I agree with Bill (see email). The train remained the most popular mode of travel in the area until the tracks were badly damaged by winter storms in 1940. Ghost town remnants resurface as Lexington Reservoir level falls, The Valley of Hearts Delight: Beautiful Alma, 1896, The Hidden Collateral Damage in Santa Cruz, How Santa Cruzs Bank of Italy Turned a New Leaf, Santa Cruzs Many Wharves: From Lime and Lumber to Ecotourism, http://www.santacruztrains.com/2012/03/wrights-station-summit-tunnel-north.html, A Thanksgiving Feast from the Year 1900 | Santa Cruz Waves. That fall, the dam was sealed, and the Lexington Reservoir slowly filled with the winter rains, drowning the historic towns. The tunnel under the road is just north of the parking I knew quite a few of them, Clarke said of the last residents of Alma. This site is done by Derek Whaley. All the best things to do, to see, and discuss in the San Francisco Bay Area! It probably stood for a couple of hundred years before it fell in the 1950s. State Route 17 runs alongside the dam's western edge and over part of the reservoir. Utah has been in a drought for several months now. This year, water levels have dropped dangerously low. (Karen T. Borchers/Mercury News). drove back to the dam and parked near the St. Joseph's Hill trailhead. The cement ribbon of the old Santa Cruz Highway. Do you have any old photos or memorobilia from the town?? One good spot is the Lexington Reservoir County Park. That same year, the general store was robbed its safe exploded with dynamite, destroying a large part of the building. Ghost town remnants resurface as Lexington, Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window), Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window), Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window), Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window), Six killed when small plane crashes, bursts into flames in field near Southern California airport, Ghost town remnants resurface as Lexington Reservoir level falls, | Natural resources and environment reporter. Lexington profited from heavy logging of the virgin redwood forests that grew thickly throughout the Santa Cruz Mountains and from high-quality leather and tan bark that was in high demand at the tanneries in Santa Cruz County. Lexington Reservoir. Ghost Towns of Lexington Reservoir: Alma - DocsLib First established in 1860, Rockport went through a couple of different names, including Crandall and Enoch City. Space Preserve. It is part of the popular Romantic Road through southern Germany. This place is known to be among the most haunted places in Munich. Language links are at the top of the page across from the title. take the route from "ENTER" to "ROOM" to reach these ruins and not the Biden is heading to Europe. The original college buildings were heavily damaged by the Loma Prieta earthquake on October 17, 1989. "ALMA, CALIFORNIA USA Weather History and Climate Data", http://ghosttowns.com/states/ca/lexingtonandalma.html, ALMA, CALIFORNIA USA Weather History and Climate Data, Alma College, California Latitude and Longitude, "History of JST - Jesuit School of Theology - Santa Clara University", Los Gatos Weekly-Times | Alma College Preservation, The Mercury News | "New redwood park opening 15 miles from downtown San Jose", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Alma,_California&oldid=1158090771, Former settlements in Santa Clara County, California, Ghost towns in the San Francisco Bay Area, Short description is different from Wikidata, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 4.0, This page was last edited on 1 June 2023, at 23:02. You must mean the two guys on the National Geographics Diggers: King George Wyant and Tim The Ringmaster Saylor. the floor of a garage. Check the top-right sidebar of this page for details on any current blog subscription giveaways! The visible ruins under Lexington Reservoir are actually those of Alma, not Lexington; building foundations and original pavements of roads are sometimes visible during droughts. The pliers were brought as a torture device to pull off Renowdens fingernails one by one until he revealed where he hid his gold. I bet the Holy City bar was a crazy place in the 1960s! Looking Most people drive along Highway 17 and have no idea what was there. I love this kind of histor I am going exploring this weekend. I followed him, he said with a chuckle. A lot of them moved to Los Gatos and Saratoga. Rothenburg ob der Tauber He hopes that the emergence of Rockport will draw attention not