Episode 35: The History Of Montecito

Scott Williams: Sweet Home Santa Barbara where the skies are so blue. Sweet Home Santa Barbara, what’s worked for me can work for you. 

Jonathan Robinson: Welcome back friends to Sweet Home Santa Barbara. I’m your co-host, Jonathan Robinson. I’m with my friend and real estate broker. 

Scott Williams: Scott Williams. 

Jonathan Robinson: How’re you doing Scott?  

Scott Williams: Something’s broken this morning. We’re breaking things just to get started. Yes, let’s get going.  

Jonathan Robinson: Luckily, the place that we’re going to be talking about today Montecito, California is now broken. It’s done pretty well for itself over the years. You know about the history. It’s a beautiful area, but I really don’t know anything about it hardly. 

Scott Williams: Montecito is a wonderful place that quite a lot of really wealthy people live. We’re going to dive back into the Spanish days. Montecito means Littlewoods in Spanish. We’re going to go back into the late 1700s when the Padres arrived and they picked the place in Montecito as the place to put the mission. If you know your history of missions, you know there isn’t a mission in Montecito but that’s where they wanted to put it. They discovered fairly quickly that Montecito was the land of bears and Indians, and the woods were fairly impenetrable. So, they moved it over to the place in Santa Barbara where the mission is today and they kept the corner of land there, that’s still a Catholic Church, that’s still there today, the corner of East Valley Road and hot springs is still a Catholic Church there, Mt. Carmel, I think it’s called. How they got established was that they moved it over to Santa Barbara, they set up the presidio was just going to be easier to protect the Indians and the Bears. They just didn’t like that. All these soldiers were working at the presidio and they weren’t paying them. They started giving 50-acre parcels in Montecito to each soldier. It became established as Spanish town. 

Fifties acres of Montecito you can imagine is there is only like two people in Montecito that own 50 acres, Oprah Winfrey and there’s another fellow who’s a billionaire. But these guys got 50-acre parcels and that’s how it got started.  

Jonathan Robinson: I know that Montecito has some hot springs. Was that part of the early days, in terms of people…? 

Scott Williams: A gentleman name of Wilbur Curtis In 1855 came to Santa Barbara, talked to the Indians, they told him about the hot springs where the Indians did healing ceremonies and he headed up to the hot springs and had a miraculous cure at warm water was good for what ailed him. He took such a love for the hot springs that a few years later in 1862, he built a hotel and began to publicize that you could come and get a cure here in Montecito, the warm waters. That bought brought people, a steady stream, a trickle became a flood of people who would go up to his hotel and take the waters. They’re way up in the woods up there and lightning strikes, some things happen to the woods, they burn. 

In the hundred years from the 1860s to the 1960s, four different hotels were built up there in the mountains of Montecito that all burned down. About every 25 years a firewood goes through. The last one was the Coyote fire of 1964. We all owe a debt to Wilbur for pointing out the hot springs. They’re still there. You could hike up to today and you can sit in the hot water. You and I we could go spend our afternoon up there at the hot springs.  

Jonathan Robinson: In the 1800’s, those starting to be terse there, they started to be like, I don’t know, a country club or something in that era?  

Scott Williams: The country clubs were getting there. What happened at the location of what currently is the Birnam Wood Country Club in the 1840s, I think a gentleman came and bought the land around there are paying 75 cents an acre. 

Jonathan Robinson: Can I do that today? That would be a good bargain. 

Scott Williams: I’ll pull 75 cents out of my pocket. I’ll get an acre and you get 75 will take acre right next to each other. Those right now today would be worth about 6½ million and a half or 7 million dollars each. There would be a house included in your 7 million dollars. two million for your land but that 75 cents was a heck of an investment. That was the agricultural time. There’s a little trickle of tourism but the train hadn’t come till the 1880s and big hotels weren’t built till right after 1900. Back in those days they were building adobe houses and people were starting to come. The old Spanish town began to become the American town. This is what in the area we now know as the Upper Village. 

Interesting guy, you may have heard of, there’s a China maker from England, Dalton China. Josiah Dalton came to Montecito in the 1870s and he bought 20 acres of Oceanfront in Montecito. I don’t know what he paid for that thing. He put up a big house and he fell on hard times. He was the sky of the Dalton China family. We had money, but as he fell on hard times, he took up borders in his big house. Eventually, those borders became…they renamed it after the Spanish Miramar, and the Miramar Hotel which is recently been rebuilt, is at that location where Josiah had his house. It’s still a hotel after all these years since the 1870s. 

Jonathan Robinson: Nice place. 

Scott Williams: Nice place. Absolutely. The adjacent Biltmore Hotel, by the way, was built in 1927. But around this time, the train is starting to come in the end of the 1800s. They built a really big hotel in Santa Barbara, 1902, the Potter Hotel. With the train and then a really luxurious hotel, we became a tourist attraction. With the tourists, much bigger one, because the train could bring a lot more people than the horse and buggy. We ended up with a situation where the really super wealthy began to spend a week or two or sometimes a month in Santa Barbara. Vacations back in those days would you go spend a month someplace. They took their time. They liked their vacations. We were becoming a health resort with a nice hot springs and the attracted families whose names you’ll probably recognize like Rockefeller, Carnegie, Fleischmann from the East, Dupont, A swift that was Meatpacking, McCormick, Cyrus McCormick who is the inventor of, I think the combine, Bliss. The ultra-rich began to carve out chunks of Montecito in 30 to 200-acre parcels.  

