On a Saturday morning Grasshopper and I headed to Stanford to do some field sketching and we found ourselves in front of the university’s latest public art.
This piece is an extended Corinthian column rearing up to look like a cobra about to strike. It bears the all too prosaic title of “Hello”. It was completed in 2021 by Xu Zhen.
I would think a better title for the sculpture would be “Column-Snake of Death” or “Columnar Churro of Doom” or even “Goodbye!”.
The former racetrack at Tanforan is bordered on one side by the former Southern Pacific mainline (currently used by the passenger service Caltrain).
Heading south, the line joins the wider rail network at Santa Clara and San Jose and on to all points on the National railroad compass.
Tanforan was, therefore, connected to the nation through the siding track that brought cars from Tanforan Park proper, to points north (San Francisco) and south (San Jose).
In 1938 the famous thoroughbred racehorse Seabiscuit boarded a special horse baggage car at the Tanforan Siding and he was shipped across the country to the East Coast on his first attempt to beat War Admiral. Large crowds came to see Seabiscuit off at the siding. The first meeting of these racing heavyweights did not happen.
Tanforan does have a dark past. In 1942, the racetrack became the Tanforan Assembly Center (the only assembly center in the San Francisco Bay Area). After the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued executive order 9066. As a result Japanese Americans where rounded up and about 8,000 men, woman, and children where brought to Tanforan Racetrack now newly christened the Tanforan Assembly Center (one of twelve assembly centers on the West Coast).
Two-thirds of the detainees were U. S. Citizens, born and raised in the United States.
The first internees arrived on April 28, 1942. They were housed in barracks and horse stalls that reeked of manure and urine. Some families spent about eight months here before being transported, over rail, to the Topaz War Relocation Center in Utah where they remained until the end of the war.
By the fall, the detainees were being sent on a two day rail journey to the Topaz War Relocation Center. On September 9, 1942, the first group of 214 detainees entered the siding that Seabiscuit travelled on a few years earlier and entered the mainline for their trip to the wastes of northeastern Utah. On October 13, 308 detainees, the last to leave Tanforan, entered the siding and then on to Utah.
The Tanforan Assembly Center was now closed.
The site of the former track and assembly center is now a shopping mall.
In 2022 the mall was bought by a developer and there are plans to raze the mall and build a massive biotech campus.
Who knew that the Northern California town of Eureka had some Civil War and presidential history?
Such is the case when a young captain who served at the fort for five months. He was a loner and spent his free time in local taverns and riding in the countryside. It is said that he developed a taste for whisky while at Fort Humboldt. His name was Ulysses S. Grant.
Of course he went on to become a Civil War hero where he commanded the Union Army. It was Grant that Robert E. Lee surrendered to at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865.
Grant later served as the 18th president from 1869-1877 serving two terms.
There is not much left of the fort on the bluff above Humboldt Bay and the fort hospital is the only remaining structure of the fort period (from 1853-1870). I pulled up my sketching chair and sketched the hospital building on the left of my spread. On the right is one of the largest steam donkeys ever made.
The state park has some nice relics of the lumber era that put Humboldt County on the economic map.
It was a cold, clear, and crisp morning in Eureka, a perfect day for railroad sketching.
Pre-trip, the Northwestern Pacific bridge over Eureka Slough was high on my sketch list. This bridge has had a major rebuild at least once and now looks to be in good shape
I pulled onto Y Street, any further north and I’d be in Arcata. At the end of the street is the rusted railroad and pedestrian path that follows the shoreline (The Waterfront Trail). I headed right on the trail (north) to where the path comes to the slough and then heads east. Of course the railroad proceeded north by conquering Humboldt Slough with a bridge. And that’s what I was here to sketch.
I had thought about bringing along by sketching chair but when you have the Steam Engine Bench with a capital view of the slough and bridge, why bother?
It was a beautiful morning to sketch and my pants absorbed the wet bench. I had to use a lot of sketcher’s shorthand and leave off the vast amount of graffiti that the bridge was covered in. I did keep the words, “OLD CROW” painted into seven panels of the bridge.
I love sketching old abandoned historic buildings. And if they were featured in sci-fi horror cult film, even better.
