his own 77th birthday. He was accompanied by the Danish ambassador, Peter Taksoe-Jensen, and Torsten Jansen, the cultural counselor at the Danish Embassy in Washington. The prince helped dedicate Solvang's Centennial Plaza, unveiling two bricks bearing the Danish royal monogram. He spoke of a relationship between the United States and Denmark "based on respect and common values and ideals" which was forged by individuals "who have made a new home without forgetting the old nation of their ancestors".
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Solvang, founded in 1911, began as a dream of three Danish immigrants: Reverend Benedict Nordentoft, Reverend J. M. Gregersen, and Professor P. P. Hornsyld. They planned to raise money to buy a large tract of land on the West Coast and subdivide it into plots for farms, homes, and a town for Danish immigrants. Profits from the sale of land would be used for building a Danish-style folk school. Also planned was a Lutheran church.
In January, 1911 the Danish-American Colony Corporation bought almost 10,000 acres of prime land in the Santa Ynez Valley, California. The new colony was named “Solvang” (meaning sunny field) and glowing advertisements were placed in Danish-language newspapers. Early buyers, almost all Danish, came from California, the Midwest, and Denmark.
Settlers soon arrived and began establishing necessary businesses. The Solvang Hotel opened in July, 1911. A general merchandise store soon followed, as did a creamery, a bakery, a bank, and a butcher shop, among others. The little town was growing.
Most of the early settlers were farmers. They quickly built barns for their livestock and farming equipment, then houses for their families. Irrigation systems were started in 1912, and a variety of crops were grown year round. Dairy farming, a tradition in Denmark, flourished. Some of the men worked on nearby ranches.
True to the founders’ plan, Solvang built a folk school, which opened November 15, 1911. Designed for young adults as a “school for life,” it offered a broad range of courses, from Danish arts and crafts, singing, folk dancing, and gymnastics, to bookkeeping, history, English and Danish language classes, and more. Out-of-town students lived at the school.
In 1914, the folk school moved to its new home, an imposing white structure on a hill overlooking the town, and took a new name, Atterdag College. For years Atterdag was the heart and soul of Solvang. It was used as a folk school, a community meeting hall, a performing arts venue, a gymnastics center, a summer school, and a boarding house.
Atterdag College also provided church facilities. (Although the Bethania Congregation was formed in January 1912, a church was not built until 1928.) When the college finally closed its doors in 1952, its site and some of its facilities were used by the Solvang Lutheran Home, now called Atterdag Village of Solvang.
The Danes of Solvang rapidly became acculturated. They learned English, followed American ways, and sent their children to the local grammar school. But they also kept Danish traditions. They spoke Danish amongst themselves and formed Danish fraternal organizations. They cooked Danish food and pastries. They celebrated Danish holidays and kept alive Danish folk dancing and singing.
In 1936, the 25th anniversary of Solvang’s founding, the people in Solvang decided to throw a party. The three-day celebration (June 5-7) included a torchlight procession, plays, pageants, a parade, folk dancing and singing, a concert, barbecue, and a street dance — and was a huge success. In 1937 Solvang put on another celebration and the tradition of Danish Days was born.
The 1940s brought great anxieties to the Danish colony, as well as great changes. Nazi Germany occupied their former home, Denmark, and their new homeland was actively fighting in World War II. Danish-Americans signed up for military service, and the home front went all out in the war effort.
In January 1947, the Saturday Evening Post magazine published a feature article about the “spotless Danish village that blooms like a rose in California’s charming Santa Ynez Valley.” The enticing article with its stunning photographs started a stream of visitors to Solvang, which became known as the “Danish Capital of America.”
Solvang decided its look should reflect the town’s Danish culture. New buildings were constructed in the Danish provincial style; older buildings were remodeled; Danish-style windmills were built. “Main Street” became “Copenhagen Drive,” and other streets were given Danish names.
On three festive occasions Solvang has welcomed Danish Royal Family members. Crown Prince Frederik and Crown Princess Ingrid of Denmark visited Solvang on April 7, 1939. Princess Margrethe visited on June 5, 1960, and then returned on May 23, 1976 as Queen Margrethe II of Denmark, this time accompanied by her husband Prince Henrik.
Solvang has forged strong cultural ties with Denmark. Danes are familiar with and intrigued by the Danish community in California. Many Danish Americans consider Solvang their cultural home and visit regularly. Denmark’s ambassador to the United States recently visited and cultural exchanges are on going.
On September 22-24, 1961, Solvang celebrated its Golden Jubilee with a banquet, torchlight parade, dance and song fest, bleskiver breakfasts, folk dancing, gymnastic performances, a barbecue, art exhibit, a street dance, and a colorful historical pageant parade. In 2011 Solvang will celebrate its Centennial with a yearlong series of activities and events.
