A Brief History of Capitola

The Capitola Historical Museum acknowledges that it stands upon the ancestral homeland of the Aptos, Casjataca (Kai-ya-stah-ka) and Uypi peoples

A Brief History of Capitola 

by Carolyn Swift - former Director, Capitola Historical Museum

Frederick Hihn, a native of Germany who came to California during the Gold Rush, obtained the land that is now Capitola Village in 1865 from the heirs of rancho grantee Martina Castro.  A few years later, Hihn leased the parcel near the wharf at Soquel Landing to S. A. Hall, a former contractor who planned to settle down as a farmer.  In 1874, his daughter, Lulu Hall Wolbach, suggested that he set up a tent camp along the beach for the summer.  It may have been Lulu, a former Soquel teacher, who named the resort "Capitola" after the heroine in a series of popular novels.  Camp Capitola welcomed its first guests in the summer of 1874. 

The Hall family set up the tents along a dirt path every summer for five years, until increases in rent forced them to give up the lease.  A series of other tenants continued the camp and began to make improvements.  By the time the Santa Cruz-Watsonville Railroad was broad gauged in 1883, Capitola had become the destination of thousands of summer visitors who wanted to escape the sweltering heat of the state's interior.  Hihn himself took over direction of the resort's progress in 1884, when he created a subdivision map and began to sell lots for summer homes.  Visitors stayed at the big hotel or in cabins and tents along the beach, and enjoyed themselves on land and sea. 

Following Hihn's death in 1913, Capitola was inherited by his daughter, Katherine Henderson, who sold it shortly after World War I to Henry Allen Rispin of San Francisco.  Rispin's dream was to renovate and modernize Capitola so that it would be appealing to vacationers from the San Francisco Bay Area.  He spent a fortune on his schemes for "Capitola-by-the-Sea," until he went bankrupt just before the start of the Great Depression in 1929. 

Lulu and S. A. Hall, Frederick Hihn, and Henry Rispin were the early builders and protectors of a small seaside camp that may today be California's oldest continuing resort.  Capitola became an incorporated city in 1949 and is one of four incorporated cities in Santa Cruz County.