By Frank Perry
As the old saying goes, “If it ain’t accurate, it ain’t history.” At least I think that’s an old saying. If it isn’t, it should be. In this era of the internet, millions of people now have the power of the “press,” reaching vast audiences with information that was never peer reviewed or fact-checked by editors. In some cases, the errors are innocent mistakes, but in other cases they are purposeful and even malicious.
After spending several decades researching and writing about Santa Cruz area history (and making my share of unintentional errors), I grew curious about the different ways that factual errors can creep into otherwise carefully-researched books and articles. Perhaps if there was a list of how mistakes originate, future researchers could be on the lookout for them and take evasive action.
Excluding willful disinformation, mistakes in written histories fall into two categories: source errors and researcher errors. Let’s first look at some examples that originated at the source, primarily using examples connected to the lime industry.
Anyone who sets out to do historical research, including family genealogies, quickly discovers that historical records are fountains of inconsistency. Another old saying—and I know this really is an old saying—is that “to err is human.” (I looked it up, and it comes from a poem, An Essay on Criticism, written in 1711 by Alexander Pope.)
One way to minimize source errors is to use primary sources. Examples are original documents such as government records, first person accounts, or news stories written at the time of the event. While not perfect, these are likely to be more accurate than something written many years later. People’s memories begin to fail, and “facts” get changed as the story is retold.
Even historical records that should be accurate, such as census records, deeds, and death certificates, can have errors—sometimes lots of them.
Take for example, Santa Cruz pioneer David Gharky, who built a wharf at the foot of Main Street in 1858. This wharf was used for many years by Felton area lime companies (competitors of Davis and Cowell) to ship barrels of lime to San Francisco. A study done in 2011 found seven different spellings for his last name. In fact, the 1865 deed from sale of the wharf to the California Powder Works, spelled his name three ways within that one document: Gharkey, Gharky, and Girkey! Other spellings were Gherky, Ghearkey, Ghirky, and Yerkey. This is an extreme case, but variations in the spelling of people’s names were common in the 1800s. In situations like this, the historian has several options. One is to pick one and cite the source. Better is to also note that the spelling varied. Even better—especially if the person is essential to the story—is to explain the problem in more detail, weigh the various sources, and try to determine which one is most likely correct. In the case of Gharky, the researchers discovered that Gharky himself signed it that way.
The problem of getting the correct spelling of personal names often arrises when consulting census records. It’s not hard to envision how mistakes can happen. The census taker visits each house and records what he thinks he heard. In some cases, the informant may have been illiterate, so could not provide a spelling. Or perhaps the enumerator simply heard the name incorrectly.
Today, census records have been digitized and made more easily searchable. Unfortunately, errors are occasionally introduced during the digitization process. An “e” can be mistaken for an “i,” and “n” for a “u,” and so forth. Sometimes an uncommon name is mistaken for a more common name. For example, Asa Hull, who in 1860 made lime for a competing Santa Cruz area lime company, is sometimes listed as Asa Hall.
Census records should be proof of where someone was living at the time of the census, but even this is not always so. I was quite interested to discover that at the time of the 1900 census, Ernest Cowell and his wife, Alice, were living in Santa Cruz. It suggests he was taking a very active role in the manufacturing side of the business here at that time. Unfortunately, I later discovered Ernest and Alice Cowell were—according to the 1900 census—also living in Berkeley. This does not mean that they lied. Perhaps one of them or one of their house staff in Berkeley or Santa Cruz spoke to the census taker, listing the people who lived there, not realizing that someone at their other house was also listing them.
Census takers also recorded the relationship of family members, occupation, education, place of birth, and age. Of course, some people don’t like to tell how old they are, even under the threat of violating federal law. A good example was Bertha Coope, who inherited part of the Santa Cruz Lime Company in Davenport, and later owned a substantial interest in the Davenport cement plant. It was the late Alverda Orlando (page 2) who tipped me off on Coope’s age discrepancies in census records.
