Vertigo

One-hundred and fifty miles south of San Francisco, Partington Ridge, in the western Santa Lucia Mountains of California, sits 1,600-feet almost directly above the Pacific Ocean, ten miles south of the Big Sur Valley and just north of Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park.

The old trail up to Partington Ridge went “straight up the mountainside.” It was so precipitous some people experienced vertigo or acrophobia ascending the narrow, nearly vertical path.

Dr. Jaime de Angulo made his first visit to Partington Ridge in 1915. “I must confess,” he remembered, “I got dizzy and had to get off my horse and lead him…”[1]

Partington Ridge is named for John and Laura Partington, the first Anglo homesteaders who settled there in 1874.

The Liberty Island Light

Laura Stone Harmon (later Partington) was born in 1840, in the seaside hamlet of East Machais, Maine, 30 miles from the Canadian border and 3,500 miles from Big Sur.[2]

On a small island at the mouth of Machais Bay stood the Libby Island Light, which guided ships safely in and out of the port, and its constancy was a reassuring presence in inclement weather.

East Machais was then a small community of fisherman, agrarians, and lumbermen. Laura’s father, Hiriam Hill Harmon, was a farmer who had plenty of farmhands. Laura was the eighth of her mother’s 13 surviving children.[3]

In late 1848, shortly before Laura’s ninth birthday, the Bangor Daily Whig and Courier began printing stories about the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill. The California Gold Rush captivated the minds of a generation of young Americans who dreaded the life of hard labor that their parents had endured.

Laura’s 17-year-old brother Leonard Spaulding Harmon was among them.

By the spring of 1849, the local newspapers were full of accounts of prospectors who’d struck it rich in the Golden State. One evening after supper, Leonard startled his parents with the news that he was leaving for California.

As the months and years went by, Leonard sent letters home to his folks, postmarked in faraway San Francisco and filled with descriptions of the wonders of California. His mother would read them aloud to the family. They made a lasting impression on his little sister Laura.

She dreamed of California.

In May of 1860, at the age of 20, Laura Harmon married a Machais housepainter named Benjamin Franklin “Frank” Longfellow, a distant cousin of the famous American poet—and perhaps a distant relative of Laura’s as well; her great aunt Rebecca was a Longfellow.[4]

The following year Laura gave birth to Frank’s child a few months before the Civil War began[5]. Frank joined the Union Army, Company C, 6th Maine Infantry. He was wounded in the April 1862 Siege of Yorktown and died of his injuries. He was 20 years old.[6]

To escape the grief of her husband’s death, Laura focused her attention on her child, her one remaining connection to Frank. But the baby soon sickened and died.

Laura was 23 years old. She’d buried her husband and her baby in rapid succession. The nation was now at war. In mourning and consumed with loneliness, she spent more and more time dreaming of California.

One evening, she wrote a letter to her brother Leonard in San Francisco, informing him of her intention to visit the Golden State.

Going to the West

Travel during the Civil War was a particularly precarious undertaking. But Laura Harmon was undaunted, packing her things, selling all her furniture, and heading west in the summer of 1863. Her parents were dumbfounded.

Before the transcontinental railroad opened in 1869, there were only four ways to get from Maine to San Francisco. Each necessitated months of strenuous travel.

The first involved an unbelievably long and bumpy stagecoach ride. The second entailed a five or six-month journey in a spring wagon. The third involved a 15,000-mile, eight-month ocean voyage around Cape Horn, through the 40-foot waves of Drake’s Passage, between the southernmost tip of the South American continent and the South Shetland Islands of Antarctica – still regarded as one of the most dangerous maritime passages on the planet.

Laura Harmon chose the fourth option, sailing from New England to the east coast of Panama, where she boarded a train across the isthmus to the west coast. There, she waited for the arrival of a steamship bound for San Francisco.[7]

Laura met John James Partington in San Francisco. He was nearly ten years her senior. Born in Buffalo New York in 1831, his parents were immigrants from England.

Like so many teenagers in his generation, John Partington followed the Gold Rush west, sailing around the horn and landing in San Francisco in 1850.[8] Having “seen the elephant,” Partington found employment overseeing the drilling of exploratory oil wells in the Santa Cruz Mountains, fifty miles south of San Francisco.