As Solvang grew, it added more amenities: a continuing care retirement home (now Atterdag Village of Solvang); enlarged public schools; a hospital (now Santa Ynez Valley Cottage Hospital); the outdoor Festival Theater; Hans Christian Andersen Park; and the Elverhøj Museum of History and Art. New home developments, new businesses, more civic organizations, and more volunteer programs also added to Solvang’s vitality.
Ever since its founding, Solvang had been governed by Santa Barbara County, but its citizens wanted more local control. In 1951 the Solvang Municipal Improvement District (SMID) was formed, which had some of a city’s basic authority. In 1985 Solvang incorporated as a general law city, with the entire SMID Board elected as Solvang’s first city council.
Today Solvang is a charming town of approximately 5,400 residents. Despite tourism, it has kept its small town atmosphere. Although only 10% of the residents now claim Danish ancestry, the Danish heritage is part of the texture of everyday life that gives Solvang its unique look and atmosphere.
THE HISTORY OF SOLVANG’S DANISH LOOK
In its early years, Solvang never advertised its Danish cultural heritage through public or private architecture. Every building, with the exception of the classically designed Santa Ynez Valley Bank, was constructed as a simple wood frame structure in a western style or adopted Mission/Spanish style facades of white washed stucco and red tile roofs.
Bethania Lutheran (1928) was the first building in Solvang to display the Danish heritage of the town’s settlers. For such an important building, the community chose to construct their Lutheran church in the style of 12-14th century Danish rural churches with corbie-stepped gables.
With exacting detail, Bethania Lutheran’s church faithfully replicates Danish rural church architecture. The building became a visual beacon for newly arrived Danes. To this day, Bethania Lutheran remains the most authentic Danish architectural replica in Solvang.
A hallmark of Solvang’s Danish look is bindingsværk. This type of construction was popular in Denmark as early as the 16th century. Literally meaning brick and timber, this half-timber construction technique (sometimes using stucco as an alternative to brick) is typical to Danish medieval buildings. Starting in the 1930s, individual building projects in Solvang started to use bindingsværk architectural style. However, most residents could not afford real timbers. Instead, sculpted cement mixed with brown pigment sufficed to create the impression of wood beams.
Alfred Baker Petersen was the first to incorporate Danish bindingsværk into his home (1931). Einer Johnsen’s jewelry and radio shop (1936) became the first Main Street business to adopt a simple bindingsværk design. In 1939 the Hans Knudsen family built their coffee shop and restaurant, Sunny Corner, with a traditional half-timber facade. A trend was developing.
The next major Danish-style building was the new Solvang Elementary School. Located on Spring Street (today Atterdag Road), it opened in January of 1940. The school’s steep red tiled roof complimented the nearby Bethania Church. A metal stork weather vane was placed over the entrance to bring traditional good luck.
One of the largest commercial projects to go Danish was Raymond Paaske’s Copenhagen Square. A collaborative effort, which included Ferd Sorensen’s design, it was completed in 1947. This building was the catalyst for downtown Solvang to invest in widespread Danish-style conversion.
Copenhagen Square incorporated thin-cut wood shingles with rolled edges and crosspieces along the roof peak, imitating the feel of thatch roofing. The detail required soaking of the shingles overnight and nailing them on wet to prevent the splitting of the shingles. Tedious work, but effective, this technique was often copied for other downtown rooftops.
Viggo and Martha Brandt-Erichsen’s home, Elverhoy, also had architectural significance in Solvang. Viggo and his family spent nearly four years (1949-1953) recreating the style of an 18th century Danish farmhouse. Viggo hand-hewed the half-timber beams and laid intricate brick patterns to provide authentic bindingsværk walls — one of the few buildings in town with such detail.
“The fact that Elverhoy used real beams caused a big problem,” recalls son David Brandt-Erichsen, who grew up in the house. “Unbeknownst to my father, the climate in California was much different than Denmark and was not conducive to this style of architecture. When it rained, the beams would swell, and when they dried out, they would shrink. This made the house leak like a sieve and it took many years and lots of work to fix this. The stucco facade ‘beams’ work much better in California!”
From this point forward, the conversion of much of Solvang from non-descript American town to Danish village began in earnest.
History of Santa Barbara County
Pre-contact history
The lands flanking the Santa Barbara Channel, both the mainland including present day Santa Barbara, and the Channel Islands, has been continuously inhabited by the Chumash people and their ancestors for at least 13,000 years. The oldest human skeleton yet found in North America, Arlington Springs Man, was unearthed on Santa Rosa Island, approximately 30 miles (48 km) from downtown Santa Barbara.
