Los Gatos Weekly-Times file photograph

Dolder's general store was among many landmarks in old Alma, a town now beneath the waters of Lexington Reservoir.

Picture from the Past

The ghost town of Alma is buried beneath Lexington

By John S. Baggerly

L.F. Dolder's General Merchandise store was located in the town of Alma during the past century--long before that area became the basin of Lexington Reservoir. Dolder's supplied foodstuffs and tools for the surrounding area and was similar to another general store of that period in the hills above Saratoga.

With the lumber trade flourishing, Dolder's prospered. The influx of lumberjacks also created 12 saloons on the one-mile route between Alma and Lexington. In 1887, however, Los Gatos incorporated and promptly went "dry," thus affording no competition for saloons in the hill country.

Some of the information about Dolder's and various other attributes of the bygone mountain communities is thanks to John V. Young and his book, Ghost Towns of the Santa Cruz Mountains.

Young, a former Los Gatos and San Jose newspaper reporter, provides an accurate account of Alma in its hard-drinking days. Booming for a time with the spectacular summer trade that flourished in the mountains after the coming of the railroad, Young writes, Alma became a popular picnic spot, rivaling nearby Wrights Station and Sunset Park, which were further up in the mountains.

A brisk trade also came from passing horse teams, although the heyday of the stagecoach had passed and the lumber industry, with its accompanying prosperity, had waned into insignificance. Teamsters, hardy men with a great love for the kind of refreshments that in the 1890s were unobtainable in Los Gatos because of local law, had been exorcised.

In the 1860s, at the peak of the lumbermill days, Alma was described as a town of few permanent inhabitants. In Alma's declining community of half-a-dozen resident families were at one time a dozen saloons. But this didn't last long--competition was too heavy, and most of these "watering holes" faded from the landscape.

Eventually, the automobile spelled doom for Alma's prosperity as a summer resort. It was too close to civilization, even for those first old high-wheelers and the puffing motors that provided a lucrative trade for the mountain ranchers whose beasts of burden helped yank stalled gas-buggies from mud holes, sand holes and ruts.

If a horse and buggy encountered an auto on the road, the latter was required to stop if the buggy driver simply raised a hand. The motorist was then required by road courtesy to alight and stand in front of his roaring vehicle to calm the passing horses. Autos also had to take the outside of the road (nearest the cliff) whenever meeting a horse-drawn conveyance. If there was not sufficient room to pass or if the horses reared up in fright, it was the auto that piled into junk at the bottom of the gulch--never the horse-drawn vehicle.

The old Alma Post Office finally closed in 1952 and, like Alma, was abandoned to make way for the rising waters of Lexington Reservoir. A few longtime residents also had to make way by the right of public domain. Now everything is under water.

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