The Point Alones Burning: How California's First Fishing Industry Was Erased
Near Monterey, California
Look south from here along the Pacific Grove shoreline. The walking path you see runs over ground that was, for half a century, one of the most productive fishing settlements in North America.
They arrived as early as eighteen fifty-one, Chinese fishermen who had come to California during the Gold Rush and then discovered that the real gold was in the water. By the eighteen seventies, more than five hundred people lived at Point Alones, on this shoreline, in a working village of boats and nets and drying racks and family compounds. They had invented California's commercial fishing industry from nothing. They were catching and exporting abalone, squid, and shrimp by the millions of pounds, feeding markets in San Francisco and beyond.
Their neighbors, the Pacific Improvement Company, owned the adjacent Pebble Beach lands and a large portion of the shoreline. In nineteen oh five, the Company declined to renew the lease on the land beneath the Point Alones village. The residents' legal options were limited to none.
In nineteen oh six, in the weeks following the San Francisco earthquake, the village burned to the ground. No one was charged with any crime. The historical record does not establish whether the fire was accidental or deliberate, and any account that tells you it knows is telling you more than the evidence supports. What the evidence does support is this: the lease was denied in nineteen oh five, the village burned in nineteen oh six, and no one was charged. The five hundred people who had lived here scattered.
The Pacific Improvement Company later donated thirty acres of adjacent shoreline to the YWCA, which became Asilomar. Seven years separated those two transactions by the same corporation.
Consider the scale of what existed here. Five hundred people, in a working village with its own internal economy, its own social structure, its own daily routines of fishing and drying and trading. Children grew up here. People were buried here. The village had been operating for fifty years by the time the lease was denied, long enough to be the only life many of its residents had ever known.
They scattered. The historical record does not say, in detail, where they went. Some likely moved to the Chinese fishing settlement at Point Lobos, a few miles south. Some may have moved north toward San Francisco. The fishing industry they had built, the techniques they had developed for catching and processing Pacific squid and abalone and shrimp, the knowledge embedded in a community of working fishermen, dispersed with them and was not recorded.
Today the walking path where you are standing is where the abalone-drying racks stood. There is no marker for the village. The path is named for its views of the bay.