In March 1864, after a brief courtship, Laura and John were married. They settled in the seaside community of Santa Cruz, at the north end of Monterey Bay, 70 miles south of San Francisco. By 1873, they had five children.[9]

Laura had lived her entire life in Downeast Maine where, from December through April, the temperature never rose above 38ºF. The mild California climate enchanted her. It never snowed or froze in Santa Cruz. It was 60ºF, even on New Year’s Day.

She never looked back.

Where the Mountains Hold Back the Sea

Finding no oil in the Santa Cruz Mountains, John Partington decided to reconnoiter the steep and rugged Santa Lucia Mountains. He heard stories about the huge stands of timber and tanoak in the Big Sur country south of Monterey.

In post-Civil War America, there were few places in the lower 48 as isolated, uninhabited, and as timber rich as Big Sur.

Travelling on horseback over miles of sinuous trails, through shadowy canyons of ferns and redwood trees, and over steep ridges thousands of feet above the sea, Partington was intrigued.

He quickly recognized the economic possibilities before him.

There were thousands of acres old growth Douglas fir and redwood trees, many more than 300 feet tall and some nearly 25 feet in diameter at the base. Partington did the math on the back of an envelope: a single one of those ancient redwood would yield half a million board feet of lumber.[10]

Plentiful stands of tanoak graced the sunny slopes, the bark of which was then in great demand as an astringent used in the manufacture of ink, dyes, and fish nets, and in the tanning of leather goods.

In the vertiginous Santa Lucia Mountains of Big Sur, John Partington encountered three of the earliest Yankee bachelor homesteaders, James Dorsey Anderson, Phil Dolan, and Thomas Benton Slate. Eager to bring more neighbors and commerce into the remote territory, they offered to help Partington if he ever decided to make the move to Big Sur.

The 1862 federal Homestead Act accelerated westward migration by granting 160 acres (a quarter-mile square) of “unappropriated public lands” to anyone who could gain clear title to it, solely by their own physical effort and the payment of a filing fee of about $26. The homesteader had five years to work the land and improve it and build a house in order to acquire the deed to the land.

But many a would-be homesteader found that five years of roughing it at primitive campsite was more than they (or their wives and children) could endure. As one old-time sodbuster put it, “Why, I’ve got a little bet with the Government—they’re bettin’ me that I can’t live here for five years, and I’m bettin’ them that I can!”

Partington returned to Santa Cruz captivated by the economic possibilities in the Santa Lucia Mountains. One quiet evening after the children were to sleep, John and Laura discussed homesteading in the Big Sur country. Laura was genuinely intrigued by the notion of owning 160 choice acres high above the blue Pacific, with enough standing timber to ensure their fortunes, as well as those of their children. She wondered what their life would be like living so far from town, growing and canning all her own food, raising livestock, and homeschooling her kids, miles from the nearest neighbors.

In for a penny and in for a pound, Laura began making preparations for the journey. She even bought a new sewing machine made by the Howe Sewing Machine Company in New York. She ordered bolts of cloth to make clothes for the family at their new homestead in the Santa Lucia Mountains.

In the autumn of 1873, John Partington wrote letters to Slate, Dolan, and Anderson, in care of General Delivery at the post office in Monterey, telling them the family’s intended date of arrival in Monterey the following spring.

The Coast Trail

John and Laura Partington and their five children left Santa Cruz on a foggy morning in the spring of 1874. They traveled 45 miles south to Monterey. True to their word, Slate, Dolan, and Anderson met them with a 15-mule pack train.[11] But there were then no roads into the Big Sur country. At this time, the inaccessible and mostly uninhabited Big Sur coast was only serviced by a steamship that came once a year.

In 1934, when she was nearly 70, John and Laura Partington’s eldest daughter Millie (Mrs. Percy H. Dolley) recalled, “Beyond Monterey there was a wagon road, which ended about 10 miles south and then became a trail at the Waters Ranch, later known as San Remo. From there was a rough narrow trail.”[12]

Consequently, any object too large or heavy to lash onto the back of a mule had to be delivered by boat when, the following spring, their larger possessions and furniture would be delivered by the Goodall, Nelson, and Perkins steamship company.

But all of their tools, bedding, luggage, clothing, cookware, and groceries, including Laura’s new sewing machine, were carefully secured to the backs of the mules with ropes and leather straps.[13]

The Partington’s destination was high on a nearly vertical mountainside in the Ventana wilderness, 1,000 feet above the Pacific Ocean, ten miles south of the Big Sur Valley, below the steep mountaintop that would forever after be known as Partington Ridge.

