Cambria Pines: The Victorian Boom Coast

Cambria in the eighteen seventies and eighteen eighties was not a destination. It was a working town, built on three extractive industries that have since largely disappeared from the landscape: dairy cattle, coastal timber, and cinnabar mining in the Santa Lucia mountains to the east.

The Monterey pines that give this area its current character were not the dominant feature then. Much of the surrounding forest had been logged for coastal shipping, the timber cut and loaded onto schooners that moved it up and down the California coast. The hills above town contained cinnabar deposits, the mercury ore that was essential to the amalgamation process used to extract gold from California's mines. The dairy operations ran cattle on the surrounding pastureland and shipped their products from the same coastal wharves that carried the timber.

The Victorian commercial architecture that survives in Cambria's East Village is the physical residue of that extraction economy: buildings constructed quickly in a place that expected to keep growing and, for reasons that economic historians describe as predictable given the extraction-dependent economic model, did not. The cinnabar ran thin. The accessible timber was cut. The railroad changed coastal shipping patterns. Cambria settled into a smaller, quieter existence.

What remains is a town that looks like it expected more from itself, built in the confident architectural language of Victorian commercial ambition, sitting in a landscape that has partly grown back from what was taken from it. The Monterey pines are still recovering too.