The hatchery at the meeting of Prairie Creek and Lost Man Creek: water ideal for hatching fish, a rare flat spot among steep forested hills, and redwood from the forest for building. NPS.
Prairie Creek Fish Hatchery, in Redwood National and State Parks, is one of only three historic hatcheries left in California. It also has historical integrity: enough of its original features survive to represent its era. A Cultural Landscape Report (CLR) — the Park Service's study of how a place was used and changed, with advice on preserving it — now guides how the park uses and protects it.
California's hatcheries, 1871 to today
Between 1871 and 1946, California built 150 hatcheries; Prairie Creek, from the 1930s, is one of the three that remain.
| Before World War II | After 1947 | |
|---|---|---|
| Purpose | stocking streams for sport fishing, in response to overfishing | mitigation for dam construction |
| Paid for by | mostly fishing licenses and fees | federal and state agencies |
| Scale | small, low-tech | large, highly mechanized, using huge amounts of electricity |
| Fish released | small | raised larger before release |
| Worker housing | needed at remote sites — once trucks replaced railroads, hatcheries could be far from rail lines | less |
Hatcheries still help offset habitat damage from logging, mining and dams.
The Hatchery Building and Superintendent's House from Highway 101, 1937. National Archives and Records Administration.
How the hatchery worked
Built in 1936, the hatchery had:
- pipelines, a diversion dam and reservoir bringing water from Lost Man Creek;
- a hatchery building with troughs and tanks;
- outdoor ponds for growing fish;
- two (possibly three) houses, a dorm, water tanks, a garage or shop and sidewalks.
The buildings were plain and practical, built by local carpenters from local redwood. Flowers, shrubs and lawn made it livable for the families who lived there.
The raised earthen pond north of the Hatchery Building, with its walkway; the rock filter house behind (undated). NPS / Laidlaw Photo Collection.
Workers raised silver and king salmon and cutthroat, rainbow and steelhead trout:
- Collecting eggs: salmon swimming up the creek were trapped by the dam, dipped out and checked. From ripe fish, eggs were taken from the females and fertilized from the males in buckets. Spent carcasses were left for bears; fresh ones were eaten by the staff or given away.
- Hatching: the fertilized eggs went into perforated baskets in the building's troughs, turned by hand until they hatched.
- Growing: when the fry became fingerlings, they moved to outdoor tanks.
- Release: big enough, the salmon were scooped into milk cans with aerators, trucked out, and released into streams in Humboldt and Del Norte counties. By 1949, a special tank truck carried them.
Because the hatchery was not modified after 1946, it is a rare example of the era of intensive hand labor, before mechanization.
Closing, reopening, closing
- After World War II: heavy logging degraded Lost Man Creek, slowing production. The state judged the facility outdated and closed it in 1956.
- 1958–1992: Humboldt County leased and updated it, and ran it until 1992.
- Some features were changed and others added, but the landscape still shows the character of the hand-labor hatchery.
Life at the hatchery
Even at its peak, the hatchery was small. Being remote, it housed its workers' families too — five to eight workers and as many as 15 dependents.
Steven Paul Smedley was superintendent from 1943 to 1949. His son Glen, a teenager there, later described the place:
- The entrance from the Redwood Highway led to a circular drive between the hatchery building and the three houses, with a bed of dahlias in the middle, a stand of second-growth redwoods, and a flagpole with a crossbar for two flags.
- South of the houses: a clothesline and a garden.
- Rhododendrons thrived — fertilized with salmon carcasses. Cecil Brunner roses planted by the Smedleys covered a huge redwood stump by the shop, after two big redwoods were cut down.
- A smokehouse, built by the superintendent across the creek, sent smoke to the houses through an underground pipe.
- Who lived where: the Smedleys (two adults, four children) in the westernmost house; the Laidlaws, with five children, in the middle one; a young couple in the third; a single man in the cabin across the creek.
Residents in the yard between the Superintendent's and Assistant Superintendent's houses, 1943. NPS / Smedley Photo Collection.