It was 40 miles south of Monterey, as the crow flies, which was more like 60 or 70 miles on the narrow and twisting mountain trails.[14]

The children were five in number: Millie was then nine years old, Freddy was six, May was four, Olive was two, and John Jr. was still a babe in arms.[15]

The trail was treacherous. They had to keep an eye out for grizzly bears and mountain lions. They travelled along ridgetops in the blazing sunlight and down dusty switchbacks meandering through shadowless canyons of dark, lush redwood groves. Fording the stream at the bottom off the canyon, they’d stop to water the mules before beginning the arduous ascent up the other side.

At one point, the trail traversed the edge of a high cliff. One of their mules lost its footing and went over the precipice, dragging three other mules, as well as thirty-three-year-old Tom Slate over the edge and several hundred feet down the canyon. One of the mules was killed in the fall.

Tom Slate broke his leg and sustained serious cuts and bruises. He was in severe pain. One can only image their difficulty of retrieving him from the bottom of that nearly vertical jackknife canyon. They brought him to the home of Captain Volney Cushing in nearby Palo Colorado Canyon, where he spent the next few months recuperating.[16] But many of the Partington’s belongings, including Laura’s new sewing machine, tumbled hundreds of feet down the cliff face never to be retrieved.

Only a handful of items were rescued from the canyon where the mules went over the precipice, including a teak tabletop that remained in the family for more than 100 years.

Three days later, the family arrived at their new homestead below Partington Ridge.

The Wreck of the Steamer Ventura

Roughing it in their primitive campsite, all through the winter rains, the Partington family talked about how, in the spring, their furniture and remaining possessions would be delivered by steamship.

The shipping firm Goodall, Nelson & Perkins of San Francisco operated a steamship line transporting freight and passengers up and down the California coast. The 725-ton steamer Ventura was the fastest ship in their fleet; she could do 13 knots (about 15 miles per hour).

On Tuesday, April 20, 1875, the Ventura set sail from San Francisco with 225 passengers and 500 tons of freight, including all of the Partington’s worldly goods. At the helm of the Ventura stood a 48-year-old Englishman by the name of Captain George John Fake. Although Captain Fake was a veteran mariner who’d sailed the route between Monterey and San Francisco for years, this was his first command of a vessel bound from Monterey to Southern California.

The Ventura’s first stop was Point Sur, to deliver the Partington’s belongings, as well as cargo bound for Rancho El Sur. Thereafter vessel was scheduled to arrive in San Pedro harbor, south of Los Angeles, on the morning of Thursday, April 22, 1875.[17]

Twenty-five miles south of Monterey, at the end of a peninsula headland that protrudes far out into the Pacific Ocean, sits a huge volcanic rock formation known as Point Sur. Although it’s connected to the mainland by a strip of beach, it’s so big, it’s easily (and frequently) mistaken for an island. Ships sailing along the coast change course and go several miles out to sea to avoid the many hazardous submerged rocks that surround Point Sur. The Esselen Indian precontact village of Kakontaruk was close to Point Sur, and there were a few Native families still living there.

John Partington and his team of mules made the 30-mile trek up the winding coast trail to Point Sur to meet the steamer on the appointed day. For many hours he waited. Shortly after sunset he stood on the bluff with a few neighbors in rapt anticipation. But the light of the full moon turned the dense fog opaque and visibility was limited to thirty feet.[18]

Around 9:00 pm, everyone aboard the Ventura heard a terrible screeching sound—the crunching of steel and wood as the vessel struck a submerged cluster of rocks just about 200 yards from shore, north of Point Sur. With her bottom stove in, she was grounded in 12 feet of water with her head to the sea.[19]

Some considered the absence of a lighthouse on the coast a contributing factor in this disaster. However, the Sacramento Daily Union informed its readers that Captain Fake was “indulging too freely in liquor.”[20]

The Partington family lost many important tools and treasures when the mules went over the bluff the previous year. All of their remaining possessions were on board the Ventura however most of the ship’s cargo wasn’t insured.

Every Tuesday at 4:00 pm, the steamer Santa Cruz departed the Washington Street wharf in Santa Cruz at the north end of Monterey Bay and headed south, bound for Moss Landing and Monterey.

Captain Herman Daggett Leland, a 45-year-old seasoned mariner from Bar Harbor, Maine, was at the helm.

