Ocean Beach’s Earliest Shoreline Resident
By Debbie L. Sklar
Just south of today’s permanently closed Ocean Beach Pier, where the cliffs drop sharply into sand and surf, a small shack once clung to the edge of the coastline. In the late 1800s, this stretch of San Diego shoreline looked nothing like the developed beach community it would later become. It was open coast— windswept, loosely governed, and still taking shape.
Ocean Beach history is full of figures who appear in fragments rather than full biographies: a photograph, a passing reference in an archive, or a story repeated just often enough to survive. One of the earliest documented residents tied to this shoreline was Captain Abraham Thomas.
Thomas is associated with a small shack near what is now the Ocean Beach Pier during the late 19th century, when the area was still largely undeveloped and defined more by sand paths than formal streets or infrastructure.
A caption on an early photographic negative identifies a nearby structure as the “Old Cliff House, Ocean Beach,” noting it burned in 1895 — an early reminder of how temporary many of these coastal buildings were.
According to San Diego coastal planning records and historic context documentation, Thomas’s shack sat at the base of the cliffs and functioned as both a residence and an informal stop for early travelers moving along the shoreline.
Local historian Jonnie Wilson described Thomas as a transitional figure in early Ocean Beach — neither fully settler nor businessman in the modern sense, but something in between. She said the shack was located “just south of where the larger structure now rests on the sands below the bluff,” and called Thomas “practically the only permanent resident at the beach” during those early years.
In Wilson’s account, Thomas’s operation reflected a makeshift coastal economy that existed before Ocean Beach had formal services. He “catered to travelers by watering their horses, 25 cents a head, serving home-cooked meals, and renting bathing suits and fishing boats,” she said, describing a shoreline where basic needs were met through individual enterprise rather than established businesses.
That informality occasionally put Thomas at odds with authorities. Wilson also noted he “got in trouble a couple of times for serving alcohol without having a license,” a reminder of how loosely regulated early coastal life could be.
Photographs referenced in Wilson’s recollections place Thomas’s shack near a larger beachfront hotel that once stood in the same general area. In one image, she described, “the shack … looks like it’s got two windows and a door,” positioned within a small cluster of early shoreline structures that no longer exist.
As Ocean Beach began shifting from a scattered coastal settlement to an organized neighborhood, many of these early buildings disappeared. Wilson recalled that Thomas’s shack may have been deliberately removed in the early 1910s. “At some point … they burned down his shack because it was a public nuisance, so there was a bonfire, like a big event to burn down the shack,” she said.
Thomas is believed to have died in September 1913 at the age of 94, closing a life that spanned the earliest phases of San Diego’s coastal development.
Other historical accounts suggest Thomas built a well and windmill near the dunes and extended a pipeline from that system to his residence and corral on Newport Street. From his base near the cliffs, he also provided lodging services, food, and care for visitors’ horses — one of the earliest known examples of informal recreation support along the Ocean Beach shoreline.
Some records also place “General” A.B. Crook in the same early coastal period, living with or near Thomas in the 1880s. Crook is described as having built cottages, operated a blacksmith shop, and maintained small agricultural plots near the beach. However, later mapping records, including Sanborn maps from 1921, show no clear physical trace of these early structures remaining.
What emerges from the historical record is a shoreline in transition — part settlement, part improvisation, and part speculation — where early residents adapted to an undeveloped coast long before Ocean Beach became a defined community.
Today, little physical evidence remains of Thomas’s shack or the early structures that once lined this stretch of bluff and sand. What survives are scattered photographs, planning documents, and oral histories that preserve fragments of a shoreline life that existed at the edge of the Pacific, when Ocean Beach itself was still being formed.
Old Cliff House Ocean Beach (burned in 1895). (Photo courtesy of the San Diego History Center)
Newspaper photo with a caption of the same photo. (Courtesy of Jonnie Wilson)
Sources:
San Diego coastal planning records and historic coastal context documentation.
Local historian Jonnie Wilson
OB Historical Society archival references
Arcadia Publishing, early photographic negative caption: “Old Cliff House, Ocean Beach (burned 1895).”
Supplemental early Ocean Beach settlement references to Abraham Thomas and A.B. Crook
The San Diego History Center
I love these articles about old San Diego. Keep them coming.