Brief History of the C.W. Lawrence
Forward

Walking along the sand dunes south of San Francisco, as you look seaward, you are aware of the brisk Pacific winds that blow here year round. Your footprints last but a short time along the broad sandy beach as the wind erases your tracks. Facing north, toward the Golden Gate there is not a sign of the drama that occurred here late in 1851. It was here, at this quiet lonely place the Revenue Cutter C.W. Lawrence ran aground during a stormy November night. The crew, fortunately survived, but the Lawrence was judged by her captain to be unsalvageable. The crew removed what they could lift and transported their loads to the Presidio of San Francisco. After the wreck some of the crew remained in the Revenue Service others left for other lives. We know little, as the records are few.

Winter storms and heavy waves took their toll on the abandoned ship and within a few years the sands swallowed the Lawrence. Her memory lived on for a time in the minds of her former crew. They surely would have told their grandchildren about their perilous journey around Cape Horn on the way to California, about their exciting role in the Gold Rush and most of all about the wreck of the Lawrence.

As years passed, the stories may have survived in the oral histories of their families, but by the beginning of the Twentieth Century the Revenue Cutter C.W. Lawrence had been lost to history as so many other ships before.

There were however, a few records that still existed scattered in libraries and dusty archives newspaper articles, letters, official Custom's correspondence and most importantly the salvaged ship's log book. All these clues, if bought together could reconstruct the lost story of the Lawrence.

In 1982, one-hundred and thirty-one years later the Nautical Heritage Society, a nonprofit educational organization in Dana Point announced a project to build a sail-training vessel to operate for students in California's waters. Staff of the library at the United States Coast Guard Academy in New London Connecticut heard about the project and recalled seeing the log of the Lawrence in the Academy archives, also remembered were plans of a sister vessel to the Lawrence. They contacted the Society and offered to make the log and plans available at the same time making the case that a Revenue Cutter would make an ideal sail training vessel.

The response of the Society's project group to this material was enthusiastic and immediate. The C.W. Lawrence would live again in spirit as the Revenue Cutter Californian.

The keel of the Californian was laid on the Fourth of July, 1983 at Spanish Landing in San Diego and she was launched May 28th, 1984. Not only did the Lawrence once again have a visual presence on the California coast but, bit by bit, many of those long forgotten records began to be discovered. U.S. Customs historians, the U.S. Coast Guard, National Park Service staff as well as the historians at the Nautical Heritage Society, all contributed to this publication, "The Rediscovery of the Revenue Cutter C.W. Lawrence".

Nautical Heritage Society