Mill Creek

There are many lovely streams on the coast side of the Santa Lucias, and Mill Creek is my favorite, for it is filled with the memories of my childhood. My father and his brother ran a sawmill on the upper creek for ten years. Redwoods all around, lumber for the house and the barn, shakes and shingles and pickets besides.

My father, Ed Sans, was born at Soledad in this county in 1875, and his father Charles ran stock in the Bryson country in the south of it, the same country the Mansfields and Prewitts ran cattle in, until he sold out in 1884 for a fruit ranch in Santa Cruz County. My father went to school at Green Valley near Watsonville, worked eight years for the nurseryman at Corralitos, married my mother, Lydia Rich of Corralitos, in 1894, and I was born there in February of 1896. I was not yet two years old when he and my uncle Charley brought us to Mill Creek for the mill.

The day-use area here has a steep little road down to a cobble beach, and it is one of the quieter stops on this stretch. For me it is the front door of childhood. There were Indians on Mill Creek before the mills, and some of them were ours.

My father bought the mill land from the Moros, and Joe and Dave Moro, two trusty young Indians, worked for my folks every year the mill ran; they lived near Chalk Peak, and their sisters Juana and Fidele helped my mother in the house, and their niece Regina was my great friend. Dave Moro's horse pasture up by the peak still carries his name. Gabriel Fontes lived in a cave high on the north slope of this creek; his daughter Alberta went to Europe as a governess, and his son Tony became the coast's horseman.

Cayetan Canieti's wife Lucia was a Gomez, and their daughter Hattie was a natural artist: her pencil sketch of my father's four-horse team, drawn from watching it pass the house, hung on our dining room wall for years. A dozen families lived on Mill Creek then: the Digges, the Mitchells, the Moros, the Caniettis, and us. Bob Digges, a King City cattleman, bought the Gomez place in 1893 and married their beautiful daughter Maria, Chiquita to everyone, and their nine children went to school with my brothers and sisters.

My grandson believes the Diggs are in the King City country still, and I would like to think so.