The Red Cookhouse: Chinese Workers at the Cowell Lime Works

Somewhere beneath the redwood canopy of the UC Santa Cruz campus, in a thirty-acre district that is now on the National Register of Historic Places, there is a cookhouse that was painted red.

The choice of color was deliberate. The Chinese contract workers who operated the lime furnaces here, beginning in the eighteen fifties, painted the cookhouse red because it was a lucky color. It was one of the few visible assertions of cultural presence available to men who had no legal standing, who left almost no written record of their names or their lives, and whose labor built the largest lime manufacturing operation in nineteenth-century California.

The Cowell Lime Works produced lime used in the construction of California's early cities. The material was essential: plaster, mortar, the skin of buildings that would become landmarks. The workers who produced it were Chinese contract laborers who lived in a camp separate from the Cowell family's operations, under conditions that historians describe as difficult and underdocumented.

UC Santa Cruz was built on this same land after the Cowell Ranch was donated to the University of California in the nineteen sixties. The lime works historic district sits inside the campus. In two thousand and seven, it was added to the National Register. In two thousand and eight and two thousand and nine, university archaeologists excavated the site and found ceramic fragments, tools, and the physical residue of daily life in the worker camp.

They did not find names. The lime those workers produced went into California's buildings. The buildings were named for the Cowells. The campus was built on what the workers made. The cookhouse they painted red is the most personal thing they left behind.