Old Watering Trough

As you travel north from Santa Cruz to Felton along Highway 9, just past Rincon, there is an old concrete watering trough. Bull teams were once watered at this trough and later it became a resting stop for horse teams hauling lumber to Santa Cruz. In 1934, in an effort to reduce nighttime accidents, protruding objects such as rocks and tree stumps were painted white by the State Highway agency, including the old trough.

This prompted an old stage driver to reminisce about the road and the trough. Described only as “one of our early citizens,” he drove the stage from Boulder Creek to Santa Cruz, over Graham Hill Road, before the Highway 9 section from Felton to Santa Cruz had been graded.

The road along the west bank of the San Lorenzo River opened in 1868 to much fanfare. It was an engineering masterpiece, being cut along the canyon wall sometimes hundreds of feet above the water. Money to build the road had been raised by subscription and money to maintain the road was to be raised through tolls.

Once the road was opened, the old stage driver took that route, noting that rarely was he ever passed by another team. “When a bull team, hauling a heavy load of logs or wood, and with wheels in the ruts, was ahead of me, it was sometimes necessary to use a shovel so that the wheels could be steered off the road and the wagon into a cove, then the stage could pass. There were, every so often, recesses cut into the hills where the freighters could pull off to let other travelers pass or the man behind to get by, but when there were a number of freighters strung along the trail it was just a case of watchful waiting.”

He also recalled, “There once were many springs gushing from the mountain sides along the old canyon trail. And trail it was, two ruts with a high center in between. When the ruts got so deep that the center scraped the wagons, there was some repair work done on the road.” During the winter rains the ruts became rivers of mud and wagons often became stuck.

Water Cress, or pepper grass, used to grow along the canyon road in the water from the many springs that trickled alongside. “Mighty good to place in a sandwich,” he reminisced, and the water from the spring that fed the old watering trough was described as “the finest water in the mountains.”

Image: Courtesy of the author.