Arriving at the wharf in Monterey, Leland was immediately dispatched to rescue passengers from the wreck of the Ventura. Experience had taught him to exercise extreme caution when navigating the jagged Point Sur coastline, notorious for the many rocks hidden beneath the surface of the ocean.

The Saturday, April 24, 1875, Sacramento Daily Union reported that the steamer Santa Cruz sighted the wreck of the Ventura, “at dawn this morning about a mile to the northward … firmly grounded on the rocks with about fourteen feet of water in the hold.” Little wreckage had washed ashore, “but a heavy western wind was prevailing, which, if it continues until flood tide will completely demolish the vessel against the rocks.”[21]

Ultimately, all 255 passengers on board the Ventura were rowed ashore, leaving the wrecked vessel to break up on the rocks. Remarkably, not a life was lost.[22]

On April 26, the Sacramento Bee noted, “The wrecked steamer Ventura has become almost a total loss. Cargo and portions of the wreck are floating away. …Most of the Ventura’s passengers have arrived at San Diego. They complain loudly of want of management on the part of the officers.”[23]

A few days later, Goodall, Nelson & Perkins, owners of the Ventura, received a letter from their agent in Monterey, “urgently requesting assistance to save wreckage from the Ventura at Point Sur.”

According to the agent, “country people, for 50 miles around, have gathered at the scene of the wreck, and are taking possession of everything they can lay their hands on, forbidding him to touch anything unless he pays them salvage.” He claimed to be “powerless to prevent them, and without a prompt and strong assistance he will be unable to save anything. The steamer has gone to pieces.”[24]

A number of Big Sur neighbors furnished their homes with salvaged cargo from the wreck, including a shipment of fine imported linen and a fleet of wagons. Old-timers remembered that the women divided up the linens and several ranchers assembled the salvaged wagons, some of which were still in use in the 1970s.[25]

The May 13, 1875, issue of the Los Angeles Daily Evening Herald reported: “The steamer Fidelity left San Francisco this morning for the wreck of the Ventura, at Point Sur. She will attempt to recover the Ventura’s boilers whole. Failing in this she will blow them up and bring away pieces. She will also bring back the wrecking party.”[26]

Captain Fake’s license was revoked after an inquest. They found he should have been 15-20 miles from shore when passing Point Sur.[27] A few years later, he retired and bought a bucolic farm in California’s great San Joaquin Valley.[28]

The Partington’s possessions in the hold of the Ventura were lost at sea and never recovered.

“It was a heartbreaking experience,” John and Laura Partington’s eldest daughter Millicent wrote in 1934, sixty years after the wreck of the Ventura. “But my parents were sturdy pioneers and mother often said that this misfortune was nothing to what she had experienced in the past.”[29]

Seaview Ranch

The Partington’s claim was ideally situated in a perfect little spot below Partington Ridge where they were protected from the weather by the surrounding mountains. A cold, clear spring nearby provided good water and the soil was dark and fertile. By 1880, they had a working homestead they called Seaview Ranch.

In 1934, at the age of 69, John and Laura’s eldest daughter Millie wrote in her unpublished memoir, “In the meantime, they [my parents and their neighbors] we’re not idle. There was much to be done in hewing and sawing the lumber to build a seven-room house, cellar, school house, dairy, and barns. They also set out an orchard, vineyard, and berry plants. Mother had about an acre in garden and section. My father stocked the ranges with cattle and hogs. There were many [mountain] lions and bears in the early days and they made a great havoc at times among the stock.”[30]

John and Laura’s granddaughter Mildred Millington (Millie’s daughter) told historian John Woolfenden in 1967, “I remember my grandmother, Laura Partington, as a fiery little woman, about as big as a minute, who was busy all the time. However during early years on the ranch she was not well, and I know that my mother did a lot of the hard work. Of course, all the children shared in the work, but in later years they looked back on those days as being the most happy and carefree they had ever known.

“The Partington home was way up over the ridge and on the other side, in a little valley with a wonderful climate. I recall my grandmother saying that anything which was stuck into the soil would grow. There were grapes and flowers everywhere, even though there had been nothing but bare ground when the family first arrived.”

John and Laura homeschooled their kids in the small schoolhouse John built near their house. In 1934, when she was nearly 70 years old, Laura’s eldest daughter, Millie wrote, “My mother’s thoughts had been to bring up her children, two boys and three girls, away from all the sins of the world and to keep her children always with her, especially the girls. We were never allowed to read periodicals until they were carefully looked over. Our books were all chosen for us. We had a private school and the best teachers. But as I look back over the years, it seems almost like a paradise.”

