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Diablo,
California
Small and
secluded, Diablo is tucked away in the hills between Danville and
Blackhawk. The community consists of about 1,200 residents residing in
this "old world" setting for estate homes.. The most
prominent landmark in Diablo is the Diablo Country Club and golf course,
pictured here.
The “Big Four” of
railroad fame owned the 10,000 acres in 1876, and successive owners cared
for the property with fondness and money. Sometime after 1889 the owners
named the property “Oakwood Park Stock Farm.”
Several owners
occupied the farm before 1913, but that year Robert N. Burgess, a young
farm manager turned real estate speculator and developer, headed a group
which bought it for $150,000. The young man, Danville-raised, had a
grandiose idea for the property. He would tempt the rich among the
hundreds of thousands coming to see the Panama-Pacific International
Exposition that would open in San Francisco in eighteen months. Burgess bought the land abutting the northeasterly
border of his Oakwood Park Stock Farm all the way to the top of Mount
Diablo.
He needed better
transportation to get his prospects out from Oakland and San Francisco. At
his urging, friends on the board of the new Oakland, Antioch and Eastern
Railway extended its line to Diablo in 1914. He persuaded another friend,
the president of the Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Company, to string
his company’s line to the clubhouse he had made of the Billiard Hall and
to the homesites he was offering for sale. The Pacific Gas and Electric
Company also extended its 4,000-volt line the three miles from Danville.
Burgess made an inn of the
old mansion. He offered memberships in his Mount Diablo Park Club at sixty
dollars each, all of it refunded if the member bought a lot. He charged
annual dues of twenty dollars. His building sites sold for $600 each and
by 1916, fourteen homes were being lived in. That year the United States
Post Office granted his request for a post office, making official the
name he had chosen, “Diablo.”
The golf course opened in
1916 with nine holes; a year later members and guests played the full
eighteen.
With restrictions put on
the public when the United States declared war on Germany in 1917, the
Burgess company’s ability to pay its bills ended. It filed a petition of
involuntary bankruptcy in 1919.
Over the next twenty years
a succession of owners acquired the land. First the Mount Diablo Country
Club operated the built-up area. The State of California took over the
largest part, establishing the Mount Diablo State Park in April 1931.
Lawrence Curtola stepped on
to the scene in 1948 and bought out the two owners. He operated the Diablo
Country Club in the traditional style of such clubs until 1961. In the
effort to stay out of the red he attracted large outside groups to hold
their balls, dances, company parties, and regular luncheons at his
facility. Horsemen’s groups rented stable space from him and rode the
nearby trails of the state park.
In 1961, the club members
bought the club back from Curtola for $440,000 with funds raised from a
mortgage. In 1974, they paid off this indebtedness. Still unincorporated,
the community is self-sufficient. It has grown from a fashionable summer
resort to an enclave of suburban homes showing permanence, their gardens
matured by years of loving care, and their family club reeking with
tradition.
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