necessarily because of its history, but because it shows how low water levels have fallen. A good starting place. Majors and one of the thugs were hanged. What kind of fish are in Lexington Reservoir? - Safe Harbor Fishing When the Lexington Reservoir was created in 1952, both Lexington and Alma were officially abandoned and SR 17 was rerouted to its present location. Next time you drive down to Santa Cruz, as you speed over the Lexington Reservoir by the Black Creek Road intersection, slow down a little and look down to your left, over the water, and maybe youll get a glimpse of a lost California city. In maybe an anachronistic presage of the future free love revolution in California, further accusations within the cult surfaced about married couples being separated and assigned to groups whose vibrations matched. west at the foundation, you can see the some large boulders on the hill The first building you can see usually is exposed every year, noted Rockport State Park Manager Eric Bradshaw. Closer CAL FIRE operates one of its 11 helitack bases near the site of the former town. This was a huge improvement to the first dirt road that was so steep and narrow that wagons had to lighten their loads and take several trips, and the cattle, horses, and oxen were always in danger of a fatal slip off the roads edge. http://www.valleywater.org/Programs/TeachersStudents/TeacherMaterials/WaterHistoryTeachersGuide/SantaClaraCountyWaterHistory.aspx. Within the park boundaries lies a ghost town that was inundated when Lake Mead first filled up in the 1930's. Once a Mormon settlement, St. Thomas thrived as a stopping point between Los Angeles and Salt Lake City along the Arrowhead Trail. Perhaps most dramatic among the reservoirs newly visible artifacts is a concrete bridge that once spanned Los Gatos Creek between Lexington and Alma. bridge over the dam's spillway. 59.352, shown as "ROOM" in the map below. Lexington School, Lexington, California. the site of the old town of Alma. Kurt, Thanks for your comment! The silent movie star Broncho Billy Anderson filmed several Western movies there in 1906. Some redwoods on the property are believed to be 800 to 900 years old. ghost town: [noun] a once-flourishing town wholly or nearly deserted usually as a result of the exhaustion of some natural resource. Once located near the mouth of the Kalamazoo River, the "ghost town" has gathered lore and mystery since its ultimate . Do you have any info on that? On my recent trip to the reservoir, Id hoped that the current drought may have a silver lining revealing those sunken remnants again. Zachariah "Buffalo" Jones bought the mill for $3000 and laid out a town called "Jones Mill". looks like the base of a sign or lamppost. the Miller Point Picnic Area. After years of speculation, the announcement came in 1947 that a dam was to be built by the Santa Clara Water Valley Conservation District. An example of data being processed may be a unique identifier stored in a cookie. wikipedia.en/Lexington_Reservoir.md at main chinapedia/wikipedia.en in, you can see the pipe snaking along the reservoir bottom. Wolgsegg Castle is one of the most beautiful castles in the Bavarian region known for its splendid architecture. It's like having a park ranger with you. This is the No wonder the fishing is terrible, not an ounce of structure on the bottom of this lake, nothing natural, concrete and ugly. The town hung on, with fewer than a dozen families still residing there, until the construction of the dam in 1952. in the Mercury News today about a ghost town re-emerging. Foundations, eroding stairs, a stretch of the old Santa Cruz Highway (known as Glenwood Highway when first built in the early 1900s), and sections of the old railroad are again exposed to the light of day. Starting at 49 acres, it began as a failed attempt at a commercial trout farm and ended as a 2500-acre estate, complete with a 40-room house and several other buildings, an experimental farm, massive gardens filled with a staggering number of rare flowers, and a private water system large enough for a small city. I didnt have a camera, Wulf said. The town was mostly demolished when the James J. Lenihan Dam was constructed there in 1952. It was hard to move dirt with draft animals , so road builders had to follow the natural contours of the mountains. Looking That same year, the Jesuits sold the property for $12 million to Hong Kong Metro Realty, based in Madison, Wisconsin, and run by Dr. Jun Lee, nephew of Hong Kong casino billionaire Stanley Ho. We and our partners use cookies to