John Partington ordered a government survey of the property to prove up his claim, which extended north from the ridge into the richly forested Torre Canyon. And he hired a man named Bert Stevens as a live-in ranch hand.

Bert Stevens and John Partington blazed a path down the steep mountainside through the brush to the seashore. There was a natural, protected cove at the bottom of the trail, with water deep enough to afford safe berthing. But there wasn’t any beach, and it was surrounded on three sides by extremely tall rock formations that descended into the water with extreme verticality, making the sheltered cove completely inaccessible except by boat.

It took them three years of hard manual labor using shovels, picks, and wheelbarrows, but the two men succeeded in carving a 200-foot tunnel straight through the rock hillside into what is now called Partington Cove. It was just wide enough to allow the passage of a horse drawn lumber wagon. At the cove-end of the tunnel, they constructed a ship’s landing of huge timbers secured with iron bolts embedded deep in the granite bedrock.[31] The tunnel and landing made it possible for Partington’s loggers to deliver lumber and tanbark to ships that anchored in the shelter of Partington Cove.

The Partington’s granddaughter Mildred Millington remembered, “[T]here were very few neighbors—the original Pfeiffer family, the Posts. But when a party was given at any of the ranches, the Partington children, all five of them, would ride their horses there, dance all night and ride back the next morning.

“When my grandmother started to cook a meal, she never knew how many persons might show up for it, but visitors could be seen coming as they crossed the Ridge and there was plenty of time to put on extra plates.

“Everything to eat was raised on the place with the exception of staples such as flour and sugar which were brought in barrels by ship from Monterey.

“Grandmother Partington lived to 92, outliving her husband by many years… His sons carried on the lumber and tanbark business for many years but finally sold the property.”[32]

After John Partington’s death in 1888, Laura moved in with her eldest daughter Millie on Hawthorne Street in New Monterey, a few blocks from the Monterey Bay. Bert Stevens continued living at Seaview Ranch until the land was finally sold.[33]

The original Partington homestead burned down. In 1967 the Partington’s granddaughter Mildred Millington drove up to Seaview Ranch on Partington Ridge to “see the old place” accompanied by an elderly relative.

“She [the relative] was tremendously disappointed when she couldn’t find a single landmark. There was no sign of any of the old buildings… For many years, it had been possible to see the old landing at the foot of Partington Canyon… but the canyon trees and shrubs had grown so thick that this was [now] impossible… The old cave was still there but there was no sign of the landing. Its remnants must have been washed away by the sea.”[34]

In the late nineteenth century, Seaview Ranch was known to neighbors as “the garden spot of the section.”[35]But the Partington’s weren’t the first people to make their home there. They lived on top of an ancient Esselen Indian midden where the soil was dark and rich from centuries of hearth fires.

The Family Heirloom

Harry Dick Ross was a wood sculptor, professional  and raconteur who worked as a bartender at Big Sur’s Nepenthe Restaurant. His wife, Lillian “Shanagolden” Bos Ross, was a New Yorker magazine “Talk of the Town” columnist. After World War Two they moved to Partington Ridge, up the hill from John and Laura Partington’s original homestead. They’d heard the story of the Partington’s first trip to the ridge in 1874 when the three mules went over the cliff with all their stuff, including Laura’s new sewing machine.[36]

One day, while hiking the hills near his home on Partington Ridge, Harry Dick found Laura’s smashed and rusted sewing machine in a dump heap. Someone must have retrieved it from where it had tumbled down the canyon, decades earlier.[37]

The broken sewing machine now resides in the home of one of John and Laura Partington’s great-great-grandchildren.[38]

 

NOTES:

[1] Jaime de Angulo, The Lariat and Other Writings (Counterpoint, 2010), 28.

[2] Laura Stone Harmon (1840-1933), https://www.ancestry.com/family-tree/person/tree/43763974/person/12701769895/facts.

[3] Hiriam Hill Harmon (1802-1873), https://www.ancestry.com/family-tree/person/tree/43763974/person/26665498248/facts.

[4] 1860 United States Federal Census for Laura Longfellow, https://www.ancestry.com/imageviewer/collections/7667/images/4231315_00641?pId=44572266.

[5] Augusta Fink, The Past and the Presence (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1972), 208.

