From whalers to Winston Churchill, SLO County store has seen a lot of history
If we could turn back time, one fascinating place to observe would be San Simeon. You might catch a glimpse of Winston Churchill or cows swimming ashore.
The Native Americans living in what is now San Simeon had rich resources, including shellfish, fish, game and seeds and acorns.
The hook-shaped San Simeon Point offered shelter to boats from the prevailing northwest winds.
It is the last significant anchorage along the San Luis Obispo County Coast for ships sailing north to Monterey. That made it an early destination for commercial shipping and trading with the ranchos.
Whalers established a base of operations there by 1852, sending out 30-foot boats to kill gray whales as they migrated on the coast. Oil was rendered from the whales’ blubber in large iron trypots.
Meanwhile, Russian fur traders brought in Aleut hunters to kill sea otters for their pelts.
In 1865, wealthy mining magnate and U.S. Sen. George Hearst bought nearly 50,000 acres of the Piedra Blanca Rancho, which extended from San Simeon Bay to Ragged Point. He was also involved in building one of the first wharves in the county.
According to shipping records, items shipped in 1869 included butter, wool, whale oil, Chinese produce, eggs and beans. Later manifests would include flasks of mercury from nearby mines.
Hearst’s son, publishing scion William Randolph Hearst, enjoyed the area so much that he built one of his estates on a hill overlooking San Simeon. La Cuesta Encantada — the Enchanted Hill in English — became the site of what is colloquially known as Hearst Castle.
The younger Hearst is the subject of a two-part PBS American Experience biography “Citizen Hearst.“
Although there were proposals to develop that spectacular stretch of coastline over the decades, a landmark deal was inked in 2005 to conserve the 82,000-acre Hearst Ranch .
One structure has stood as a witness to most of these historic developments: Sebastian’s General Store, which was established in 1852. The current building was constructed out of two separate structures in the 1860s; it’s now being remodeled after a two-year closure.
Longtime store owner Pete Sebastian shared his memories of San Simeon and the Hearsts with reporter Brooks Townes for a story published on Aug. 20, 1986.
Sebastian died of a heart attack in February 1988, and his family’s store was bought by Hearst Corp. in 2009.
Pete Sebastian: A witness to 80 years of San Simeon history
Pete Sebastian, standing by the ranch gate and his well worn Jeep, could have been taken for a ranch hand, and that would be appropriate.
A friend to the rich and famous, a land owner, a wealthy individual, Sebastian has been a ranch hand one way or another for most of his 80 years.
In khaki pants and shirt, a fleece-lined vest and boots, Sebastian leaned against the back of his jeep and patiently awaited his visitors.
They found him gazing out across the highway to the horizon on the Pacific, a view that has been a constant in his life. He has never left for more than a few months his homeland of San Simeon and Ragged Point.
“I’m the oldest native of San Simeon,” he said with a smile. But the years have left him unbowed, wiry and clear-eyed as an athlete a quarter his age.
He will speak eloquently of current San Simeon-Big Sur politics, or remember in sharp focus the days when wooden steam schooners ferried supplies into San Simeon Cove.
The native’s father, Manuel Sebastian, left the Azores at age 12. He sailed for Boston, worked there four years in a factory and signed aboard a sailing ship bound round Cape Horn for San Francisco.
The elder Sebastian had barely hit the beach in San Francisco when he boarded a coasting schooner south, “just looking for the right place,” said his grandson.
“At that time Senator George Hearst had a race track here and my grandfather’s first job was taking care of the race horses. Later he became farm foreman.
“When William senior built the Castle, father grew all the fresh vegetables for the place.”
Manuel Sebastian homesteaded the family spread in 1888. It stretched from the ocean to way up the mountain at Ragged Point, his son said.
In 1912, he bought the store in the town of San Simeon and renamed it Sebastian’s.
“It is the oldest store still operating in the state of California,” Pete Sebastian said.
“It was first established in 1852 out on Whaler’s Point, west of the cove, and moved to its present location in 1878. My father bought it from Alvi Thorndike, who was part of an old coast family.”
