Santa Cruz County Place Name: Folger Canyon (May 3, 2026)
According to Jerome Alexander, that canyon shown as unnamed on Watsonville East Quadrangle (USGS:17) as trending from the summit of the Santa Cruz Mountains in a southwesterly direction immediately to the west of and parallel to Casserly Ridge is known locally as Folger Canyon. Origin undetermined; however, Ed Martin in his 1873 Directory of the Town of Watsonville mentions “Peter Folger [who ran a skating rink at that time] has a snug little farm well improved of 200 acres on the former Rancho Salsipuedes” and the map listed below shows the lands encompassing the gulch were owned in 1908 by Clara Folger.
Recently, I talked a little about the prospective town of Folger (one of many prospective real estate development efforts that never fully materialized), named after the San Francisco coffee/business magnate. Santa Cruz also had a local Folger family (no idea if there was a relationship) after which a local canyon in the Watsonville area is informally named. The persistence of informal names like this, long after the original rationale is no longer relevant, fascinates me (see previous entry on Rob Roy Junction for another example). There’s a whole thread of un/barely documented history in these names, passed down from one generation to the next.
What actually caught my attention about this entry was the aside about Peter Folger running a local “skating rink”. The idea of late Victorian/early Edwardian Americans zooming around a roller skating rink is irresistibly fascinating to think about for me, especially being a chid of the 1980s when roller skating was a big thing and rollerblades were invented. Apparently, roller skating was a huge thing in the late 1800s after roller skates became affordable due to mass production. See this article from the London Science Museum, Wonderful Things: Roller Skates, 1880, for more information on that. The Santa Cruz Public Library has an old article from the Register-Pajaronian, Skating a long time Watsonville tradition, talking about the history of roller skating rinks in Watsonville dating back to before 1900.
Tags: columns, place-names, bratton-online, writing