[6] Laura S Partington in the U.S., Civil War and Later Wars Index to Remarried Widow Pension Applications, 1848-1934, https://www.ancestry.com/discoveryui-content/view/21169:2402.

[7] John Woolfenden, Big Sur: A Battle for the Wilderness 1869-1985, (Pacific Grove: Boxwood Press, 1981), 40.

[8] Ibid.

[9] John James Partington (1831-1888), https://www.ancestry.com/family-tree/person/tree/10935943/person/24023316067/facts.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Betty Hoag McGlynn, “Partington Landing: of Poets, Artists, and Ships in the Big Sur Country,” Noticias

Del Puerto de Monterey, A Quarterly Bulletin of Historic Monterey Issued by The Monterey History and Art Association, Vol. XXIX, No. 3, September 1988, 8, https://www.mayohayeslibrary.org/uploads/2/5/3/9/25392173/vol_29_num_3_september_1994.pdf.

[12] John Woolfenden, Big Sur: A Battle for the Wilderness 1869-1985, (Pacific Grove: Boxwood Press, 1981), 40.

[13] Ibid.

[14] J. Smeaton Chase, California Coast Trails (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1913), Chapter XV.

[15] Laura Partington in the 1870 United States Federal Census, https://www.ancestry.com/discoveryui-content/view/584246:7163.

[16] John Woolfenden, Big Sur: A Battle for the Wilderness 1869-1985, (Pacific Grove: Boxwood Press, 1981), 39.

[17] Wrecked­–Steamer Ventura a Total Loss,” San Francisco Examiner, April 22, 1975, https://www.newspapers.com/image/458110439/.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Ibid.

[20] “The Ventura Wreck, Sacramento Daily Union, April 24, 1875, https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=SDU18750424.2.5.

[21] “The Ventura Wreck, Sacramento Daily Union, April 24, 1875, https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=SDU18750424.2.5.

[22] “The Steamer Ventura Wrecked Off Monterey – 225 Passengers Saved,” Sacramento Daily Union, April 22, 1875, https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=SDU18750422.2.3.5&e.

[23] “Pacific Coast Dispatches,” Sacramento Bee, April 26, 1875, https://www.newspapers.com/image/623348557/?terms=%22the%20ventura%22&match=1.

[24] “Land Pirates Defiant,” Los Angeles Herald, May 1, 1875, https://www.newspapers.com/image/42355321/.

[25] Elaine W. Fitzpatrick-Grimm, “Ghosts of Yesteryear Haunt Computerized Point Sur,” Big Sur Gazette, No. 2, Vol. 9, September 1979, http://www.bigsurgazette.com/issues/014_September_1979.pdf.

[26] “Last of the Ventura,” Los Angeles Herald, May 13, 1875, https://www.newspapers.com/image/607577765/.

[27] “Delayed Dispatches,” Daily Colonist (British Columbia), May 14, 1875, https://archive.org/details/dailycolonist18750514uvic/page/n1/mode/2up?q=%22Captain+fake%22.

[28] George J Fahe in the 1900 United States Federal Census, https://www.ancestry.com/discoveryui-content/view/322157:7602.

[29] John Woolfenden, Big Sur: A Battle for the Wilderness 1869-1985, (Pacific Grove: Boxwood Press, 1981), 39.

[30] Ibid., 41.

[31] Ibid.

[32] John Woolfenden, Big Sur: A Battle for the Wilderness 1869-1985, (Pacific Grove: Boxwood Press, 1981), 41-42.

[33] Betty Hoag McGlynn, “Partington Landing: of Poets, Artists, and Ships in the Big Sur Country,” Noticias

Del Puerto de Monterey, A Quarterly Bulletin of Historic Monterey Issued by The Monterey History and Art Association, Vol. XXIX, No. 3, September 1988, 9, https://www.mayohayeslibrary.org/uploads/2/5/3/9/25392173/vol_29_num_3_september_1994.pdf.

[34] John Woolfenden, Big Sur: A Battle for the Wilderness 1869-1985, (Pacific Grove: Boxwood Press, 1981), 42-43.

[35] Ibid.

[36] Magnus Toren, Facebook Messenger to author, February 6, 2022.

[37] John Woolfenden, Big Sur: A Battle for the Wilderness 1869-1985, (Pacific Grove: Boxwood Press, 1981), 43.

[38] Partington Family member, email to author, March 2, 2023.