Jonathan Robinson: With the ultra-rich you need people to service the ultra-rich. What was the effect of that?  

Scott Williams: Then we started to have the American town alongside the Spanish town. There was days when these wealthy industrialists were building houses, when there’s as many as 3,000 cars would show up in Montecito from the workman building these fabulous estates in the 1920s. We got to the end of the 1920s and the crash came and suddenly houses where you needed to have a staff of four, five, six, eight, ten people you needed that money to run the house, that became impossible to carry on. Montecito was set for a change at that pointing time. 

Jonathan Robinson: What kind of change happened? 

Scott Williams: The wealthy couldn’t completely run everything the way they used to and some of those biggest states began to get broken up. There was a survey of the biggest states, I think this was in the 1920s, no, 1930s. Harold Chase Realtor did a survey and he found out that there were more than 200 major estates. Some of these became institutions along the way. The houses were so big. They housed things like Brooks Photography, that was a school and the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. Some of these became like think tanks. But most of them have gone back to being estates these days. The breaking up of these big estates from a couple of hundred acres, suddenly they would get broken down to one and two-, and five-acre parcels which is closer to the way things look today in Montecito. 

Jonathan Robinson: Montecito is going through some challenging experiences with floods recently but that also dates back a while, right?  

Scott Williams: That’s true. The Spanish town because there was quite a few of the workers that worked on the places, they built things like dance halls, cantina, tavern, a brothel, a food store, things that you needed for life. There was a big flood, just like we had in 2018 right here in Santa Barbara, back in 1914. The same thing happened. There’s been rainstorm for several days that completely saturated soils. Then in a four-hour period of time, they got a huge deluge, and the mud, and the rocks came down the hill in Montecito, things repeat, and wiped out a lot of old Spanish town, and a lot the buildings and many houses, and people died, similar to what happened just a few years ago. 

That impacted both the wealthy and the middle class in Montecito in those days. They rebuilt things that were social clubs. Let’s talk about the golf which is always been a part of Montecito for quite a while because the Spanish workers prefer things like sandlot baseball. The wealthy people like to play tennis, and golf, and polo. We had the war of the country clubs, take place in Montecito. It’s funny that the first one was the Santa Barbara Country Club which was located where the Music Academy of the West is right now, the Center of the Music Academy was big estate there, that was the clubhouse for the golf course. They picked up and went up on the hill to where the Montecito Club is today. The Santa Barbara Club became the Montecito Club. 

Then, there was a break of the membership, and the group went out and built the Valley Club. I think that was in the 1920s, 1928. Max Fleischmann that Yeast King took a bunch of people, a bunch of wealth and they built the Valley Club. The most recent one, the third of the three golf courses in Montecito is the Birnam Wood Country Club and that was built in 1968. They put a gate around that to get into the place and fenced around the whole thing. If you live in Birnam Wood, you actually have to belong to the country club. The other places don’t have their own boundaries and their things like Birnam Wood does.  

Jonathan Robinson: It’s the latest in Montecito with the floods and the real estate prices going up, what might you say about what’s happening there today? 

Scott Williams: Montecito attracts celebrities. It attracts business, tycoon, wealth A-listers from Montecito, business personalities, captains of industry, finance, business people still today. They are mostly looking for a place where they’re not going to be bugged, where they can start a get away from that kind of life, where the spotlight is always on them. They come here in order to have the spotlight be off of them. The town is very sensitive that. Both Santa Barbara’s and Montecito realize there’s a lot of people who live here who don’t really want to be bothered. That’s been the rural way of life in Montecito. We don’t have curbs and gutters, a lot of city-bide ways of having homes and roads and there’s still a lot of privacy in Montecito. They don’t want to be called royalty or aristocratic. I think they would all flinch at those kind of identifications. But that’s what the town really attracts.  

If you go back to the 1920s, there would have been about 3,000 people in the whole Montecito area. Today it’s more like 13,000. That’s the population of the town and they’re independent from Santa Barbara. They’re not a city, they will never become a city, I don’t think. They have their own water, utilities. They do public services but they won’t ever join in with Santa Barbara. 

Jonathan Robinson: I know you’ve been doing a lot of selling a lot houses in Montecito. If people want to get in touch with you, what’s the best way? 

Scott Williams: Email would be a good way, scott@scottwilliams.com. 

Jonathan Robinson: Thank you Scott, fascinating to hear about all these towns and how they’ve developed over the years and even where they’re going. Thank you to our viewers for tuning into Sweet Home, Santa Barbara. We’ll catch you next time. 

Scott Williams: Thank you for listening. Please subscribe to our podcast on your favorite app. If you know someone preparing to sell their home, please tell them about the podcast. Visit Scott@Scottwilliams.com to contact me and download the two free e-booklets, is my house saleable now and how not to buy a money pit. Thank you for listening.