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| Hiram Spurling | |
| Born | 1835, Nova Scotia |
|---|---|
| Died | 1903, Briarmont |
| Family | The Spurling Family |
| Occupation | Rigger, seaman, landing boss |
Hiram Spurling learned his trade as a boy in the Nova Scotia shipyards, rigging new hulls for a coast that built wooden ships by the hundred. He sailed on coasting schooners after that and in time came round to California. The yards and the coasting trade had left him good with rigging, blocks and splices, which was what Hartwell Timber Co. needed in 1862. Its new mill stood on the bluffs, with no wharf below where a ship could tie up. Hiram built a plank chute down the face of the bluff, with an A-frame at the top and a hinged apron at the foot that his tackle raised or lowered to the deck of whatever schooner lay moored underneath. The lumber slid down it a piece at a time, with a man on the brake to slow it.
He ran the landing until he died in 1903, when his son Gus, who had worked it under him since boyhood, took it over. The work meant the chute, the tackle, the man on the brake and the schooner captains, who wanted their cargo aboard and themselves gone before the swell came up. A load dropped in the sea came out of the landing's pay, so the men under him learned to work at his speed or went elsewhere.
In 1869 he married Esther Doane in San Francisco and brought her back to a house above the harbor, where the front windows looked straight down on the landing. As long as he could haul on it, no other man worked the apron tackle. He never went back to Nova Scotia.
When the chute came down after the company sale, the iron eyebolts that had anchored his A-frame were left in the rock at the top of the bluff.