The Diamond Springs Creamery was built in 1893 in Loleta, California. Which is about 20 miles south of Eureka. The location of the plant would make sense because it is in the middle of California Coastal cow country and on the route of the Northwestern Pacific mainline, bringing dairy to points south including San Francisco.
The dairy plant is very large, perhaps three blocks by six blocks. A good portion of the town must have worked at the plant making Loleta a real company town.
Now the brick building is falling apart with broken windows and covered in graffiti. It was in operation for over one hundred years, stopping production in 2007 and finally being abandoned in 2010. It is now surrounded by a fence with many “No Trespassing” signs on display. This must be to keep graffiti artists and film geeks at bay.
In 1982, Loleta filled in for the fictional town of Santa Mira and the creamery stood in for the Silver Shamrock Novelties factory in the film Halloween III: Season of the Witch.
While the film made a profit, it was the lowest grossing film in the Halloween franchise. It probably shouldn’t have been called Halloween III because it gave the false expectations that it was going to star a man in a doctored Captain Kirk mask with a large knife. This film does feature masks but not Michael Myers.
One of the biggest challenges of building a railroad from Willits to Eureka is the Eel River Canyon. And the Northwestern Pacific Railroad (NWP) definitely had their hands full with this engineering challenge.
13 miles north of Willits the Northwestern Pacific (NWP) line crosses Highway 101 and begins to parallel Outlet Creek.
Just north of Willits I turned left onto Highway 162 (Covelo Road). I wanted to follow the railroad as far north up the Eel River Canyon that I could. I figured I would get as far as Dos Rios before I ran out of road.
There were some key sites in the Eel River Canyon that I wanted to see: Cain Rock and Island Mountain but these were so far off Highway 101 on long and windy roads (some on private roads that seemed very inaccessible). I wanted to avoid trespassing in Mendocino or Humboldt Counties! (Think shotgun!)
One of my sketching destinations was the train trestle over Outlet Creek near the confluence of the creek with the Eel River.
I pulled over just as I crossed the Eel River and set up my sketching chair to add the trestle in my Beta panoramic book (featured sketch). The field sketch is on the left side and as the pictures moves to the right, the color turns to sepia and a steam locomotive pulling a passenger consist, is heading down canyon towards the trestle. The spread is a look back in time.
After the sketch I continued to follow the line towards Dos Rios on Highway 162. I came upon a tunnel, NWP Tunnel 14.
An imposing landmark on Highway 101, just south of Hopland is Frog Woman Rock (formerly known as Squaw Rock).
This was a barrier to the progress of the railroad that was following the Russian River on it’s West Bank. They could not go around the monolith so they had to tunnel through it.
This became the 1,270 foot Tunnel No. 8 on the Northwestern Pacific Railroad (NWP). While this monolith was a new delay to the railroad’s northern progress, the local Pomo people knew this location very well.
To them it was know as Bi-tsin’ ma-ca Ka-be, Frog Woman Rock.
There are various legends of how the rock got its name. One Pomo story, filtered through early settlers, is that the rock was a sort of “Lover’s Leap” featuring in a lover revenge quarrel of the scorned Sotuka. Other say Sotuka is the wife of Coyote the trickster and the Pomo people avoided the rock. While others believe when the railroad tunnels through Frog Woman Rock, it released evil spirits.
Whatever the “truth” behind the legend of the rock, it was always be hidden in the past.
In 2024, Frog Woman Rock was designated California Historical Landmark No. 549. The plaque reads:
Since time immemorial, this monolith has been revered by Pomo people as the home of Frog Woman, the consort of coyote, and a special being in her own right. For native people it is a place of sacred power and a reminder of the connection we still have with our spirituality and natural environment. The presence of this great rock on the local landscape is a solemn witness that will forever be a local symbol of our indigenous collective conscience, strength, and perseverance.
Just north of the Victorian town of Ferndale is the small Humboldt County town of Lotleta (population 783).
The name of the town is shrouded in a bit of mystery but the name is supposedly the Wiyot word for “pleasant place at the end of the tide water” or according to Wikipedia, “Go f___ yourself “ or “Let’s have intercourse”. So many varied derivations! Take your pick.
Through the center of town runs the rusted rails of the Northwestern Pacific Railroad (NWP). Dairy was a very big in this part of Northern Californian economy and this area supplied San Francisco with dairy products. The railroad played a big part in transporting dairy to markets south.
