Sign the Petition
Sign the petition to save the Old Ellwood Gas Station from destruction by decay. Click Here.
The Guppies
If you lived in Goleta in the late 60’s and early 70’s, you may remember seeing these almost comical looking aircraft flying around, but do you know they served a very serious purpose and helped man land on the moon? They were called Guppies, and their story is quite interesting. It […]
Goleta’s Whaling Station
Next time you’re at Goleta Beach, look towards UCSB and notice the dark rock formation at the base of the bluffs. This lovely location once was the scene of blood and carnage, all in the name of commerce. A shore whaling station was located here for about twenty years starting […]
Attack on Ellwood
At 7 PM on Feb. 23, 1942, Goleta residents were settling in to listen to President Franklin Roosevelt’s Fireside Chat on the radio. The Japanese had just attacked Pearl Harbor two and a half months earlier and tensions were high for folks living on the coast. Meanwhile, a 365 foot long Japanese […]
Kate Bell’s Cactus
If you ever walk from Haskells Beach towards Santa Barbara, you probably have noticed the hillside below Sandpiper golf course has a large, unruly patch of cactus growing on it. We’ve always seen it there, but never really thought much about it. We figured the oil companies planted it to […]
Old Town
A funny thing happened. I got a phone call from Jay Allen saying he had an old photo of Goleta he wanted to give me. I was honored and said heck yes, I’d love to see it. The next day, I get an email from Rob Evans. He too had […]
Tar
If you spend any time at all on the beaches of Goleta, you know what tar is. Some days it’s plentiful other days, there isn’t any. Surprisingly, a lot of people don’t understand why it’s there. Lots of folks assume it’s due to the big oil rigs out in the channel, […]
Goleta Earthquake 1978
August 13, 1978. A sunny Sunday afternoon in the Goleta Valley. Somewhere underneath the Santa Barbara Channel, the earth shifted abruptly, causing a magnitude 5.2 earthquake. The initial rupture started on an offshore fault, south of the city of Santa Barbara, at a depth of about 5.5 miles. The earthquake […]
Naples
Most folks know there’s a stretch of the Gaviota Coast that’s referred to as Naples. But do they know how it got this name? It was first called Naples all the way back in 1887, by a wealthy world traveler named John H. Williams and his wife Alice. They had a […]
Mescaltitlan Island
When you’re driving out to Campus Point, you may not even notice this obscure little hill. But before World War II, this lump of dirt was a sizeable island and in ancient times it had a huge, thriving Chumash village on it. The purple line shows the area that was […]
Who’s Ellwood?
Most Goleta folks know of an area called Ellwood. It’s used in conversation and directions, it even shows up on maps, but do you know why is it called that? According to this map, there’s an Ellwood Oil field, an Ellwood Canyon, and Ellwood sits proudly at 86 feet above […]
Bishop Ranch
When passing through the heart of Goleta on the 101, you can’t help but notice a large open space on the mountain side of the freeway, between Los Carneros and Storke. This is referred to by locals as Bishop Ranch. Over the past few years, this beautiful piece of land has […]