Heritage Shared Essays, Papers, and Poetry

The Spooners of Montana de Oro Considered as Objects of Natural History

Central Coast Natural History Association Mindwalk, February 18, 2008

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Cropping   

Because of its remote coastal location, farming came late to the Pecho. Indeed, one of the most remarkable aspects of Pecho history is that the Spooners, who arrived in the year the Chicago World's Fair celebrated the 400th anniversary of 1492,  may well have been the very first people to plow Pecho soils and cordon off the landscape with  road cuts and fence lines. The Spooners were thus probably the first residents over the millennia to engineer significant changes in the natural course and rate of water runoff and  soil erosion.

Barley, wheat, hay, oats for horse fuel, and beans (especially whites, pinks, pale yellow Bayos, and green Limas), had been the traditional pioneer crops on the Central Coast.  The Spooners planted lots of oats because in his youth A.B.  Jr. had been a professional race and show horse handler. He always kept a herd of blooded stock, especially Cleveland Bays.

Of the small grains, wheat brought far the best price, but was hardest on the soil and the most susceptible  to wheat rust fungus. Since the Spooners were canny farmers they likely   practiced some pattern of nitrogen-fixing crop rotation, perhaps a three year cycle of beans,  barley or wheat, then beans again, with periodic fallow years during dry spells to conserve ground water and give the soil a rest. If they used fertilizer at all, it was feedlot and stable manure.

A foreign food crisis at the onset of the First World War triggered a bean bonanza.  Bad weather, crop failures and the disruptions of war had pushed western Europeans to the edge of starvation. Dense, high protein, storage-stable dried beans were an ideal relief crop, and hardly anything grew better on the cool and moist Central Coast. Indeed, for decades SLO had led the state in bean exports.  Beginning in 1916 the Spooners, like many other SLO county farmers, joined in a patriotic bean boom, extending their existing terrace irrigation system in order to boost production.

The 20's and 30's were times of transition.  The bean bubble burst, launching many over-extended and debt-ridden Central Coast farmers spiraling downward toward the Great Depression. A.B. Spooner, Jr. died in 1926.  His sons carried on, but turned much of their coastal terrace cropland over to Japanese sharecroppers who lived on the place. Several Japanese families farmed peas, bush and pole beans, celery, flower seeds, and other labor-intensive crops.  Meanwhile the Spooner sons moved much of their dairy operation to the Edna Valley, and finally sold the Pecho to Oscar Field in 1942 – the same year that war-spooked authorities rounded up the Pecho's Japanese residents and shipped them off  to barbed wire relocation camps. 

Animal Husbandry

In the early 1860s several years of  catastrophic drought killed off the old Spanish and Mexican  herds and bankrupt the old ranchos that had managed to weather the Panic and depression of 1857. The collapse of the old economy and way of life opened opportunities for   newcomers, especially old-stock Yankees like the Spooners, and recent Swiss-Italian immigrants, who restocked the Central Coast herds with shorthorns and dairy cattle. Beef and dairy products destined for the insatiable San Francisco urban market replaced hides, tallow and wool as the leading local animal exports.  Creameries and cheese factories sprang up along the coast from Morro Bay to Cambria.  The Spooners had plenty of grazing land for large Holstein herds. Butter was a good cash crop: it had a high cash value relative to bulk, was relatively easy to produce, and if properly packed traveled well without refrigeration. Unlike  the coastal  dairymen between, say,  Cayucos and  Harmony,  however,  the Spooners were  too isolated to join with their neighbors in a cooperative creamery. Pecho Ranch was on its own.

The limits on Pecho butter output were energy and transportation – how to get the horsepower needed to separate as much cream and churn as much butter as Pecho herds could produce, and how to get their output to market. The ingenious Spooners addressed both problems with typical technological verve.

All successful farmers are mechanics because they have to be, but some display extraordinary Yankee ingenuity. In the Spooners' case it was a family tradition. A. B. Spooner Sr. had been a skilled shipwright before he became a preacher, sheriff, harbor pilot, and general storekeeper. A.B. Jr. and his sons carried on the heritage as gifted and enthusiastic gadgeteers   who made things both because they needed them, and because making things was fun. Mrs. Spooner probably had to endure a perpetual clutter of disassembled machinery in the house. On the other hand, she was likely one of the first farm wives in the region to enjoy the luxury of fauceted inside running water, in this case piped from a hillside spring catchment along side what is now the trail to Oaks Peak.  The first big Spooner Pecho project was the bluff side loading chute of 1892 –  a jury-rigged private port that gave remote Pecho Ranch an outlet to world markets.  The creamery waterpower of the mid-1890s was their second.

