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In 1812, Mexico won its independence from Spain.
In 1833, the Mexican Act of Secularization stripped the Roman Church of its vast
land holdings in Alta California.
Governor Jose Figueroa granted 5,500 acres of Roman land to
Rafael Castro
, a member of a prominent
Californio family and a veteran of the Mexican Army. Additional grants
followed, and soon the Castro family owned much of present-day
Santa Cruz County.
In 1865, descendants of Rafael Castro sold some of their land to
Frederick Hihn, a German who had emigrated to California during the
Gold Rush. Hihn, in turn, leased part of his land to S. A. Hall
for a farm. In 1874, the Hall family pitched some tents to attract
summer vacationers. They named their venture Camp Capitola after the
heroine in a series of pulp novels and opened for business on July 4,
1874.
The venture succeeded, but the Hall family did not. For the
next decade a series of entrepreneurs managed and improved the camp
and by 1883 when the Santa Cruz-Watsonville Railroad was converted to
broad gauge, Camp Capitola was attracting thousands of summer visitors
from California's hot Central Valley. Hihn began to
actively manage the resort himself in 1883 and continued to manage it
until his death in 1913.
In 1919, Hihn's daughter sold Camp Capitola to San Franciscan
Henry Allen Rispin
who planned to transform homey Camp Capitola into Capitola-by-the-Sea,
America's answer to the Côte d'Azur.
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