The Fishing Village They Burned
In the 1890s, a thriving Chinese fishing community worked Santa Barbara's coast. The city erased them — first by law, then by fire, then by forgetting.
The Camp at the Foot of the Wharf
Where Stearns Wharf meets Cabrillo Boulevard today — where tourists park their cars and walk past seafood restaurants and bait shops — there was, from roughly 1870 to 1893, a Chinese fishing village. The camp consisted of wooden shacks, drying racks for fish and abalone, and small boats pulled up on the beach. At its peak, somewhere between 20 and 30 Chinese fishermen and their families lived and worked there, harvesting abalone, shrimp, and rockfish from the kelp beds of the Santa Barbara Channel.
They were good at it. The Chinese fishermen had refined techniques for drying abalone and shrimp that allowed the catch to be shipped to San Francisco’s Chinatown and, from there, exported to China. Dried abalone from the Santa Barbara coast was a luxury commodity in Guangdong Province. The operation was efficient, profitable, and — to Santa Barbara’s white civic establishment — increasingly intolerable.
The Legal Architecture of Removal
California’s hostility toward Chinese immigrants was structural, not incidental. The Foreign Miners’ Tax of 1850 targeted Chinese gold miners specifically. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the first federal law to ban immigration by nationality. But the mechanisms used against Chinese fishing communities along the California coast were more surgical than blanket exclusion. They targeted the work itself.
In 1880, the California legislature passed a law prohibiting the use of “Chinese nets” — a category defined broadly enough to encompass most of the gear the Chinese fishermen actually used. The law didn’t mention Chinese people by name. It didn’t need to. It described their equipment with sufficient precision to function as a racial ban while maintaining the legal fiction of neutrality.
Santa Barbara added local pressure. The city council passed ordinances restricting where fish could be dried, where nets could be hung, and where temporary structures could be erected on the waterfront. Each ordinance was framed as a matter of public health or aesthetic improvement. Each one made the Chinese fishing camp less viable.
The fishermen stayed anyway. The abalone beds were too productive, the dried-fish trade too profitable, and the alternatives — railroad labor, laundry work, domestic service — too constrained to abandon a functioning enterprise without a fight.
The Fire
On the night of May 26, 1893, the Chinese fishing village at the foot of Stearns Wharf burned. The fire consumed every structure in the camp. The cause was never officially determined. The Santa Barbara Daily Press reported it with the brevity reserved for events that surprised no one. No charges were filed. No investigation followed.
The fishermen were not permitted to rebuild.
This pattern — legal harassment followed by fire followed by prohibition on rebuilding — was not unique to Santa Barbara. Chinese fishing camps at Point Lobos, Monterey, and San Diego were destroyed by similar sequences of regulation, arson (proven or suspected), and administrative refusal. The consistency of the pattern across independent municipal governments suggests either coordination or, more likely, a shared understanding of how these things were supposed to go.
What They Built
The Chinese fishermen of Santa Barbara were not subsistence workers clinging to the margins. They operated within a sophisticated commercial network that spanned the Pacific. Abalone meat was cleaned, sliced thin, and sun-dried on wooden racks. The dried product was packed in burlap and shipped by rail to San Francisco, where brokers consolidated it with product from other coastal camps before loading it onto trans-Pacific vessels. In Guangdong, dried California abalone sold as a delicacy. The shells — iridescent, durable, and large — were sold separately to button manufacturers and inlay craftsmen.
The shrimp operation was similarly organized. Chinese fishermen used bag nets deployed from small junks — flat-bottomed boats adapted from South China designs — to harvest the dense shrimp populations in the Channel’s kelp forests. The catch was boiled in iron pots on the beach, dried on raised platforms, and then winnowed to separate the meat from the shells. The shells were ground and sold as fertilizer. The dried shrimp meat went to San Francisco.
This was not a primitive fishing camp. It was a vertically integrated export business operating across 7,000 miles of ocean, and it functioned efficiently enough to threaten the economic interests of white fishermen who lacked the processing infrastructure, the trade networks, and the market access that the Chinese community had built.
The Erasure
After the fire, the waterfront was “improved.” The city extended Cabrillo Boulevard, landscaped the beachfront, and developed the area around Stearns Wharf for tourism. The Chinese community that remained in Santa Barbara — laundry workers, cooks, domestic servants — was concentrated in a small area along Canon Perdido Street, the remnant of what had been a modest Chinatown since the 1860s. That community, too, shrank through attrition, exclusion, and the slow mathematics of a population barred from replenishment by federal law.
By the time Pearl Chase and the Architectural Board of Review began reshaping Santa Barbara’s identity in the late 1920s, the Chinese fishing village was already gone from living memory for most white residents. It did not appear in the “Spanish heritage” narrative that Chase and her allies constructed. The Chumash were included, if only as romantic predecessors. The Spanish and Mexican periods were elevated to foundational myth. The Chinese chapter — a quarter-century of productive, organized, economically significant activity on the city’s most visible piece of real estate — was simply omitted.
There is no historical marker at the foot of Stearns Wharf. No plaque on Cabrillo Boulevard. No mention in the walking-tour brochures that guide tourists through the red-tile district. The Santa Barbara Historical Museum has some documentation — photographs, a few artifacts — but you have to know to ask for it.
The Abalone
Here is one detail that captures the whole story in miniature. The Chinese fishermen were harvesting green, pink, and black abalone from the nearshore reefs of the Santa Barbara Channel in the 1870s and 1880s. They took substantial quantities, but they were harvesting a population that had been fished by Chumash communities for thousands of years without collapse. The resource was robust.
After the Chinese fishermen were removed, white commercial fishermen took over the abalone harvest. They used hard-hat diving suits and compressed air, which allowed them to work deeper reefs and harvest faster. By the mid-20th century, commercial overharvesting had driven several abalone species to the brink. The white abalone was listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act in 2001 — the first marine invertebrate to receive that designation.
The fishermen who knew how to harvest the resource sustainably were the ones who got burned out.