Los Gatos History

The Old Mill Stream

James Forbes planned to strike 'gold' on the banks of Los Gatos Creek

By Robert Aldrich

Some people take a look inside Forbes Mill Museum and say, "I didn't even know this place was here," or perhaps, "I've always wondered what this was." The one-story structure at 75 Church St. actually was built in 1881 as an annex to a working flour mill whose construction began in 1853. The mill was the first building and first business in the area. It was around the mill that the community of Los Gatos gradually grew.

James Alexander Forbes, the mill's founder, has always been a shadowy figure in the town's history, but now Los Gatos historian William A. Wulf has tracked down a good deal of information about Forbes through letters, documents and interviews with family members.

According to Wulf, who has made a serious study of history for some 45 years, many letters written by Forbes were collected by one of his descendents, the late Lutheria Cunningham. The Saratoga Historical Museum has a collection of some 200 of his letters, which Wulf has copied for his own files.

What kind of a man was James Alexander Forbes? Not the most reputable, according to Wulf. "He was a suede-shoe man," Wulf says. "He was bright, and better educated than most men in California when he first arrived. But he was basically a bad guy who ended up losing control of circumstances." Wulf discovered, for instance, that Forbes was so devious that he would write several contradictory letters on the same day. He referred to a creditor who loaned him $100,000 simply as "an old man in Guadalajara."

When he invited Jesuit priests to Santa Clara Mission to found a university where his sons could attend school, he refused to move out of the mission until they paid him $11,000. According to Wulf, the priests had to write to Rome to get the money. Later, when Forbes sold the mansion he built with that $11,000 to an order of nuns, he neglected to mention that it had a $20,000 lien on it.

Born in Inverness on Jan. 6, 1805, Forbes is correctly described as a Scotsman; he was, however, half Spanish. His father, John Alonzo Forbes, married Marta Rodriguez of Spain. Their son, James Alexander Forbes, arrived in Yerba Buena, which eventually became San Francisco, in 1831.

At the age of 12, Forbes went to live in Argentina with an uncle who owned a shipping line. Forbes, who was later educated by the Jesuits at the University of Montevideo in Uruguay, turned one of his uncle's ships into a man-of-war to fight a 1825 battle on behalf of Argentina against Brazil. During the fighting, he was nearly killed by a saber wound, and as a result wore a plate in his head for the rest of his life.

He escaped from South America aboard another of his uncle's ships. His uncle, meanwhile, had died, and the young adventurer found himself penniless.

When he arrived in California, the young Forbes worked for a time as an accountant for the sprawling Castro ranch near Richmond. But he was too restlessly ambitious to be content working for another. From his research, Wulf concludes: "Forbes was determined and headstrong. He usually went after whatever he wanted."

He relocated to the Santa Clara Valley, where he soon met and married Maria Ana Galindo, a move Wulf attributes less to romance than to the fact that his bride was a Mexican citizen, and the marriage would allow Forbes to stay in the Mexican territory of California. The bride's father, Juan Christomo Galindo, was the majordomo of the Santa Clara Mission. By this time, with only a loose hold on California, Mexico had secularized the missions and dispossessed the mission padres' vast land holdings.

In due time, James and Maria Ana raised a family of 12--three daughters and nine sons.

Forbes was given the post of British Vice-Consul for Alta California, a region from San Diego northward. For a while, he represented the British-controlled Hudson's Bay Co.

In 1846, Forbes and Padre Real, the last Franciscan priest at the Mission, joined with the Robles brothers, who were the original owners of the Santa Clara Mine, to develop the mine which later was called New Almaden Quicksilver Mine. Unfortunately for Forbes, he shared his enthusiasm for the mines with his well-to-do uncle, Alexander Forbes, who lived in Tepic, Mexico. Uncle Alexander knew a good thing when he heard it and soon arrived to take a look at New Almaden for himself. Before he knew what hit him, James had been pushed aside, and Uncle Alexander had taken control of the mines.

"This made James pretty mad," Wulf says.

In 1851, James Forbes invited Jesuit missionaries to come from Oregon to the Santa Clara Mission and start a college and a school his nine sons could attend. Once they arrived, the Jesuits told Forbes they wanted him to move out of his quarters in the mission. With the $11,000 he collected to leave, Forbes built himself a mansion behind the mission.

In 1852, with the Gold Rush in full bloom, Forbes hit upon a way to strike gold himself--without leaving the Santa Clara Valley. Gold miners ate a lot of bread, and flour was going for $50 a barrel. Although he had no experience, the booming flour business was too good for Forbes to miss out on, and he decided to build a flour mill.

After looking around the valley, he settled on a spot overlooking Los Gatos Creek, sometimes called Jones Creek for Zachariah Jones, a pioneer lumberman.

Forbes, however, ran into a series of technical problems and had gone into debt by the time the mill was operational in 1855. He had borrowed $100,000 from the "old man in Guadalajara" at a usurious 3 percent per month. As his troubles mounted, he was unable to repay even the interest. There was no use turning to Uncle Alexander; he and a partner, Eustace Barron, were being pursued by Mexican authorities. They had been shipping gold and silver from their mines in San Blas but hadn't bothered to pay Mexico any inland or export taxes.

