Episode 26: San Marcos Pass Neighborhood

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 and I’m with my trusty co-host friend and realtor.

Scott Williams: Scott Williams. Hey partner!

Jonathan: Nice hat, Scott. So, you know, we’re starting this series of 12 different areas of the Santa Barbara area to give us a historical viewpoint of where we live and what came to be Santa Barbara today. And today, we’re going to be focusing on the San Marcos Pass area. And I hear, you know, quite a lot about it. What can you tell us about the San Marcos Pass, Santa Ynez area?

Scott: Well, we call them neighborhoods, Jonathan. The neighborhoods. Well, San Marcos Pass is, you know, I’m dressed like a cowboy for those of you who are just listening to the podcast. I have my cowboy hat on today because crossing the Santa Ynez mountains to get to Santa Barbara, that’s how you used to get here if you didn’t come by boat. And it was quite a trek, going over the top of San Marcos Pass about 2,225 feet. And San Marcos is actually named after one of the friars from the mission who helped really build some of the, you know, integral parts of the mission. Marcos was his first name, Marcos Amestoy, and so San Marcos was named after him.

That was the 1804 to 181 timeframe, so quite a way back in time and pretty much came to our attention when, before we were a state. 1846, Colonel Fremont was engaging the, we were owned by Mexico in those days, and he came over the pass in 1846 to let the Mexicans know that the Americans were interested in taking over this territory. There was actually a war, if you recall the Mexican war, we called it the war with Mexico, but in 1846, he camped at the top of the pass and then came over what we now call Old San Marcos Pass Road. He came down, it was just an Indian trail in those days, down into Santa Barbara.

Jonathan: So, I heard that San Marcos was a big stagecoach stop back in the early days and what do you know about that?

Scott: Yeah, stagecoaches were you know, you could either walk or you rode a horse, and eventually, they built a road. Now, the building of the roads over the past, a couple of different things happened there. First of all, some gentlemen who were down in town, mostly a group of like six doctors and six lawyers, entrepreneuring, decided they would build a turnpike road or a toll road.

Basically, down from San Marcos High School on one end up to Maddie’s Tavern up in the valley on the other end. Maddie’s Tavern was the end of where the railroad, it was a narrow-gauge railroad, ended. If you wanted to get to Santa Barbara, then you had to take what amounted to a stagecoach, over the rest of the way. They came in in the 1860s to build this road.

Eventually by 1890, 30 years later, the county took it over and it turned into a free road. But back in the day, they had places along that road, which is now underneath Lake Cachuma. There was the stagecoach, the central stagecoach was up there, and then they had one up in the top of the pass.

A couple of names that we still associate with the past, the Ogram family and the Kettle man family were part of those old stagecoach days. And they hired Chinese laborers, coolies as we call them in those days, they picked and shoveled and black powder, and they blasted a road through the mountains.

Jonathan: Thank God they did it back then, so we don’t have to do it today. Well, nowadays there’s a Cold Springs Bridge, you know, that goes over that big ravine. How did people get across that chasm way back in the day?

Scott: Well, I think that’s the San Jose Creek which is down in the bottom there. And there was still a bridge back in those days, although there was quite a switchback going down to the bridge. And you had to, to go across that bridge, it was even worse. If you wanted to go all the way to the bottom of the canyon and back.

If you were on a horse, they charge you a dollar to get across the bridge and stagecoaches were two dollars and fifty cents. Because those switchbacks were so, you know, they’re tight, even for a car. But for a stagecoach, which is six horses in a Conestoga wagon, that slowed down the stagecoach quite a bit. And that’s how the mail got delivered, and passengers got delivered. But that being slowly made it open for bandits to hold up the stage, just like in old western movies. That happened up in our mountains up here.

And so, to this day, because there was definitely the stealing of gold from those stagecoaches, there was the rumors including a dying bandit who said, I put the gold underneath between, you know, where the two creeks come together underneath the tree. That’s where the gold got stored. And so, a lot of people have gone through the canyons up there looking for gold. And in 1913, along one of the creeks, a fifty-dollar gold piece was discovered by someone in the Kettle man family. And so, in fact, there may still be gold in them, their hills, Jonathan.

Jonathan: That’s pretty interesting. I would imagine back then there was a bunch of gambling and other sordid activities going on in that area. So how did the area at the top of the pass come to be called Painted Cave?

Scott: Well, let’s talk about some of that gambling in them, their stuff up in the hills.

Jonathan: Okay.

Scott: They actually started a little bit closer to home, like a place to eat. And what, the man who started the stagecoach at the top of the hill there, his wife then cooked meals. And for 25 years, if you’re going over the pass you would stop at Nora’s and have food. As it got later in those 25 years, another competitor showed up called the Cold Spring Tavern, which also then cooked meals.

There were two places where you could get food. Now Cold Spring Tavern, back during prohibition, and back in those days, they did specialize in booze and gambling. So, you get to that part of town, you get that stuff.

