What really hit me was the reference to Martin McCarthy—with an "h"—as having laid out the town in 1851 and giving it the name of McCarthysville. The same spelling appears in the 1888 Pen Pictures from the Garden of the World, which also describes Saratoga of the time and goes into its background.

So where does McCartysville—without the "h"—come in? That's how it's commonly referred to now, including on a historical sign at Third Street and Big Basin Way. A couple of thoughts came to mind.

One was that the pronunciation may well have been the same, with or without the "h." Seems to me I've heard that's the Irish way of doing it, and I understand it is an Irish name. With an "h," though, we Anglophiles are used to pronouncing it, as with Edgar Bergen's ventriloquist dummy Charlie McCarthy and the late Redbaiting Wisconsin senator, Joseph R. McCarthy, whose ruthless tactics enriched the language with the word "McCarthyism," the dictionary listing "unfairness in investigative techniques" among its definitions.

But I'm satisfied with the h-less spelling, if for no other reason than that's the way it appears in Florence Cunningham's Saratoga's First Hundred Years, which I regard as a prime source of historical data. As a clincher—and this really took the wind out of my sails when I read it after getting stirred up over the 1880s references—this book states that "records indicate the 'h' was added to McCarty several years later after they were well established in the community. Either spelling would be correct." At one point I must have read that some years ago, but I just hadn't thought about it. I knew Miss Cunningham well and did some menial journalistic chores for her in her After Harper's Ferry treatise on John Brown. She was a very careful historian.

Aside from spelling trivia, I find that 1881 Alley Bowen book to be of great interest in its description of Saratoga's industrial past. Chief among these enterprises was the Saratoga Paper Mill—which, by my calculation, from looking at a surviving photograph, would have been on or near the present Pamela Way and close by the creek.

This mill, which produced a heavy grade of wrapping paper, operated from 1869 until it was destroyed by fire in April 1883. The machinery was powered by steam and the mill was a known polluter of the adjacent creek. The Alley Bowen book noted that its capacity was "about two and a half tons daily and there was an annual consumption of two thousand cords of wood and twelve hundred tons of straw."

The other major industry of the time was the Caledonia Pasteboard Mill, which was set up around 1868. I have never been clear about the location, which is not described in the 1881 book, other than being across the creek from the paper mill. I seem to remember Miss Cunningham saying it was somewhere around the present Wildwood Park, and she liked to think of it as the forerunner of the vast container industry.

The initial mill was built in 1870 and prospered as the quality of its product improved. The products, however, weren't boxes but sheets of pasteboard used in packing. The mill operation moved to Santa Cruz County in 1880.

Another book that I am pleased to own is the 1922 History of Santa Clara County, California by Eugene T. Sawyer. Again in my nit-picking mode, I was amused to read, in the section on Saratoga, reference to "early morning walks to Congress Springs, with its fine hotel and medicinal springs." That was OK as far as the mineral springs were concerned, but the "fine hotel" burned in 1903 and was never rebuilt. Today, the mineral springs are inaccessible to the public, being behind a chain-link fence.