Who was Henry Cowell?
Henry Cowell arrived in Santa Cruz area in 1865 and bought half of the shares of the Santa Cruz limestone business from Albion Jordan for $100,000. By 1886 he was reported to have the highest income in Santa Cruz County in addition to owning 10,000 acres of land in the area. His businesses included limestone quarries, shipping, logging, cattle, cement trade and large land holdings, ranches and lime deposits in 15 counties. His property included over 1,600 acres of forest adjacent to Welch’s Big Trees Resort He developed lime quarries at Rincon and Fall Creek. The limestone were an excellent grade and available where there were large quantities of fuel for the kilns. During the years of highest demand, 80% of the statewide need for lime was supplied by Santa Cruz County.
In 1849 Henry Cowell and his brother John left their home town of Wrentham, Massachusetts when the lure of gold was drawing the adventurous to California. John returned to Boston because of poor health. Henry, 30 years old, began a successful drayage business that soon grew to include routes to Stockton and the gold country. Henry’s knowledge, attained from his wealthy family, paid off and soon his empire grew to include property and business interests from San Luis Obispo to Washington State. With the population boom of the Gold Rush came the construction of towns and cities. Lime, made from processing limestone in wood-fired kilns, was high in demand and soon attracted the attention of Henry Cowell. In the early 1850s Albion Jordan and Isaac Davis seized the opportunity to replace the lime shipped from the East with limestone they would quarry and process in kilns locally. They found that Santa Cruz had almost unlimited deposits of high-quality limestone, plentiful wood to fuel the k
