Pescadero Creek - History

History

Pescadero is Spanish for "fishing place". In early Mexican land grants or disueños, John Gilroy stated "The Castros, I and an Indian gave it that name in 1814, being a place where we used to catch salmon." Arroyo del Pescadero appears on the disueños of the 1830s. The 1860s' Coast Survey called it the Pescador River. Spanish-speaking people founded the town of Pescadero, California in 1856.

The pre-European Pescadero watershed was occupied by the Ohlone. The Quirostes controlled the area from Bean Hollow Creek southward to Año Nuevo Creek and inland to Butano Ridge. The Oljon controlled from the lower San Gregorio Creek drainage southward to Bean Hollow Creek, including the lower Pescadero and Butano drainages. The Cotogen held the land in and around Purisima Creek. When the Portolà Expedition traveled on horseback along the immediate coast on October 24, 1769, Padre Juan Crespí wrote, "Only in the watercourses are any trees to be seen; elsewhere we saw nothing but grass, and that was burned." The Ohlone managed the land with the most effective tool they had, fire.

Farmers began building levees and drained small areas of the marsh by the late 1920s. Substantial levee building and conversion of marshlands to agriculture occurred during the 1930s, and continued through the early 1960s. The State began acquiring land in the 1960s. In the early 1960s local farmers used a dragline to remove sediment from Butano Creek channel below Pescadero Bridge for several thousand feet down stream. The sediment removed was used to build a 6,000 foot levee on the west side of Butano Creek. Other levees were built to keep salt water out of agricultural fields. California Department of Fish and Game (DFG) required the dragline practice to stop following the introduction of new fish protection laws in 1963.

The Highway One bridge was rebuilt (1989–90) with fewer supports and closer to the ocean to minimize effects on the stream and lagoon; the original bridge had been built in the early 1940s.