In more recent pre-Columbian times the Chumash had many villages along the shores and inland, at least one of which, on present-day Mescalitan Island, had over a thousand inhabitants in the 16th century. They were peaceful hunter-gatherers, living from the region's abundant natural resources, and navigating the ocean in tomols, craft closely related to those used by Polynesians. Their rock art work can be seen in nearby Chumash Painted Cave, and their sophisticated basket weaving at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. The Santa Barbara bands spoke the Barbareño language dialect of the Chumashan languages group. As Europeans settled in their homelands the Chumash population declineed.
Spanish period
Mission Santa Barbara was rebuilt after the 1812 earthquake, and the towers were repaired again after the 1925 earthquake.
The first European to see the area was the Portuguese explorer João Cabrilho, who sailed through the Channel in 1542, and anchored briefly in the vicinity of Goleta. He injured himself on the trip, dying of his injury in January 1543, and was buried either on San Miguel Island or Mescalitan Island – the exact burial place of Cabrilho has long been a mystery. Sir Francis Drake also sailed past the area in 1579, but is not known to have made anchorage. In 1602, Sebastian Vizcaino gave the name "Santa Barbara" to the region, in gratitude for having survived a violent storm in the Channel on December 3, the eve of the feast day of Saint Barbara. However it was not until 1769 that Europeans established a colonizing land presence, with the arrival of Gaspar de Portolá and Franciscan missionary Junípero Serra in upper Las Californias. This expedition was sent by King Carlos III to occupy the region, convert the natives to Christianity, and fortify it against perceived threats of other encroaching European colonial powers – principally the early British Empire and tsarist Russian-Pacific Empire.
Portola's expedition reached Santa Barbara on August 14, 1769, encountering exceptionally friendly natives, many of whom lived in Syuxtun, a village just in back of the beach between present-day Chapala and Bath streets. Indeed the natives – which the Spaniards dubbed the Canaliños for the "canoes" (actually tomols) they used so skillfully – so irritated their guests with gifts and boisterous music that Portola changed the location of his camp so his soldiers and missionaries could get some rest.[6] Portola, however, did not stay, and it was not until 1782 that a force of soldiers, led by Don Felipe de Neve and again accompanied by Junipero Serra, came to build the Presidio of Santa Barbara, one of several military outposts meant to protect the area against foreign interests. While the Presidio was not completed until 1792, Padre Lasuén dedicated the new Mission Santa Barbara on the feast day of Santa Barbara (December 4, 1786). He chose for his building site the location of a Chumash village on Mission Creek named Tay-nay-án.
Many of the soldiers who came to build and garrison the Presidio had brought their families with them, and after their terms of service ended settled in Santa Barbara. They built their adobes near the Presidio, arranged haphazardly; a Boston journalist described the scatter of these buildings "as though fired from a blunderbuss." Most of Santa Barbara's old families are descended from these early settlers, and many of their names linger in the street and place names, such as Cota, De la Guerra, Gutierriez, Carrillo, and Ortega.
Building the Mission itself continued throughout the rest of the century, along with the work of converting the Indians to Christianity, a task which proved difficult: according to the Mission registers, by 1805, only 185 of the more than 500 Indians in Santa Barbara had been baptized. The burial register shows that 3,997 Indians died between 1787 and 1841, the majority from diseases such as smallpox, to which the natives had no natural immunity. By 1803 the Mission's chapel was finished, and by 1807 a complete village for the Indians had been completed, largely by their own labor. The site of this village is on the Mission grounds along modern-day Constance Street.
On December 21, 1812, one of the largest earthquakes in California history completely destroyed the first Mission along with most of Santa Barbara. With an estimated magnitude of 7.2, and a hypothesized epicenter near Santa Cruz Island, the quake also produced a tsunami which carried water all the way to modern-day Anapamu Street, and carried a ship a half-mile up Refugio Canyon. Following the devastating earthquake, the Mission padres decided to build a larger and more elaborate Mission complex, which is the one that survives to the present day. While the church was ready in 1820, the bell towers were not finished until 1833.
The most serious military threat to Santa Barbara during the Spanish period was not by a colonial power, but by Hippolyte de Bouchard, a French privateer working for the Argentine government, which was, along with Mexico, attempting to throw off Spanish rule. Bouchard, who was given the task of destroying as many Spanish assets as possible, and in particular the ports in the Americas, possessed two well-armed frigates, which had sufficient armament and crews to destroy any lightly defended towns they encountered. He had done exactly that to Monterey, the capital of Alta California, shortly before coming to Santa Barbara.