Forbes had also borrowed $30,000 from Gustave Touchard, a San Francisco furniture dealer who had furnished Forbes' Santa Clara mansion. Meanwhile, Forbes had also purchased 2,000 acres of the huge Rancho La Rinconada de Los Gatos from Jose Hernandez. Forbes' property included all the acreage in the rancho that was east of Los Gatos Creek, approximately to where Camden Avenue is today. At the time, Forbes had little legal hold on the property, which was a Mexican land grant. By the time the state land commission approved the holding, Forbes Mill was bankrupt. Wulf adds: "According to the family of Jose Hernandez, Forbes never did pay the $8,000 he owed for the purchase. Another black mark."

A key reason for the bankruptcy was that Forbes was never able to operate the mill efficiently. He built the mill of local timbers and the rough-hewn graywacke stone that lay in and along the bed of Los Gatos Creek. Meanwhile, Forbes had ordered milling machinery from the east. It came around Cape Horn, was deposited in San Francisco and then shipped to Alviso and carried by ox-team to the creek.

Forbes had trouble getting the heavy stone-grinder machinery inside his finished mill. That, coupled with his heavy debt load, kept construction behind schedule.

When finally installed, the machinery took the wheat dumped from farmers' wagons on elevated buckets to the top, then dropped it through a series of stone-grinders that finally reduced it to flour. Two 20-foot-high water wheels were propelled by water carried in a wrought-iron flume from a dam Forbes had built a half mile to the south. But a 20-foot-high water drop was not enough to run the mill efficiently, so Forbes kept raising the water level.

Despite these difficulties, the mill was turning out "Santa Rosa Brand" flour. Unfortunately, by this time, some eight rival mills had sprung up, including one at McCarthysville, the city that later became Saratoga. And, with the Gold Rush winding down, that attractive $50 per barrel price for flour had dropped to $5 per barrel.

On May 29, 1857, the "Santa Rosa Brand Mill" and 2,000-acre Santa Rosa ranch were sold in a sheriff's bankruptcy sale.

The buyer, Gustave Touchard, paid $26,613. Touchard was not interested in running the mill, however, and several people tried unsuccessfully to run it for him. He finally sold it in 1866. He also sold off lots from the 2,000 acres for the next 30 years, making a big profit.

Wulf has found an advertisement offering the mill for sale under the name "Clifton Mill on Los Gatos Creek," apparently because Touchard did not want it associated with the bankrupt Forbes. What "Clifton" meant is unknown.

It was William H. Rogers, of Los Gatos, who bought the mill, and in 1869, Dr. William S. McMurtry, a physician, and J. W.McMillan bought a half interest. It was incorporated as the Los Gatos Manufacturing Co. and improvements made it efficient. New turbine machinery was installed and the waterhead raised to 200 feet.

The Los Gatos Manufacturing Co. produced 100 barrels a day of "Los Gatos Water Mill Flour." The Los Gatos News of Aug. 13, 1881, bragged: "While other cities and towns may boast of a larger population, for the manufacture of the finest grade of flour known to the markets of the civilized world, Los Gatos Flouring Mills stands preeminent."

When the South Pacific Coast Railroad brought its narrow-gauge tracks to Los Gatos in 1878, a spur track was run from University Avenue across Edelen and Miles avenues to the west side of the mill. Now barrels of flour could be loaded onto freight cars and conveyed to San Jose and beyond. According to Wulf, the first time freight cars were shunted to the mill, the owners couldn't wait for a locomotive to pick them up. "They hauled the cars by horses to the rise at Saratoga Avenue and coasted them down the grade to San Jose," he says.

Just before the annex, which is now Forbes Mill Museum, was attached to the mill in 1881, James Alexander Forbes died at the age of 76 on Alameda Island, with Maria Ana at his bedside. "He was apparently quite bitter about the turn his life had taken," according to Wulf.

The mill ceased to be used for making flour in 1887. It was damaged in the 1906 earthquake and was finally demolished in 1916. Over the years, the annex has been used as part of an ice-plant operation (the Ice Works was in a separate building nearby), as a PG&E substation in the 1940s and as a youth center. The annex boasts its original stone walls and interior redwood beams.

Eureka Federal Savings supported restoration of the mill annex for a museum in 1981, until the lease was passed to the town of Los Gatos on March 1, 1986. The volunteer Los Gatos Museum Association, formed in 1965, manages the town's two museums. The town budget pays for maintenance. Forbes Mill has been designated a California State Landmark and the Los Gatos Preservation Society had it placed on the federal Register of Historic Buildings.

James Alexander Forbes built more than he knew when he set out to strike it rich in flour. Before Los Gatos incorporated on Aug. 10, 1887, some 32 years after the mill was completed, Los Gatos was already a thriving community.