Los Olivos: The Olive Ranch, the Railroad, and the Flagpole

The name Los Olivos means the olives, and this village earned it the plainest way possible. In eighteen eighty-five a man named Alden March Boyd bought a tract of Santa Ynez Valley land and planted about five thousand olive trees across it. He called the spread Rancho de Los Olivos, the ranch of the olives, and the name would soon belong to the whole town.

What turned a ranch into a town was a railroad. In eighteen eighty-seven the narrow-gauge Pacific Coast Railway pushed its tracks up the valley and made Los Olivos its southern terminus, the point where the iron rails ended and stagecoaches took over for the run down to Santa Barbara over the mountains. The railway company laid out lots, held a land auction, and named the new townsite for those long rows of olive trees.

For a few years Los Olivos was a busy transfer point, alive with freight, passengers, and the dust of stage teams changing horses. Then the boom passed it by. When the Southern Pacific extended its main coast line to the south in the early twentieth century, the through traffic followed the ocean instead of the valley, and Los Olivos settled back into being a quiet ranching town.

For most of the twentieth century its single most famous feature was a flagpole standing right in the middle of the main street. Local tradition ties that flagpole to the First World War era and the young men of the valley, and it still rises from the intersection of Grand Avenue today, traffic bending politely around it. The sleepy years turned out to be a gift.

Because nobody tore the old town down to build something bigger, the low western storefronts and shaded porches survived intact, and when the Santa Ynez wine country blossomed in the late twentieth century, visitors found a genuine nineteenth-century village waiting for them. The olive trees gave the town its name, the railroad gave it a reason to exist, and the flagpole gave it a heart that still stands in the middle of the road.