"Cap was a bit of a Don Quixote. The stirring incidents of the last few months had spoiled her; the monotony of the last few weeks had bored her; and now she had just rode out in quest of adventures. The old Hidden House, with its mysterious traditions, its gloomy surroundings and its haunted reputation, had always possessed a powerful attraction for one of Cap's adventurous spirit. To seek and gaze upon the somber house, of which, and of whose inmates, such terrible stories had been told or hinted, had always been a secret desire and purpose of Capitola."
-----A scene from Capitola's Peril , a novel by E.D.E.N. Southworth, in which Capitola is drawn to a setting where, unbeknownst to the heroine, her own mother is held captive.

Capitola, a fabled character from Emma Southworth's popular novels of the 1850s, was a spirited girl of French descent, known eventually by her full name of Capitola Le Noir. Although she appeared in tales that were favorites of young readers of the last half of the century, few knew her as inspiration for a tiny village in California.
The little campground named for Capitola is today the oldest resort along the coast. Throughout 1999, Capitola will celebrate several anniversaries: 140 years of its oldest landmark, the wharf; 125 years since its founding as a resort; and 50 years since incorporation as a city.

In many ways, Capitola has remained true to its namesake. Author Southworth was among the best writers of sentimental American novels of the 1850s, and when she created the legendary Capitola, the heroine had something new over the traditional image of damsels in distress. Capitola, treated unjustly under the custody of male guardians, was hardly helpless. She did not need a masculine hero to rescue her. Instead, she had the boldness of character to save herself.

Few historians have said much in the past to explain how this fictional character of Capitola happened to give her name to the camp along the banks of the Soquel River. Only a small number has known that it was really another woman, a Soquel school teacher, who first made the suggestion.

Capitola's story really begins with the Gold Rush in 1849, the year that Frederick Augustus Hihn left Germany for California. Within a decade, this determined entrepreneur had secured title to the beach at Soquel Landing and contracted for construction of its first wharf. The agreement for the wharf was signed by builder Sedgwick Lynch in late November, 1847, and it is assumed the pier was fully completed within the next few years. The land known as Capitola Village was then known as the far more modest "wharf warehouse lot," and was graced by a single storehouse.

On the way to securing his stature as Santa Cruz County's first millionaire, Hihn concentrated next on construction of a Santa Cruz County railroad. As an industrial baron, he paid little attention to Soquel Landing beyond the wharf and the nearby property he leased out for a sugar beet mill. Little happened until 1869, when Hihn signed a rental agreement with Samuel A. Hall.

A direct descendant of Oliver Cromwell, S.A. Hall has established himself in California as a hotel proprietor and carpenter. Locally he was the respected builder of Soquel's finest landmark, the Congregational Church. His daughter Lulu, previously the resident teacher at a state asylum for the blind and deaf in San Francisco, had joined her parents here and became a local public and Sunday school teacher. It was Lulu's suggestion to her father that encouraged him to carve out a piece of his unnamed beachfront for summer camping. Visitors began coming in 1870 and the number increased every year until Hall decided to advertise it in San Jose newspapers as "Camp Capitola" on the Fourth of July, 1874.
Hihn, who is given credit for the founding of Capitola, actually did little as overseer until 1882, when the first subdivision maps were drawn. By then, both Hall and his successor, R .D. Berry, were forced out by Hihn's increased rent. Once personally in charge, Hihn spared little to guarantee the camp's success, and did so until his death in 1913.

Camp Capitola was purchased by wealthy speculator H. Allen Rispin in 1919. The era of the Twenties and the heyday of Capitola by-the-Sea was a time of high hopes and even greater disappointments. The resort's reputation suffered through Prohibition and endured the disgrace of Rispin's bankruptcy months before the start of the Great Depression. Eventually Capitola was literally raised from the ashes of downtown fires by a handful of local residents who came to the rescue.

In January, 1949, Capitola became the third city in Santa Cruz County, and in the last fifty years has come into its own as a confident and independent municipality.

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