Celebrating Valley Newspapers

Congratulations to the Santa Cruz Mountain Bulletin on your tenth anniversary! Let’s take a look back at some of the other newspapers that have, in the past, reported on local Valley news.

The first was The Hatchet, published in Boulder Creek in 1889 by the Reverend Sam Wallis of New Zealand with the slogan “The Hatchet Will Chop, the Chips Will Scatter, and the District Benefitted.” Two years later it was renamed the Boulder Creek News and was published by Captain Ferdinand Lee Clarke. It was renamed again the following year as The Woodsman. The newspaper was short lived however, and died the following year.

Then, in 1894, came the Boulder Blast published by the Rev. Joseph Richard Watson. When Watson was called to “other and urgent fields of usefulness” in 1896, the Mountain Echo newspaper was born. Its first edition was October 24, 1896, describing itself as “the old paper under a new name and management.” The Mountain Echo described its platform as “the advocacy of truth, justice and right as we see it.”

The Mountain Echo printing works were located next to the post office on the corner of Central Avenue and Forest Street in Boulder Creek. Charles Campbell Rodgers was the founder and Winfred Scott Rodgers Sr., his brother, was editor of the paper and continued in that role after his brother’s untimely death in 1898 at age 57.

In 1916, Luther E. McQuesten took over as publisher of the Mountain Echo newspaper. Owed money by his subscribers, faced with the high cost of printing, and a paper shortage, he printed four editions of the newspaper on cottonwood leaves. In the subsequent paper edition, he printed the text of all four, for those who might have found the “fig leaf editions” difficult to read.

In 1905, Clarence Davis bought the newspaper printing plant of the Campbell Visitor with the intent of shipping it to Ben Lomond where he would “conduct a newspaper in conjunction with some other line of business.” Just one month later, the Santa Cruz Sentinel congratulated him on his first run of the Ben Lomond News, which carried “a good quantity of advertising, which is complimentary to the progressiveness of Ben Lomond business men.” However, his name wasn’t Davis but Probert – and he was a con man (see the article in the Santa Cruz Mountain Bulletin November 2014 issue).

In 1914, California poet Charles Elmer Upton, principal at the Boulder Creek Grammar School started the short-lived The Patriot monthly newspaper “issued on the belief that home itself is the foundation of the nation. It espoused that “We are opposed to all shades and sorts of vice and crime, whether the wrongdoer is a pauper or a millionaire, an individual, a state, or a nation.”

After the closing of the Mountain Echo newspaper, the void was filled by Arthur H. Townsend “an old newspaper man of Ben Lomond.” He worked with boys at the Boulder Creek Union High School who were studying printing to create a quality local newspaper called Community. Arthur was also a correspondent for the Santa Cruz Evening News and the editor of the Santa Cruz County Herald. He believed in the need for a community newspaper as in his words: “The people of the San Lorenzo River Valley are bound together by ties of neighborhood, common environment, resources and interest.” The newspaper ran from 1921-1923.

To be continued.

Image: The offices of the Mountain Echo newspaper next to the post office on the corner of Central Avenue and Forest Street in Boulder Creek. Now Scarborough Lumber’s Boulder Creek Hardware. Courtesy of the San Lorenzo Valley Museum.