According to the California Death Index, Bertha Billing Coope was born May 12, 1860 in New York and died October 16, 1965 in Santa Clara County at age 105. In the New York State Census for 1875, she was age 15, which jives with the 1860 birth year. At the time of the 1900 census, she was living in Santa Cruz with her husband, John F. Coope, and was age 35 (five years younger than she actually was). It listed her birthdate as May, 1865 instead of 1860. By 1910, she was 40 (10 years younger than her actual age). In 1920 she was again age 40 (now 20 years younger than she was). By 1930 she was 63 (only 7 years younger). In 1940 she was 79 (about the right age). In 1950 (the most recent census record available) she was 89. Only by tracking her through time and examining other sources, can the historian home in on her correct year of birth. Accuracy takes diligence.
Old newspapers have been a particularly valuable source of information on the history of the Cowell Lime Works. They tell us about the lime-making process, the people who made the lime, changes in ownership, changes in lime-making technology, advances in transportation, and many other details that can be found nowhere else. Nineteenth century newspaper reporters, however, like those of today, were under pressure to meet publishing deadlines—sometimes at the cost of accuracy.
The article on Sarah Cowell in the last Lime Kiln Chronicles, for example, noted that the Associated Press obituary in the Los Angeles Times said she was Henry Cowell’s youngest daughter instead of second youngest. It was published the day after Sarah’s accidental death, so was clearly written hurriedly.
Again, it is important to seek out multiple sources, find follow-up stories, and be skeptical of any “facts” that seem odd or out of place.
Maps can be another wonderful source of information. They can show roads, creeks, lakes, land ownership, and even individual buildings. But like other sources, they can also contain errors. Sometimes mapmakers would show things that were planned but not yet built. This was probably so that the maps would not become obsolete a short time after being published.
A wonderful example of this is on a 1960s road map of Santa Cruz that shows the new UCSC campus. It shows the lower quarry as the site of a proposed football stadium. The maker of the map no doubt got that from a conceptual map of the campus done in the early 1960s. A naive researcher, unfamiliar with the campus, might assume this was eventually built. UCSC, however, has never had a football team nor stadium.
Readers love to see interesting old photos, but pictures can have pitfalls, too. In researching the Lime Kiln Legacies book, my co-authors and I were pleased to discover a photograph of the steamer Santa Cruz, which hauled lime between Santa Cruz and San Francisco in the 1880s. At least that is what the photo was labeled in the collection of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. We knew of no other photographs of this ship, so it was a great find. It was not until several years after the book was published that I stumbled upon a picture book on the maritime history of San Francisco Bay. As I studied the photos, I began to worry. Our photo looked a lot more like a ship called the Bonita than the Santa Cruz, both of which were pictured. The Bonita was a slightly younger ship which also regularly hauled Santa Cruz lime to San Francisco. I showed the picture to my co-author, Allan Molho (a ship expert), and he agreed that, alas, the picture we used in the book was the Bonita. I informed the museum staff, who said they would correct the caption on the back of the original. I now know to be more critical of hand-written identifications on the backs of old photographs. (By the way, if you have a copy of that book, please turn to page 166 and pencil in the correct name.)
The last type of material under the category of source errors is advertising material. It has a particularly bad reputation when it comes to historical accuracy and in most cases should be avoided. In the early 1900s, for example, a row of old buildings in the redwood grove at what is now Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park was labeled on souvenir postcards as the first “pony express” office in California. Of course, this is nonsense. The pony express never came anywhere near Santa Cruz.
The second main category of errors are those made unintentionally by the researcher.
Sometimes the problem is carelessness: especially the failure to double check dates and the spelling of names. It also pays to proofread quotations. This is why footnotes in scholarly papers not only benefit future researchers, but help the writer. They are a good excuse to go back and double check each source.
