Old postcard depicts the road to Congress Springs about 1904.
Probably it is from years of newspaper work that, in writing on historical subjects, I find myself looking for an angle, a gimmick, a hook of incongruity on which to hang a story.
Saratoga, in its early years, was loded--to expand the mining term--with angles, gimmicks and incongruity. Consider these examples:
From the Oct. 15, 1858, diary entry of Alfred Doten, a frontier journalist who visited this part of California before the Civil War:
"McCartysville (Saratoga's first official name) is a small town of a dozen homes or so, and is supported by the lumber business--the lumber is hauled out from the mills and woods and a depot established there--there is one store--it is a strictly temperance town, no liquor at all being sold here--the only place of the kind I know of in California."
From an undesignated publication a good 40 or more years later:
"Saratoga was a notorious town in the (eighteen) eighties with its sawmills and lumbering back in the mountains. . . There were seven saloons in the village and to be a 'drunk from Saratoga' was the last word in drunkenness. Some of the lumberjacks would work in the timber for six months and then come down to Saratoga and spend all the wages on a 'toot.'"
From the Sept. 21, 1871, San Jose Mercury: "Saratoga, a fine little manufacturing town nestled in the foothills, is one of the most inviting places in the county. It will probably become a large manufacturing town and summer watering place."
These paragraphs encompass, or at least touch on, three of Saratoga's developmental stages: lumber town, manufacturing base and resort center.
It goes without saying that, in terms of today's social and economic structure, the incongruity stands out in throbbing bas-relief. But what should be remembered is that this was an entirely natural evolution; Saratoga grew organically, not as a planned community.
When the lumber wagons wended their way down from William Campbell's sawmill, at the present site of the Saratoga Springs resort, they took the most feasible route along what later became known as Congress Springs Road, through the village via Lumber Street--now Big Basin Way--and on out Saratoga Avenue to San Jose or Santa Clara.
That this route through the village might later work to the discomfiture of visitors, who can find no easy turnaround after driving through town, could not have been envisioned at the time. Saratoga's downtown business district is, in a sense, the prisoner of history and topography--a long-established main street with a hill on one side and creek on the other.
Unlikely as it seems, the industrial era, mainly in the 1870s, also was a logical development. Santa Clara Valley, at the time, was a great producer of grain. Saratoga, at the western edge, had ample water power, nearby sources of timber and tanbark oak and an ideal climate.
Combine these elements with the ingenuity and energy of some enterprising entrepreneurs and the result was a water-powered grist mill; a tannery; a paper mill utilizing wheat and rye straw, which otherwise would have been burned, as raw material; and a pasteboard mill, the first of its kind on the Pacific Coast.
These enterprises faded away for various reasons. Orchards replaced wheat fields, and the grist mill and tannery became a winery. The paper mill burned in 1883 and was not rebuilt. The pasteboard mill moved to Corralitos in 1880. Except for blacksmiths, the industrial era was over.
Saratoga's status as a resort center was more enduring and, in a sense, never really ended. The San Jose Mercury's 1871 reference to "summer watering place" was to Pacific Congress Springs, a mineral water source about a mile and a half up the canyon from the village.
Although the springs had been discovered in the 1850s, it wasn't until a decade later that it was established that the mineral content closely resembled that of the Congress Springs at Saratoga Springs, New York.
Two results followed: In October 1864, residents voted to change the town's name from Bank Mills--promoted by mill owner and politician Charles Maclay--to Saratoga, the postal designation becoming effective in 1865. The other result was the opening in June 1866 of luxurious Congress Hall, a hotel situated about at the present location of Congress Hall Way.
The hotel flourished until June, 1903, when it burned, never to be rebuilt. However, Congress Springs remained a popular picnic grounds until World War II, and Congress Water was bottled at the site until 1910.
This article appeared in the Saratoga News, May 29, 1996.
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