Davenport Landing

Davenport Landing, near the mouth of Agua Puerca Creek, eighteen miles up the coast from Santa Cruz, was a booming coast villange through the 1870s and 1880s. The present town of Davenport, two miles to the south, succeeded it when the Santa Cruz Portland Cement plant was built in 1906.

John Pope Davenport, mariner from Tiverton, Rhode Island, had come around the Horn in 1849, gone back by way of the Isthmus and in 1851 returned with his wife and the schooners Ann McKinn. Scorning gold mining, he had operated as a whaler at Monterey and Moss Landing and was living in Soquel in 1867 when he and his friend, John King, begain building a wharf on El Jarro Rancho.

King was declared insane in 1870 but Davenport continued trying out his whales and operating his 450-foot wharf, which ran out to 15 feet of water at low tide. By 1875 the town had L. A. Utt's and Auguste Roque's hotels, William Purdy's store and hall, Benjamin F. Sprague's and W. J. Taliaferro's blacksmith shops, Lorenzen's shipyard and four dwellings. Agua Puerca school was nearby.

Development of better shipping facilities elsewhere ended the wharf's prosperity and John P. Davenport removed to Santa Cruz, where he was a real estate dealer and justice of the peace. Some shipping and fishing remained at Davenport Landing but its population dwindled until in 1886 its postoffice was moved to Laurel Grove, which today is known as Swanton.

Enough of the wharf was left in 1905 for W. J. Dingee's lime kilns of San Vicente Rancho to ship from it, but the following year Dingee's lime company, which had been taken over by John Q. Packard and F. W. Billing, was sold for $400,000 to the newly incorporated Santa Cruz Portland Cement Company.