Bouchard landed first at Refugio Canyon, where they pillaged and burned the ranch belonging to the Ortega family, killing the cattle and slitting the throats of the horses. However, after being alerted by messengers from Monterey, the Presidio dispatched a squadron of cavalry, who caught three stragglers from the ill-disciplined raiding party and dragged them back to Santa Barbara in chains. Bouchard sailed the remaining twenty miles (32 km) to Santa Barbara a few days later, anchoring off of present-day Milpas Street, and threatened to shell the town unless his men were returned to him. José de la Guerra y Noriega, the commandante of the Presidio, granted his request, but Bouchard did not realize that he had been tricked: the town was not as heavily defended as it had seemed to be; the hundreds of cavalrymen Bouchard had seen through his spyglass were but the same few dozen riding in large circles, stopping and changing costumes each time they passed behind a patch of heavy brush. Although Bouchard had recently destroyed Monterey, he departed without destroying the town.
Mexican Period
In 1822 the Spanish rule ended and their flag came down forever, with their loss in the Mexican War of Independence. Santa Barbara, along with the rest of Alta California, became a territory of independent Mexico. One of the earliest notable events in the Mexican period in Santa Barbara was the February 1824 Indian rebellion. The Indians especially resented the poor and scapegoating treatment given them by the soldiers stationed at the Presidio, who were resentful of being unpaid by the new government. The rebellion, incited by the more warlike Yokut—Tulares, inland relations of the Chumash, began at Mission Santa Inés, near present-day Solvang on the other side of the Santa Ynez Mountains, and quickly spread to Mission La Purísima Concepción. In Santa Barbara, the Indians seized control of the buildings of the Mission complex, but immediately the buildings were surrounded by Presidio soldiers, since the Presidio was little more than a mile away. Overnight the Indians were able to make a getaway north into Mission Canyon and then over the mountains, where they eventually linked up with other unsubdued groups of Native Americans in the southern San Joaquin Valley. After a battle near San Emigdio Creek in March, and a subsequent three month pursuit and negotiation, the Indians were recaptured near Buena Vista Lake, and brought back to Santa Barbara.
During the Mexican period, the government shifted from military to civilian, with the first city council forming in 1826. During this period Alta California opened to trade with the United States and other areas for the first time, and exporting became important to the local economy. Some commodities exported included tallow and hides trade, both which were carried by California clippers to Boston to the candle- and shoe-making factories in New England, in return for goods purchased by the locals. One of the most famous English-language descriptions of Santa Barbara from this period is by Richard Henry Dana, Jr., who wrote of the town as a desolate place, at the ends of the earth, in Two Years Before the Mast:
“ ...the large bay without a vessel in it; the surf roaring and rolling in upon the beach; the white mission; the dark town and the high, treeless mountains ... We lay at a distance of three miles (5 km) from the beach, and the town was nearly a mile farther; so that we saw little or nothing of it. Occasionally we landed a few goods, which were taken away by the Indians in large, clumsy ox-carts, with the yoke on the ox's neck instead of under it, and with small solid wheels. A few hides were brought down, which we carried off in the California style. ”
By 1833 the process of secularization at the Missions was completed, and the lands and property were given to soldiers, leading Californios, and occasionally the original Native American owners, with most of the Indians becoming Mexican citizens. This had a dramatic effect on the economy and culture, commencing what is called the Rancho Period in California history, a period which overlapped the end of the Mexican era. Lands formerly owned by the Church were parceled out in land grants to applicants; the Mexican governors of California awarded over 800 separate land grants before the end of Mexican control in 1847. Many local place names derive from these grants, including Dos Pueblos, San Marcos, Nuestra Señora del Refugio, El Rincon, Las Positas y la Calera, Lompoc, Alamos, and La Goleta.
Cattle ranching rapidly expanded, becoming the predominant land use; horsemanship and cattle ownership became the symbols of status, and the society developed quasi-feudal characteristics, in which the largest ranches were almost entirely self-sufficient. The Chumash who previously had served the padres in the Mission system became laborers on the ranches, occupying the lowest rung of the social ladder, with the oldest established families – the Ortegas, De la Guerras, and others – at the top. During this period the town of Santa Barbara grew into a modest, and informally organized collection of pueblos around the central Presidio. A few of these buildings – such as the Covarrubias adobe, on the grounds of the Santa Barbara Historical Society on Santa Barbara Street, which was briefly the location of the capitol of California during the Mexican War – survive to the present day. By the mid-1840s the Mexican period, the population of Santa Barbara had reached approximately 2,500.