The Sebastians lived upstairs, he said, in the adjacent Hotel Bayview, a 15-room establishment that served schoonermen and whalers and Hearst and Cambria visitors long before the castle on the hill was even a gleam in anyone’s eye.
In those days, the ranch belonged to George Hearst, who raised cattle on the coast, Sebastian said.
“Passengers and freight came ashore from the coasters and five or eight each time would stay at the hotel,” Sebastian said. “They could rent horses and buggies from the livery stable to get on to where they were going.”
When it came time to offload cattle from the schooners, “they would dump them overboard and let them swim ashore to the cowboys,” the native said. “Cattle can swim like hell.”
From 1919 to 1928, Pete Sebastian worked as a landscaper for the Hearst family. But from early as Sebastian can remember, the Sebastian and Hearst families were mainly friends and neighbors, he said.
“I’ve been friends of that family for 65 years,” Sebastian said. He told of running around with William Randolph Hearst Jr. — now the editor-in-chief of the Hearst newspapers — during summer and Christmas vacations, of going to a one-room school with the younger William Hearst, of raising and lowering and folding the American flag out front of the store with young Hearst.
“There are all kinds of stories about Hearst senior, about how he stole the land and so forth, but that’s not so. He was a very fair man,” said Sebastian. He let out a sigh of weariness at the idea and leaned against the Jeep’s spare tire:
“William Hearst was a very nice man. During the Depression era, Mr. Hearst sent his secretary down with a message that said ‘Tell Sebastian to name all the needy people in the area.’ Then he said, ‘Give each family $50 worth of groceries and clothes each month and send the bill to me,’ and I did.
“I sent the bills to the San Francisco Examiner office all through the Depression.”
In the early days, when the Hearst men were in their platform tents on “Camp Hill” — where the Castle is now — “Mr. Hearst thought things could be a little more comfortable, Sebastian said, so Hearst hired architect Julia Morgan.
“at first, the idea was just for a few bungalows to replace the tents with platforms which every year had to be carried up and down,” Sebastian said.
“Of course, it just mushroomed from there. Hearst and his mother were collectors of art and antiques and wanted a place to put them.
“First to be built were guest houses A, B and C,” Sebastian said.
While the Castle was taking shape, Sebastian was working in his father’s store. In 1933, he took over the business.
It would be hard to find a small general store with more notable customers, including Winston Churchill, George Bernard Shaw, Cary Grant, “any number of them.”
If he was so disposed, Sebastian could name-drop with the best of them, but that is not his style. He gave as much importance to the Chinese (immigrants) who harvested seaweed around San Simeon for export to Asia.
“In the late ‘20s and early ‘30s, where Spanish bungalows are now west of the store, that was China Town. They were all along the coast here, harvesting shellfish and seaweed.”
He remembered how they bundled seaweed into the schooners or the steam schooners which took it to San Francisco where it would be transferred aboard fast square-rigged tea clippers bound for Asia where California kelp would grace Chinese dinner tables.
Nearly everything traveled to or from San Simeon by sea until the 1930s, Sebastian said. Roads were scarce, especially along the rugged coast, and the railroad was too far inland over the mountains.
It was a two-and-a-half day ride to San Luis Obispo, Sebastian said, and a journey over the hills was not taken lightly.
For 36 years, Sebastian worked seven days a week in the store with his name on it. For 25 years, he was postmaster, notary public and registrar of voters.
A year or two ago, he sold the business to Robert Buddell, but Sebastian still owns the property and makes almost daily treks down Highway 1 to get his mail and learn the latest.
The store is nearly the same as when Churchill may have gone there for a cigar. There are the same creaking wooden floors and an eclectic assortment of wares.
On the walls are whaling harpoons and lances left at Whaler’s Point and other odds and ends left by Sebastian’s many friends.
Today, Sebastian lives with a mixture of tradition, the timeless hills and sea and the latest the 1980s has to offer.
He still hunts deer and quail every year, but there’s a satellite television dish by the house in the trees he shares with his wife Louise.