We live in a world very different from that of the nineteenth century, and sometimes words were used differently from the way they are used today. In 1860 the Santa Cruz Sentinel wrote that the firm of Davis and Jordan built a “railroad” to haul limerock from the quarry to their kiln. From other sources, we know that this was actually a gravity-powered tramway. Ore cars were filled with rock and traveled downhill to the kiln. The empty cars were pulled back up by horses or mules. Santa Cruz’s horse-drawn streetcars were also called railroads, but were not what we would call railroads today.
In 1873 an angry mob departed Watsonville for Monterey so as to lynch former lime manufacturer Matthew Tarpey. He was accused of murdering a Watsonville woman. The paper said the mob went by “car.” What? They didn’t have automobiles back in those days! Of course, they were not using that word as we would use it today. The newspaper was referring to railroad cars.
Sometimes errors arise because of incorrect assumptions. In the 1973 book, Santa Cruz County: Parade of the Past, the author tells how “Mrs. Cowell, the mother, did not live at the family home—apparently she preferred the Fairmont Hotel where she lived for years on an allowance of $1,000 per month.” The author tells how Mrs. Cowell wanted more money, and “the children raised a ruckus, according to one newspaper story.” The problem is that the author apparently based this on one old newspaper clipping. Had she looked at the multiple stories written at the time (and there were plenty), she would have discovered that the “Mrs. Cowell” was actually Alice Cowell, the widow of Ernest Cowell, not the mother of Ernest, Harry, and their sisters, and wife of Henry. Mrs. Harriet E. Cowell died in 1900, three years before her husband.
Another tip: do not be overly swayed by one source, even if highly credible. I learned this while researching the lives of the lime-workers. For many years, the main source on this topic was the oral history that Elizabeth Spedding Calciano of the UCSC library conducted with George Cardiff in 1963-1964. Cardiff worked for S. H. Cowell and in later years lived in the ranch house near the kilns (now known as Cardiff House). Cardiff spoke from personal experience, and his oral history is an incredibly valuable resource.
On the subject of the workers, however, he mostly talked about “Old Joe.” This is not surprising. Cardiff knew Joe, who was certainly a colorful character. According to Cardiff, Joe worked on the Cowell Ranch for fifty years. “He’d never go to town; he’d rather stay here.” He took care of the yard and chickens, but did not know how to read and write. Cardiff’s granddaughter tried to teach him, apparently without success. “He was an awfully good man,” Cardiff explained, but Joe was also “the dirtiest looking thing you ever saw. He never took a bath or changed his shirt unless he had to.” Cardiff said that Joe seldom spent any of his money and when he died he left an estate of around $80,000 to his brothers and sisters. “They all liked him when he died,” he said.
By the time Cardiff was living on the ranch, however, there were only a few workers left, and lime making had ceased. He did not know the place in its heyday. Based on old newspaper accounts, census records, interviews with some of the descendants of the lime workers, Joe was not typical. Many of the workers were literate, and some were married with children. Cowell would hire Italian and Portuguese immigrants “fresh off the boat,” when a lot of other employers would not. The job of making lime was hard work, but for these recent immigrants, it was the first step towards achieving a better life than they had back in Europe. Many left the lime business after a few years, getting higher paying jobs elsewhere or starting their own businesses.
In summary, if you deeply care about Santa Cruz County history and want the most accurate information, read with a critical eye. Does the author provide sources for the information? Is the story line internally consistent? We all make mistakes, but if you notice a history book or article with lots of careless ones, it may not be very reliable.
The best historical research is like an iceberg. It involves a large amount of meticulous digging, thereby enabling the author gain a proper perspective on a topic. Perhaps only one tenth of the information collected will make its way into the book or article—the tip of the iceberg—but it will be factual. After all, if it ain’t accurate, it ain’t history.
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This was one of the stories included in the Spring/Summer 2025 issue of our Lime Kiln Chronicles newsletter. To see the entire issue, please go here.