In the Spooners' day Central Coast dairymen typically powered commercial farmstead cream separators and churns the easy way, with a machine appropriately called a "horsepower." They were available at farm supply stores in San Luis, or by mail from Sears & Roebuck and Monkey Wards. The Spooners evidently had a big one, mounted on wheels that they used in the fields as a portable motor. Horsepowers featured a long horse-driven boom turning a gear drive and shafting that converted the push-pull muscle power of a walking horse into the rotary motion of machinery. The technology was simple, reliable, and relatively cheap.

But horsepower technology wasn't fun, so the almost compulsively inventive Spooners turned their practical power need into a tinkering opportunity. They fashioned an elaborate, home-made water power system with a twenty-four foot overshot wheel and a fifteen foot high masonry dam to drive their actually quite modest cream separator and churn. Overshot wheels run on the weight of falling water. Spooner's problem was to get a head of water close enough to the creamery, located on the Islay Creek bluff just behind the ranch house.  His solution was to dam Islay Creek at the site of the first natural rocky falls, about a mile and a half upstream from the ranch house, then sluice water through a wooden plank and iron pipe head race all the way down Islay canyon, through what is now the campground, across the feedlot and milking pens and finally to the waterwheel forebay next to the creamery.  The water power complex was a telling artifact of Spooner culture -- a wholly unnecessary, enormously over-complicated, endlessly labor-intensive, self-indulgent example of  Yankee ingenuity run amok.

But the Spooners were immensely proud of their creation.  We know this because we have these dramatic photographs of the waterwheel, the dam, and the whole ranch complex of some 30-odd buildings. Creating the images required hiring a professional photographer at considerable expense to lug his large, heavy, and fragile glass plate camera and tripod all the way out from town – more than a half day's trek one-way -- and spend at least a couple of days making pictures.

The dam at the other end of the waterpower system must have backed up a mill pond nearly a quarter mile upstream to the next rocky outcrop. If you look at a topo map you can see where the brown elevation contour lines cross Islay Creek. Better yet, if you hike up Islay Creek Road and scan lay of the land between the dam site and the upper falls ( just downstream from today's Loop Trail crossing),  you can get a sense of  where the mill pond must have been. If you then scan eastward you will also realize that the dam blocked access to much of the upper Islay Creek steelhead spawning grounds.

That's if any fish made it that far. Human actions almost always have unintended biological consequences.  The major effluent waste products from butter manufacture are buttermilk and waste water. At the Spooner creamery they were easy enough to dump over the side into Islay Creek.  Here again the ever-clever Spooners found a tinkering opportunity to turn a mess into a profit. 

Which brings us back to animal husbandry, namely pigs. Pigs are easy to raise, prolific, and tasty. They are opportunistic omnivores that thrive on almost anything, but require water for wallow. Reliably wet wallows were few and far between on the semi-arid Pecho. How convenient it was that a creek ran close at hand, just below a creamery dumping quantities of nutritious waste buttermilk. The waterwheel photo shows the waste drainpipe running from the creamery to the fenced pigsties straddling Islay Creek.

For the pigs the sty must have been a hog heaven. For the Spooners the stench drifting up to engulf the ranch house must have been awful.  For the steelhead on their way up Islay Creek to spawn it must have been a catastrophe.  Any fish that somehow managed to wriggle through the gauntlet of hungry hogs shortly ran headlong into the mill dam. It's unlikely that the Spooners thought to provide a fish ladder.

It's  unclear how long the dam remained a steelhead barrier, or when the waterwheel fell into disuse. The second, gas engine-powered Spooner creamery (the cast concrete building still survives) dates from about 1909.  Don Spooner, born in 1924, at various times recalled the waterwheel as operational when he was a kid, and at other times as a long- abandoned ruin finally demolished by Oscar Field after the ranch changed hands in 1942. At some point the dam was breached, either by flood or deliberate blasting – the evidence suggests the latter -- which drained the mill pond and its associated artificial wetlands, thus altering miles of riparian corridor for a second time. Today the shoreline of the old mill pond is lost under the scrub, but the steelhead are back. 

Man's Place in Nature

So where do these sketches of Spooner ethno-ecological history lead us, and leave us? I hope they lead us toward the notion that we need to interpret all humans, of whatever era or hue or gender,  in exactly the same way – as both historical actors and as objects of natural history,  no more and no less than heads of state or aboriginal villagers or bat rays or butterflies.

I hope too that we can begin to see the history of the Spooner's Pecho within the larger story of long-term human impacts on Central Coast ecologies.  More often than not it's been a story of people acting without knowing about, or thinking about, or caring about the consequences. Lots of examples come to mind: Chumash and fire; Spaniards and grizzly bears; otter hunters and abalones; day boats and ling cod, effluents and oysters, suburbs and mountain lions; septic tanks and algae blooms.

Finally, I hope that the Spooner example will inspire us, in all our interpretive programming, to emphasize our museum's main ecological message:  that all biological causes have historical effects, and vice-versa.

Copyright © by Howard S. (Dick) Miller