Henry Mello, the late bulldog legislator from Watsonville, ushered through a resolution in Sacramento that paid tribute to Nelson’s “magnanimous spirit rejected any bitterness or envy because he had been denied education, but on the contrary, caused him to treasure it all the more ….”
The effort to honor Nelson was widespread. What had been etched into the collective history of the region was that, at the time of his death, in 1860, Nelson had “left his entire fortune … to Santa Cruz School District No.1.” His life story, as was then known, was a small, torn, and incomplete patchwork of legend and folklore that had never been fully flushed out in the decades since he died. In the late 1970s, a small group of African-American community leaders and activists began pushing for the renaming of the Laurel Community Center, at the corner of Laurel and Center streets, in honor of the slave-mistakenly referred to as “Louden” Nelson-whose enduring legacy in Santa Cruz County history dates back to before the Civil War.
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