Store and/or access information on a device. . I could have taken photographs. There are a few places you can park. The GPS coordinates Also, all those plants have burrs, Two Ghost towns rising out of the water.. - TreasureNet The James J. Lenihan Dam, a 195ft (59m) high, 1,000ft (300m) thick earthen dam, forms the third-largest reservoir in Santa Clara County. One of those places - an underrated t. It quickly became the most heavily hewed region in California outside of Humboldt County, and was far closer to the growing Bay Area cities than those distant NorCal forests. It was a tumultuous period for Santa Clara County. Devon DeweyPlummeting water levels have revealed faint traces of the former town known as Rockport. When the reservoir filled, Highway 17 was rerouted to higher ground. 6. A man-made flood is about to sweep Alma, a pioneer Santa Clara village out of existence! the San Francisco Examiner wrote, somewhat less forgivingly. I went in there and it was full of hornets, he said. Eventually, it appears that the entire thing was removed but I cant find any info on what it was or when it was from. [2] Lexington started out as a sawmill built in 1848 by Isaac Branham and Julian Jank. It was 551 feet (168 meters) above sea level. A devastating drought in Utah has lowered reservoir levels across the state. Alma Bridge Road (Limekiln Canyon Road) runs around the eastern side, connecting with 17 at the north end and again at the south end via other surface streets. The last owner of the estate, Dr. Tevis, was a retired San Francisco physician with a generous heart. The estate also claimed to have the largest madrone tree in the world growing on its acreage, visible from Bear Creek Road. The bridge can only be viewed when the water level is unusually low, such as the summer of 2008 when construction on the dam lowered the water level to 7% capacity. [9], When the level of Lexington Reservoir drops, it is possible to see portions of the old roads that were used in the construction of the reservoir and that served the historic towns of Lexington and Alma that were covered by the reservoir. As a result, the town of Rockport has emerged from the depths. Somewhere farther south, way back down along the reservoir bottom, is Over half a century later, the reservoir was emptied for some maintenance work in 2008. shown as "BLDG" in the map below. The original town name registered with the Postal Service in 1861 was Lexington. The irregularly-shaped upper parcels lie on both sides of Bear Creek Road and surround the Presentation Center, a conference and retreat facility run by the Sisters of Presentation. It prompted my recall of the time my Dad took me for a drive on that stretch of road and told me how it was to be covered with water and disappear. For fishing, the reservoir is stocked with black bass, trout, bluegill, and crappie. Built in 1926, the bridge once spanned the Los Gatos Creek between Alma and Lexington and is almost always submerged. By the year 1867, Lexington was the main commerce center between San Jose and Santa Cruz. Get Morning Report and other email newsletters, With a lot less water, the fishing is good at Lexington Reservoir, as Jesus Robles Sr., and his son, Jesus Robles, age one and a half, found out. Ghost town remnants resurface as Lexington Reservoir level falls ( when it was full). "TUNNEL" in the map below). http://www.sccgov.org/sites/parks/parkfinder/Pages/Lexington-Reservoir.aspx. The deceased, it turns out, are all linked to a ghost town submerged by a recently constructed lake. below. According to local lore, the town was originally named Forest House, but was renamed by the postmaster to honor his sweetheart. Another story claims it was named after a sex worker. Lexington was the halfway stop for stagecoaches running between San Jose and Santa Cruz. A funeral was held for the town by the last residents, whose homes were condemned. Ahead The town of Lexington burned bright for a short while, profiting from the logging industry and achieving infamy from a brutal murder. I lived and taught school at Fisher for 28 years. I just want to say that I really enjoyed reading everyones comments here about Lexington and the surrounding areas I was raised in Redwood Estates so some of this I knew and some I did not. The western portions of the upper parcels are crossed by a network of trails and roads built by the Jesuits, while the southern parcel is the steepest and most heavily wooded part of the land and can't be easily accessed.
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