Zayante

Zayante, site of the first power sawmill in California, was a Mexican grant in 1834 to Joaquin Buelna, who had been Branciforte alcalde and earlier teacher in San Jose.

The scholarly Joaquin let his claim lapse after conferring in 1835 timber rights on Ambrose Tomlinson and Job Dye, thus starting the settlement of "foreigners" which ten years later was a trouble spot in Mexican-Californian politics.

In 1839 a request for Zayante was made by "Don F. Moss", whose real name was Francisco Lajeunesse. He was a French Canadian who had come to the Monterey region in the Walker party in 1833. Despite the fact that he had been naturlized and had married Nicanor Cota, "Moss" was not given the grant. Adopting his nickname as surname, he moved to Ventura in 1860.

In the spring of 1841 Isaac Graham and his young partner, Henry Neale, cast eyes on the tract. Neither had become an Mexican citizen so they induced Joseph L. Majors to apply for it. Majors had taken Mexican citizenship and maried Maria de Los Angeles Castro. He was granted both Zayante and the adjoing rancho of San Agustin.

The grant was made to Majors on April 22, 1841, and on September 11 a syndicate of four signed an agreement to erect a mill, Majors, Graham, a German named Frederick Hoeger, and a young Danish ironworker, Peter Lassen. The mill was a "muley" with a straight saw which worked up and down in a wooden frame. Its site was on the grounds of today's Mount Hermon, where the course of the little flume can be traced on the west bank of Zayante Creek opposite the confluence of Bean Creek.

Graham and Neale soon took over their partners' interests. In 1843 they built a slightly larger mill on the east bank of the San Lorenzo below the entrence of Fall creek, a mile north of Felton. Graham hauled his lumber up the hill east of the Zayante and along the hilltop across what is today the Pasatiempo golf course to Branciforte Creek, which he followed to Santa Cruz and its beach, where he loaded through the surf to coastwise schooners.

Graham was a native of that part of Virginia, which became West Virginia in Civil War days. Born in 1800, he had come from Tennessee over the Santa Fe Trail. In 1840 , when he was seized with the other foreigners and sent to San Blas, he and Neale were operating a little still at Natividad in the Salinas Valley.

It is well authenticated that Graham received $36,000 from Mexico as indemnity for his exile. He was one of the wealthy men of Santa Cruz in the 1850s when he bought Rancho del Ano Nuevo, on the San Mateo county line up the coast.

Graham's contract marriage in 1845 with twenty-one-year-old Catherine Bennett, which drew the attention of U. S. Consul Thomas O. Larkin of Monterey, was not successful. In 1850 Catherine, learning that Isaac had left a wife in Tennessee, fled in male garb by schooner from Santa Cruz to San Francisco and Honolulu and then to Oregon. After Isaac located her in Oregon City she returned to Santa Cruz, where she had the marriage annulled in 1852 and the following year married Daniel McCustker, a youn Irishman who was starting a dairy ranch in the Elkhorn district south of Watsonville.

The arrival of two of Graham's sons from Tennessee precipitated a feud between them and Catherine's four brothers which brought about the shooting of Dennis Bennett by Jesse Graham. Isaac's first wife had gone to Texas where the law made seven years separation equivalent to divorce and had married again. One of Graham's daughters, married to J. D. Marshall, came from Texas in 1852 and settled on what is know as Marshall Creek.

Graham maintained a home at Zayante and in Santa Cruz until his death in 1863 while on a trip to San Francisco. He left his land to his daughter, Matilda Jane, who was Mrs. David M. Rice of Aptos. When, in 1870, George Treat, an Easterner, bought the new Page Donnell & Lee Mill at Gold Gulch he acquired also the rich timer holdings of Zayante. Treat mortgaged and lost the tract to Charles McLaughlin. After the latter's death F. A. Hihn bought, divided, and sold the tract.

A Santa Clara Valley Mill and & Lumber Company operation took most of the timber from the upper Zayante valley in the 1870s and until the mill burned in 1886 hauled its product by way of Lexington and Los Gatos.

The Zayante school district, created in 1882, had for nearly twenty years as its teacher Josefa Buelna, one of the first graduates of Santa Cruz high school, who was a granddaughter of the Joaquin Buelna, who was Zayante's first grantee.

Mount Hermon, modeled after summer religious assemblies to Northfield, Massachusetts and Winona, Indiana, was instituted in 1906 when a group of church leaders from the San Francisco Bay area bought a 400-acre tract from Thomas L. Bell and his associates, who had built Zayante Inn near where the Mount Hermon railroad station later stood.