There is a “hiking trail”, much overgrown, along the rails to the abandoned Loleta Tunnel (Tunnel No. 40). I was about to set off on an adventure!
I set out on the hiking “trail”or the “ING RAIL” which was following the route north of the Northwestern Pacific right of way. In many places the rails were swallowed up in mud or vegetation or both. The Loleta Tunnel was about a mile from “downtown” Loleta. Near the tunnel was a washed out trestle over a small ravine, leaving the NWP rail suspended in midair. Perhaps this is a just metaphor for the hopes of restoring rail to this part of California.
I did not attempt to cross the trestle (or lack of a trestle) but a path had been worn down one side of the ravine and up the other. From here is was a short but muddy slog to the south portal of the Loleta Tunnel.
Before I headed up to Loleta I did two historic sepia sketches based on period photographs when steam locomotives rumbled through the small town (featured sketch). Parts of Loleta are very recognizable to this day.
Just south of Willits on an unassuming county road is Ridgewood Ranch.
First established as a ranch in the 1850s, the ranch was given the name Ridgewood Ranch by its second owner, Rench Angle in 1859. Angle increased the size of the ranch by buying up surrounding land for $3.25 an acre.
The next owner of note, and the reason for my visit, was multimillionaire Charles S. Howard, who bought the ranch in 1919.
Howard came to San Francisco with 21 cents in his pocket. He worked his way up to become one of Buick’s best salesmen of all time. He ran many Buick dealerships in the west at the rise of the age of the automobile.
On the streets of San Francisco, cars began to replace horses as the motive power of the day. This is ironic because of a purchase he made in August of 1936 for the sum of $8,000.
This was the famous thoroughbred Seabiscuit which won many races in the 1930s, lifting a nation in the depths of the Great Depression. He was voted American Horse of the Year in 1938.
The all-time money winner was retired from racing in 1940. Seabiscuit spent the last years of this retired life here at Ridgewood Ranch. He died May 17, 1947 from a probable cardiac arrest.
Seabiscuit is buried near an oak tree at Ridgewood Ranch. Only the Howard family knows the exact location. Seabiscuit’s final resting place is a closely guarded secret.
Schellville is not really a town, just an intersection of a two lane highway and a country road in incorporated Sonoma County. But this is a very important railroad junction.
This is the last bastion of the once great Northwestern Pacific Railroad (NWP).
Schellville was an important rail junction on the NWP and there is a two mile rail yard south of the former train station.
This was NWP’s only outlet to the greater Southern Pacific rail network. All passenger and freight traffic from Eureka in Humboldt County south to Willits, Santa Rosa, Petaluma and San Rafael in Marin County, had to pass through Schellville.
At one point, post World War II, 11,000 cars a month passed through the junction at Schellville. Many cars went on, under Southern Pacific steam, to the division point at Roseville.
Over the years, declining passenger and freight service, landslides, and the severe winter floods of 1964, sent NWP on a downward decline. The railroad was operated by Southern Pacific and once SP merged with Union Pacific in the mid-1990s, NWP changed hands many times, holding on to it’s diminished existence.
It seemed that the entire fleet of four locomotives where fenced in near the station. This motley collection were painted in the livery of other railroads.
From the Y track at the station I headed north along the line, vineyards flanking either side of the rusted rails. I crossed a short trestle and before me stood a railroad graveyard, a mothballed fleet of NWP and SP diesels and rolling stock.
While these locomotives had seen better days I was surprised to see a Southern Pacific Steam Locomotive on a siding across 8th Street.
At first I couldn’t believe my eyes. Could this be one of a handful of operable SP steam locomotives? I could barely make out the road number.
It was P-8 Class No. 2572 a 4-6-2 “Pacific” type built by the Baldwin Locomotive Works in 1921.
2472 was retired in 1957 and donated to the city of San Mateo and put on public display at the San Mateo County Fairgrounds.
In 1976 a group decided to restore the SP workhorse to working order. The group, the Golden Gate Railroad Museum, had 2472 ready for Railfair 91 in Sacramento which feature another Southern Pacific legend, 4449.
For many years 2472 operated steam excursions in Niles Canyon but was moved to Schellville on March 1, 2020.
Corvid Sketcher 