Mexican–American War
The end of the Mexican period came quickly for Santa Barbara, but without bloodshed. The United States conquest of California in the Mexican–American War had broken out in May 1846 over the annexation of Texas; in August, Commodore Robert F. Stockton anchored a warship in Santa Barbara harbor and deployed a contingent of ten Marines to occupy the town. They proceeded to the Presidio where they ran the Stars and Stripes over the city for the first time; not long afterwards, seeing the town was peaceful, they left, being replaced later by ten cavalrymen from John C. Frémont's army. However, a contingent of a hundred Mexican cavalrymen sent by General José María Flores came and chased them out. The outnumbered cavalrymen, rather than surrender, fled on foot up into Mission Canyon, and fortified a rocky ridge below La Cumbre Peak, resisting the calls to surrender by their pursuers. When the Mexican force set fire to the chaparral, the Americans clambered over the mountain ridge overnight, escaping north and eventually reaching Monterey, where they joined forces again with Frémont.
The culminating event of the Mexican–American War for Santa Barbara was Frémont's return, over the surprise route of San Marcos Pass, which at the time was little more than a trail. On the night of December 24, 1846, during a torrential rainstorm, he led his California Battalion over the mountains. In spite of losing many of his horses, mules, and cannon to the treacherous and muddy slopes – and not a one to enemy fire – he reached the foothills on the other side in the vicinity of present-day Tucker's Grove, spent the next several days regrouping, and then marched in to Santa Barbara to capture the Presidio. He encountered no resistance: all men interested in fighting had left for Los Angeles to join the forces headed by Flores and Andrés Pico which had assembled to defend that city. On January 3 Frémont headed south, skirting the cliffs of the Rincon at low tide (no road existed then), arriving in Los Angeles ten days later. The Treaty of Cahuenga, signed on January 13, 1847, ended the war in California. After the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed a year later, Santa Barbara formally became part of the United States.
U.S. annexation; Gold Rush; Haley; Civil War
Change came quickly after the end of the war. Gold was found at Sutter's Mill in the Sierra foothills, and hordes of gold-seekers flooded into California from the eastern United States, and other places in the world, to become rich. Few did, but Santa Barbara began to attract settlers, as newcomers discovered the charms of the place, including that almost anything planted would grow there. In 1850 California became the 31st state, and immediately after its establishment both Santa Barbara City and County came into being. By 1850 the area was still sparsely populated, with the census showing only 1,185 people for the entire county, but that number doubled in ten years.
Some of the changes that occurred involved administration, communications, construction, urban layout, and transportation. On April 9, 1850, Santa Barbara incorporated as a city, and formed an official town council. The appearance of the town began to change as well. Settlers coming from the east wanted dwellings made from wood, rather than the sensible adobe built by the Spanish and Mexican residents; to build them they needed to import wood from distant Oregon, as the local oak trees were not suitable for lumber. This was one of several pressures that resulted in the development of the port.
Another consequence of the American takeover was the creation of the street grid, which replaced the previous haphazard jumble of dwellings and irregular paths. Its execution, the disastrously bungled survey of 1851 by Salisbury Haley, is a notorious event in local history. Haley's survey chains were broken in places, and held together with oxhide, a material that expanded on damp mornings and contracted in the afternoon sun; since his chains varied in length depending on the time of day he used them, most of his measurements were off, accumulating errors of as much as 45 feet (14 m) out of true by the time he had crossed the city. Haley had been ordered to create neat square city blocks exactly 450 feet (140 m) on a side: a subsequent corrective survey established that he had actually created blocks ranging from 457 to 464 feet (141 m) on a side. The lot misalignments and street grid problems caused by Haley persist to the present day. Kinks in Mission Street at De La Vina, and De La Guerra at Santa Barbara Street are two of the awkward places well-known to city commuters which were resulted from Haley's unfortunate measurements. In addition, it was Haley who decided to lay out the street grid at an angle of approximately 48 degrees from north, with State Street approximately midway between the Mesa and the Riviera, paralleling both hills, an orientation that confuses both residents and visitors. Downtown's Haley Street, named after him, is ironically one of the streets which did not need a dog-leg to compensate for his variable-length chain.
Another change that accompanied the transformation of Santa Barbara from a small village to a significant town was the founding of the first newspaper, the Santa Barbara Gazette, in 1855. The newspaper was half in English and half in Spanish, since the population, not all of whom were bilingual, was split between the two languages. English gradually supplanted Spanish as the language of daily life. Although minutes of the newly formed City Council were kept in English by 1852, Spanish remained the language used for public records until 1870.
The Presidio fell into disrepair after 1848. A portion of the Santa Barbara Presidio, was converted to a residence, around 1880.
