History
The first inhabitants in the Santa Cruz area were small groups of Native Americans. The Ohlone were a semi-nomadic tribe that hunted game and marine mammals and supplemented their diets with shellfish, fish, edible roots and shoots, acorns, nuts, and seeds. The Ohlone raised medicinal plants and herbs. They made tools from locally found stones and shells. Their crafts included shellfish jewelry and baskets.
The displacement of the natives began with the Spanish colonization of the Americas when missionaries and soldiers brought the Ohlone into the missions. The population of Native Americans was greatly reduced by European diseases to which they had no resistance. Governance of the area was transferred from Spain to Mexico after the Mexican War of Independence. The citizens of Mexico used what is now Natural Bridges State Beach as pasture land for their cattle. California became part of the United States after the Mexican-American War.
The area in and around the park later supported a dairy farm, a brussels sprouts farm, hotel, housing for mill workers, a South Seas movie set and a failed housing development. The land was purchased by the State of California in 1933 and construction of the state beach facilities began in 1954. The land surrounding the park was largely wild and undeveloped until the 1970s. The park is now surrounded by beach development and commercial properties.
Read more about this topic: Natural Bridges State Beach
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“Properly speaking, history is nothing but the crimes and misfortunes of the human race.”
—Pierre Bayle (1647–1706)
“The principal office of history I take to be this: to prevent virtuous actions from being forgotten, and that evil words and deeds should fear an infamous reputation with posterity.”
—Tacitus (c. 55–c. 120)
“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)