Jonathan: Right, right. So, I would imagine that would have been pretty wild back then. How did, you know, the whole Painted Cave thing get its name and what can you tell us about the Painted Caves?

Scott: Painted Caves is, we now know it as a community at the top of the hill there, but back in the day there’s actually a grotto that the Chumash Indians painted inside of, you know, like cave paintings. And in 1907, Johnson Ogram put down metal rods and put a padlock on that whole thing because the Indian artifacts had been picked up and carried off and sold to museums and dispersed, but this is a beautiful grotto. It’s now a state park and you can stop alongside the road there. The metal bars he put up are still there, you can still look through the metal bars and see all the paintings on the back of the cave. And it’s worth stopping to see.

Now, because he and his wife owned that land and, you know, saved it. They want about a quarter of a mile above that, and they built a resort because the air is dry up there, and they found that people would want to come. They have abundant water; the springs are really good, and people would start to come for health reasons. So, he cut a little tract of about 100 houses up there. It’s called the Painted Cave community and sold off those lots and Painted Cave, you know, it’s been there for about a hundred years now.

Jonathan: Wow, pretty interesting. So how did cars start going over the pass? When did that happen?

Scott: Well, the first car over the pass was right around 1900 and that was a steamer. It was not even a gas-powered car. The switchbacks made the road a bit difficult, it’s been straightened out a couple of times. But we know today, you know, they did that in the 1960s and then they built the bridge that you mentioned, the Cold Spring Bridge over there. That’s 700 feet across and it crosses a canyon, 400 feet above the canyon. It’s very useful, cuts off a lot of time. Now getting from here, Santa Barbara, up to Los Olivos back in the day was an eight-hour ride and you had to work all day to get up there. Now, you can do it in 40 minutes. So, you know, that they’ve taken all of the curves out of it, so to speak.

Jonathan: I know there’s this thing along the way called the Trout Club, I don’t really know what it is. So, is it still there and what’s the history of that?

Scott: Well, the Trout Club is somewhat similar to Painted Caves. They’re a small community, a group got together, and they built some concrete dams in the creek there and they stocked them with trout. They set up about 30 or so lots, and the friends and families of these people could go fishing. Of course, it’s easy to catch the trout when they’re in a pond. But they set up cabins to be able to go up into the mountains and get out of town. And the Trout Club, as we call it, with those lots and the Painted Caves, are the two little communities up there on the hill and they still exist today. And you can still buy houses up there. Both of those places.

Jonathan: Must have great views from there. Now, I also know Jane Fonda had a ranch somewhere on top of the pass, you know anything about that?

Scott: This is the Laurel Springs Ranch. A fellow named of Knapp, famous, most people know him as Knapp’s Castle, but he, George Knapp, he was a utilities tycoon. Built a big lodge up on top of the mountain, and he bought the Laurel Springs Ranch and he set it up as a place for the nurses from Cottage Hospital to be able to go and have a retreat, get away from their work, relax a little bit.

So this has been sort of a health place and Jane bought it and, you know, doing it as a retreat center, sort of along the lines of Esalen although it’s smaller, it’s up on the mountain. It’s still there, it’s still available as a retreat center, although it’s not associated with Cottage Hospital anymore. And Jane bought it and helped develop it, and then she sold it, and she’s long gone on but she did, and you can see it as you go along there. It’s got this really big windmill, she put in the big windmill for generating electricity.

That’s up there.Jonathan: Yeah, interesting. And they’ve had a bunch of fires there. I know like Knapp’s Castle burned down at some point.

Scott: Yeah, that was I think in 1940 when that burned down and there were subsequent fires in 55, 64, and 90. And back in the 40, about half of Painted Cave, including the lodge that was up there, and about half of Painted Cave houses all burned down. So 1940 was the last time that that really burned into the community. Since then, all the other fires, they have their own fire crew up there as volunteer, but they’re very effective at keeping that community safe.

Jonathan: So, over the years, the road, the San Marcos Pass Road has constantly been improved. What’s the status of it today?

Scott: Well, it is a scenic highway. It’s not allowed to have, you know, it’s a corridor, billboards, commercial development is banned in this area. It is naturally beautiful, that’s for sure. Going past the Cachuma Lake, you can take that in just a few minutes. You can get up into the valley and up into the wine country and it’s a beautiful road.

Jonathan: Yeah, and sure took a lot of time off the trip to Los Olivos.

Scott: Yeah, no, no, eight hours dropped down to 40 minutes so it’s a breeze to get there. Cell receptions, not so perfect. It reminded, well you’re out in the country! Yeah. Cell reception is not perfect.

Jonathan: Well, fascinating history and I appreciate your level of detail and we’ll be doing more of these episodes of the different neighborhoods of Santa Barbara, so have our listeners stay tuned. And thanks for listening to Sweet Home Santa Barbara. How can people get a hold of you Scott?

Scott: E-mail. E-mail is the best, scott@scottwilliams.com. Thank you.

Jonathan: Thank you.

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 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