The 1850s was a tumultuous and violent period. Life in the town was disrupted by rowdy Americans recently returned from the gold camps in the Sierra foothills, and gangs of toughs and highwaymen. Some of these lawless newcomers targeted the local Spanish population, causing violent racial incidents including lynchings. Outlaws such as Joaquin Murrieta (the Zorro of Hollywood legend, but likely a composite of several different bandits) preyed on travelers on the roadways, and even on citizens in town. The confrontation with the gang led by Jack Powers at the "Battle of Arroyo Burro" in 1853, in which he intimidated and drove away a posse of approximately 200 citizens, was one of the most dramatic incidents of the period. Powers was not thrown out of town until a band of angry and well-armed vigilantes from San Luis Obispo rode to Santa Barbara to get rid of him (he eventually came to a bloody end, murdered and hurled into a den of hungry wild boars in the Mexican state of Sonora). His downfall coincided with the return of law and order after a period in which Santa Barbara was the rowdiest and most dangerous town between Los Angeles and San Francisco.
In 1859, Richard Henry Dana returned, 24 years after his first visit as a 20-year-old sailor, and described the changes in the town:
“ ...and there lies Santa Barbara on its plain, with its amphitheatre of high hills and distant mountains. There is the old white Mission with its belfries, and there the town, with its one-story adobe houses, with here and there a two-story wooden house of later build; yet little it is altered – the same repose in the golden sunlight and glorious climate, sheltered by its hills; and then, more remindful than anything else, there roars and tumbles upon the beach the same grand surf of the great Pacific as on the beautiful day when the Pilgrim, after her five months' voyage, dropped her weary anchors here; the same bright blue ocean, and the surf making just the same monotonous, melancholy roar, and the same dreamy town, and gleaming white Mission, as when we beached our boats for the first time. ”
In that same year, 1859, Santa Barbara recorded the highest temperature ever noted on the North American continent, 133 °F (56 °C), a record which was to stand until Death Valley topped it by one degree in 1913. The U.S. Coast Survey wrote that birds dropped dead in midair, cattle died in the fields, and fruit dropped, scorched, from trees; the town's inhabitants fled to the safety of their adobe buildings, which insulated them from the freak superheated northwest simoon wind, an event which has not occurred since. In the immediately following years, two other weather events had a significant effect on the course of development in Santa Barbara: catastrophic floods during the winter of 1861-62, during which the Goleta Slough, formerly open to deep-water vessels, completely silted up, becoming the marsh it remains to the present day; and the disastrous drought of 1863, which forever ended the Rancho era as the value of rangeland collapsed, cattle died or were sold off, and the large ranches were broken down and sold in smaller parcels for development.
Victorian Period
The town continued to grow, and slowly ended its isolation after the American Civil War. The war itself had little effect on Santa Barbara. One troop of cavalry organized to join the Union cause, but never saw action against Confederate forces; they served briefly and bloodlessly in Arizona versus Apache raids. In 1869, the first coeducational preparatory school in southern California, Santa Barbara College, opened at State and Anapamu Streets. Improvements in the harbor included the building of Stearns Wharf in 1872, which increased the commercial capacity of the port; formerly, ships had to anchor several miles offshore, and load and unload their cargoes by rowing small boats to the shore. In that same year, Jose Lobero built an opera house (at the current site of the Lobero Theatre), State Street was paved, and gas lamps were lit downtown.
Not only did the development of the Summerland Oil Field transform Santa Barbara's economy, it was the location of the world's first offshore oil well.
Writer Charles Nordhoff, commissioned by Southern Pacific Railroad to write about Santa Barbara to draw easterners to the town, was largely responsible for the boom in the tourism industry that commenced in the 1870s, and which would eventually lead to Santa Barbara becoming a world-famous resort. He praised Santa Barbara as the "pleasantest" spot in California, and particularly delightful for those suffering health ills; his book resulted in steamships full of travelers, many of whom came to stay. The luxurious and instantly famous Arlington Hotel, built in 1874 (and destroyed by fire in 1909), housed many of them.
The isolation of Santa Barbara ended in stages. The building of Stearns Wharf allowed easy access by steamboat; in 1887, the railroad to Los Angeles was completed; and in 1901, the railroad was put through to San Francisco. Santa Barbara was finally accessible both by land and sea. The day that the first train arrived from San Francisco was also the last day that the stagecoach bumped over dusty San Marcos Pass. These new connections made possible Santa Barbara's development into the resort destination it has remained ever since.[34] Within the city, the first electric streetcar line opened in 1896, as the demand for transportation increased. By 1900, the population had reached 6,587, doubling in twenty years.
The discovery of oil changed the local economy as well as the landscape. While the black gooey stuff had long been known from natural oil seeps, and was used as a roof sealant during the building of the Mission, its value as a fuel did not become widely known until the late 19th century. In the 1890s, the large Summerland Oil Field was found and began to be developed. Summerland was the site of the world's first offshore oil well. While most of the oil had been pumped out by 1910, derricks remained on the beach in Summerland into the 1920s, and the field remained partially productive until 1940.