The original entry view from Highway 101, around 1943. NPS / Smedley Photo Collection.
A changing landscape
As the hatchery turned toward education, the county added water features. Around 1962, the flower bed in the courtyard became a rectangular "dedication pond" showing visitors the kinds of fish raised there.
The same entry view in 1996, recorded for the National Register. The third house (rear right) was gone, and the flower bed had become the dedication pond with junipers. NPS.
The entry view in 2019, recorded for the Cultural Landscape Report. By then blackberries had overgrown the pond. NPS / University of Oregon.
- Still there: the site's overall layout and the buildings' original style.
- Gone or changed: one building is lost and others altered; most of the water system is gone — the original dam was removed in 1989, and much of the pipeline collapsed in a flood.
- Plants: few originals survive, but the lawns, rhododendrons and the places of other plantings still outline the historic landscape.
Part of a national park
Redwood National Park was created in 1968, bringing more tourists. The hatchery drew thousands of visitors and became a regular school field trip in Humboldt County, with staff explaining its history and work.
The concrete fish ladder from Lost Man Creek, built around 1973 so returning salmon could reach new concrete tanks. NPS.
- 1998: some years after it closed, ownership passed from the California Department of Fish and Game to the National Park Service.
- 2001: the unused buildings were "mothballed" to preserve them.
- 2011: NPS preservationists and partners such as HistoriCorps stabilized the rotting hatchery building, painting it and replacing damaged material, and completed a Cultural Landscape Inventory.
The Cultural Landscape Report
Preservationists say the best way to save a place is to find a use for it — but modern standards for safety, accessibility and electricity can require changes. Guiding documents such as CLRs and Historic Structure Reports say what matters historically. A CLR documents a landscape's history and features, traces change over time, and recommends how to preserve it.
Documenting the hatchery began soon after the Park Service acquired it:
| Year | Step |
|---|---|
| 2000 | nominated to the National Register of Historic Places |
| 2005 | Historic American Engineering Record documentation |
| 2011 | Cultural Landscape Inventory |
| 2020 | Cultural Landscape Report, prepared with Robert Melnick of the University of Oregon Cultural Landscape Research Group |
Each step uncovered details that sped the next. The CLR records the historic landscape and its 2020 condition, and plans future treatment. Its comparison shows the site's overall layout is much as it was in 1943, despite changes.
What it asks for: beyond restoring buildings, attention to small details — a sidewalk, a fence — to the wider view, the arrangement of buildings and open space, and to the sense of a shared community space where life and work met. It can also suggest new uses, found through research and staff and community workshops. Groups connected to the place are encouraged to lead in carrying the recommendations out.
The garage and the Assistant Superintendent's House porch, 2019 — plain buildings in ordinary rustic siding, linked by walkways partly from the historic period. NPS / University of Oregon.
New uses
- Training center: when funding for a training center came up, the documentation already in place let the park act quickly. Following the CLR, Redwood National and State Parks is rehabilitating the buildings as meeting and training spaces for the park, tribal partners and park rangers nationwide, with the Yurok Tribe and the NPS Historic Preservation Training Center.
- More study: the CLR's success led to a Historic Structures Report on the Hatchery Building and Garage.
- Maybe next: work with the U.S. Air Force disaster-response team to make improvements while training in historically sensitive work.
Through research, documentation and preservation, the hatchery's landscape can keep telling the early history of fish hatcheries while its buildings return to use for living and working.
On the Hatchery Building's loading dock, around 1943. NPS / Smedley Photo Collection.
Sources
Based on "Prairie Creek Fish Hatchery Cultural Landscape," National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. Its sources include a 1996 interview with Glen Smedley and the park's 2011 Cultural Landscape Inventory. The superintendent is "Steven" and "Stephen" in the source; its "Cecil Bruner" roses are given as Cecil Brunner. The report's cover and its University of Oregon site plans are not reproduced.
In these publicationsRedwood National and State Parks
Licence: CC0 1.0 (public domain) · Adapted from www.nps.gov
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