The hotels are first-class in their equipment, the principal ones being the Arlington and the Potter. The new railway station of the Southern Pacific has been built close by the Potter, and the city grows close about it. The hotel grounds are elaborately laid out, running down to the long boulevard that fringes the stretch of perfect ocean beach. Close by is a well-equipped bath-house, with the ocean itself as an annex for more ambitious swimmers. The population of Santa Barbara and suburbs is made up very largely of people world and climate-weary, driven by stress of storm or cold from more rigorous climes. Here, upon these foothills, surrounded by Nature’s lavish bounty, they have built their homes, prepared to face their future in climatic comfort. The city’s chief attraction is Mission Santa Barbara. The church is of dressed stone and adobe, with massive walls heavily buttressed. The towers yet shelter the chime of bells, and the famous garden with its fountain, so often pictured, still fills the air with fragrance. Buildings have been carefully preserved, and form to-day the most interesting and imposing of all the California missions. The average annual winter temperature here is fifty-four degrees; the summer, sixty-five. Seldom does the temperature rise above eighty degrees or go below forty, but there’s a tonic of new life in the air, even though it has no month so cold as April at Atlantic City, nor any month so warm as New York’s June. Here Stewart Edward White, the man who wrote “The Mountains,” that stirring epic of Out-of-Doors, has his year-around home. To seaward from Santa Barbara can be seen the Channel islands, wondrous isles for fishermen and tourists. The marvelous caves running in from the sea, the seal, the Indian relics, the plants and trees, are all of strange interest. The run up the coast from Santa Barbara to Surf, and nearly all the way to San Luis Obispo, is, to him who loves the sea, a never-ending source of delight.
AT MISSION SANTA BARBARA (ESTABLISHED 1782) THE BEST PRESERVED OF THE CALIFORNIA MISSIONS
THE BELFRY OF MISSION SANTA BARBARA—THE BELLS HERE WERE SENT FROM SPAIN A CENTURY AGO
At Elwood, one passes the pioneer olive farm of Mr. Ellwood Cooper, who came here from Boston over a quarter century ago, when olive oil, oil pickles and kindred industries were almost unknown in this country as commercial enterprises.
All this region, the rolling hills to the east and the high plateau that runs far out on the Point Concepcion peninsula, once formed the domain of the native Californians, many of them grandees of old Spain. Like lords of the Middle Ages these land-holders held large possessions under grant from the king, ranging their stock over vast ranches of from fifty thousand to one hundred thousand acres. Of such was El Cojo rancho around Point Concepcion; the Santa Margarita, El Sur, Piedra Blanca, and a hundred others. These ranches are being cut up very rapidly to satisfy the demands of increasing population and of appreciative home-seekers. To these old families California to-day is indebted for many musical names—Arguello, Castro, Estudillo, Pacheco, Vallejo, Peralta, Alvarado, and many others are here, the lingering of early-day nomenclature amid the present made-over maps.
THE CHAPEL DOOR AT SANTA BARBARA
Beyond Point Concepcion, to the east are two of California’s most fertile valleys, the Lompoc and the Santa Ynez, fruitful, progressive, ideal locations for the farmer and fruit-raiser. Here, too, are located, two of the most interesting of California’s missions, La Purisima Concepcion and Santa Ynez. La Purisima mission is reached from Lompoc by way of Surf, and Santa Ynez from Los Olivos, by way of San Luis Obispo, or from Gaviota, by a picturesque highway, leading over the mountains, through the Gaviota pass, and close by the wildly beautiful cañon and falls of Najoqui.