Early 20th century to World War II
Santa Barbara was the center of the U.S. silent film industry from 1910 to 1922, before anyone associated the name "Hollywood" with movies. The Flying A Studios, a division of the American Film Company, covered two city blocks centered at State and Mission streets, and was at the time the largest movie studio in the world. It produced approximately 1,200 films during those twelve years, including the world's first indoor set and likely the first animated cartoon. Only about 100 of those films are known to survive today. Many of the studio's films were westerns; Lon Chaney, Sr. and Victor Fleming were among the famous actors featured. In 1911, before the Flying A had become the predominant studio in the area, there were 13 separate film companies in Santa Barbara. The local film era ended in 1922 when the studios moved south, needing the resources of a larger city.
During this period, the city continued to grow, and at an even faster pace. By 1920, the population had reached 19,441, tripling in twenty years. The completion of the water tunnel under the mountains to newly completed Gibraltar Reservoir on the Santa Ynez River relieved the water shortages for a time. Also during the teens, a movement for city beautification commenced, led by Bernard Hoffman and later by Pearl Chase; their idea was to unify the city's architecture around a Spanish Colonial style, harmonious with the Mission and surviving pueblos. Many of the buildings from the late 19th century were, to their eyes and the eyes of many citizens, ugly, dilapidated, and no different from those in dozens of other run-down western towns. The Lobero Theatre, built on the site of the original Lobero Opera House in 1924, was an example of the architectural style they promoted, as was the first part of the Santa Barbara Natural History Museum.
1925 earthquake
The most destructive earthquake in Santa Barbara history, and the first destructive earthquake in California since the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, occurred on June 29, 1925, converting much of the town to heaps of rubble. While the quake's epicenter was centered on an undetermined fault offshore, most of the damage came about due to two strong aftershocks which occurred onshore and five minutes apart. The intensity on the Modified Mercalli scale was determined to be VIII for the coast from Goleta, through Santa Barbara, and to Carpinteria.
The low death toll (13 or 14) is credited to its early hour, 6:23 a.m., before most people were in the streets at risk from falling masonry. A fire which broke out after the earthquake destroyed more of the town, but was contained by a company of U.S. Marines who had arrived immediately to help maintain order. The earthquake, coinciding with the movement for architectural reform, is credited with giving the town its unified Spanish character; during the rebuilding, Hoffman and Chase pushed for new structures to be in a Spanish style. The most famous of these was the Spanish-Moorish style County Courthouse, completed in 1929, "the loveliest in the United States." One of the few voices opposing the unification of architectural style was newspaper publisher and future Senator Thomas Storke, who later changed his mind, saying that his former opposition was due to his belief that such compulsion infringed on the constitutional rights of property owners. Storke in 1932 created the city's main newspaper for the next 74 years, the News-Press, by winning a libel suit against his rival Reginald Fernald, and absorbing that publisher's Morning Press into his Daily News.
In 1928, oil was found at the Ellwood Oil Field on the other side of Santa Barbara, and development of this new and rich pool was fast: the peak production in 1930, only two years later, was 14.6 million barrels (2,320,000 m3) of oil. As at the Summerland Oil Field, derricks went along piers into the ocean, and the cliffs were dotted with storage tanks. Some of this development remains to the present day, with one active wastewater disposal well and several large storage tanks, owned by Venoco, Inc., adjacent to the Ellwood Open Space. In 1929, as part of the wild burst of oil-drilling activity following on the Ellwood discovery, the Mesa Oil Field was discovered within the city limits. Centered just south of Cliff Drive near the intersection with Santa Cruz Boulevard, the field sprouted over 100 oil derricks in the early 1930s, occasioning the city's first anti-oil protest, but a local ordinance had already been enacted allowing such development. The field’s failure in the late 1930s—it proved to be smaller than initially thought—allowed residential development to continue on the Mesa, although the field was not formally abandoned until 1976.
The Santa Barbara County Courthouse, one of the city's main tourist attractions, was completed in 1929.
World War II brought sweeping change to the Santa Barbara area. The U.S. Marines took up residence on the high ground adjacent to Goleta Point, current location of the University of California, Santa Barbara campus. The military filled in the Goleta Slough in order to expand the adjacent airport; the U.S. Navy took over the harbor area; and north of Point Conception the Army created Camp Cooke, which was later to become Vandenberg Air Force Base. On February 23, 1942, not long after the outbreak of war in the Pacific, a Japanese submarine emerged from the ocean and lobbed about 25 shells at the Ellwood Oil Field facilities, one of only two direct attacks on the U.S. mainland during the entire war, and the first such attack since the War of 1812. Although the gunners were terrible marksmen, and only caused about $500 damage to a catwalk, panic was immediate. Many Santa Barbara residents fled, and land values plummeted to historic lows. Only one week after the attack, on March 2, military authorities issued Public Proclamation No. 1, which began the long internment of Japanese during the war, and approximately 700 people of Japanese ancestry assembled on Cabrillo Boulevard to be taken to Manzanar.
After World War II
After the war ended, many people who had seen Santa Barbara during the war came back to stay. The population grew by 10,000 by 1950, in just five years. During this time the University of California took over the blufftop Marine camp, turning it into a modern university. The burst of growth brought traffic, housing, and water problems, which led to improvements in the transportation system, such as the building of Highway 101 through town; tracts of low-cost housing, especially on the Mesa, where oil derricks were removed and replaced by houses; and the building of Lake Cachuma reservoir on the other side of the mountains, along with another water tunnel to bring its water to thirsty residents. During this period, the city selectively recruited businesses to relocate there, choosing clean industries such as aerospace and technology in preference to the oil industry which had already marred many local landscapes with abandoned wells and sumps.
The oil industry moved most of its local operations offshore during the 1950s and 1960s. In 1947, offshore leases were approved by the federal government, and seismic exploration of the Channel took place in the 1950s, even though fishermen complained that the underwater explosions were killing fish. The first of the huge black fifteen-story oil platforms, a feature of the seascape south of Santa Barbara for fifty years, went up in 1958. During the period, Stearns Wharf was the main connection for oil services going out to the platforms.
Making the relationship between Santa Barbara and the oil industry even worse was the disaster of January 28, 1969, one of the formative events in the modern environmental movement. A blowout on an offshore oil well at the Dos Cuadras Offshore Oil Field spewed between 80,000 and 100,000 barrels (13,000 and 16,000 m3) of oil, producing an immense oil slick which spread over hundreds of square miles of ocean in the Santa Barbara Channel, contaminating shorelines, killing wildlife, ruining the tourist industry, and appearing on television screens worldwide. The anti-oil group "GOO" (Get Oil Out) formed shortly after the spill, and oil drilling has been a sensitive issue in the area ever since. Wider consequences of the spill included the 1970 passage of both the National Environmental Policy Act and the California Environmental Quality Act, laws which require assessment of potential environmental impacts of projects before they begin.
Santa Barbara's Lobero Theatre, from Canon Perdido Street. The theatre opened in 1924, the year before the large earthquake, but survived. It is an example of the Spanish Colonial architectural style which began to be promoted then.
Several catastrophic fires burned portions of Santa Barbara and the adjacent mountains in the late 20th century. In 1964, the Coyote Fire burned 67,000 acres (270 km2) of backcountry along with 150 homes, blackening the mountain wall behind Santa Barbara, and briefly threatening the entire town of Montecito. In 1977, the smaller but more destructive Sycamore Fire roared down Sycamore Canyon on the northeast fringe of Santa Barbara, destroying over 200 homes. Most destructive of all was the 1990 Painted Cave Fire, which incinerated over 500 homes in just several hours during an intense Sundowner wind event, crossing over the freeway to Hope Ranch, and causing over a quarter billion dollars in damage.
The population center of Santa Barbara moved west during the period, with the buildout of the region west of the De La Vina/State intersection, including the San Roque neighborhood, Hope Ranch Annex, and later the Goleta Valley. As a result, the citrus groves which formerly stood in the region were cut down and replaced by housing and commercial districts. Regional shopping centers such as Loreto Plaza, Five Points, and La Cumbre Plaza developed during this period. Between 1960 and 1970, the population of the Goleta Valley rose from only 19,016 to 60,184.
By the mid-1970s, forces opposing uncontrolled growth had become stronger than those favoring development. On April 8, 1975, the City Council passed a resolution to limit the city's population to 85,000 through zoning. In order to limit growth in adjacent areas, such as Goleta, it was standard to deny water meters to developments which had been approved by the County Board of Supervisors, effectively shutting off growth. The city and immediately adjacent areas stopped their fast growth, but housing prices rose sharply.
When voters approved connection to state water supplies in 1991, parts of the city, especially outlying areas, resumed growth, but more slowly than during the boom period of the 1950s and 1960s. While the slow growth preserved the quality of life for most residents and prevented the urban sprawl notorious in the Los Angeles basin, housing in the Santa Barbara area was in short supply, and prices soared: in 2006, only six percent of residents could afford a median-value house. As a result, many people who work in Santa Barbara commute from adjacent, more affordable areas, such as Santa Maria, Lompoc, and Ventura. The resultant traffic on incoming arteries, particularly the stretch of Highway 101 between Ventura and Santa Barbara, is another problem being addressed by long-range planners.
The annual Summer Solstice Parade, which began in 1974, is the city's largest single-day tourist event, commonly drawing over 100,000 visitors.