Davenport, CA — A Real Place, an Extremely Thin Market

What Davenport Actually Is

Davenport's modern identity starts with cement, not tourism. The site was first called San Vicente, home to a whaling station at nearby Davenport Landing founded by Captain John Davenport in the 1860s, decades before the town most people mean by "Davenport" existed. The town as it stands today was built in 1905 by the Coast Dairies and Land Company specifically to house workers for a new cement operation, incorporated in 1906 as the S.C. Standard Cement Company by founders William Dengee, Irving Bachman, and banker Charles Crocker. When the post office relocated from Davenport Landing to the new company town in 1907, it kept the Davenport name, and the plant grew fast: by 1910 it was producing 1.4 million barrels of cement a year and had become, at its peak, the largest cement plant in California and the second-largest in the United States. By 1915 the company town had roughly 1,800 residents, 60 homes, two hotels, a school, a hospital, and a church -- a scale almost unimaginable set against today's population of 388.

That scale didn't last. As roads and automobiles improved through the 1930s, workers increasingly commuted in from Santa Cruz rather than living in company housing, and by the 1940s Davenport's resident population had fallen to under 500. The plant itself changed hands repeatedly over the ensuing decades and was eventually acquired by the multinational cement company CEMEX in 2005; CEMEX shut the plant down entirely in 2010, and the 172-acre former plant site has sat vacant, undeveloped, and still owned by CEMEX ever since -- the single most consequential unresolved fact about Davenport's future. As of 2025-2026, Pacific Elementary School District superintendent Eric Gross has publicly pitched an ambitious plan, backed by an anonymous local philanthropist, to purchase and redevelop the shuttered plant site into a consolidated "Midtown" campus combining a new school, workforce housing, and public-safety facilities around a town green -- a real, reported proposal, not a rumor, but one that still faces a live negotiation with CEMEX as owner, environmental remediation of an industrial site, zoning changes, and ecological review before anything is built. Treat it as a genuine, sourced possibility for Davenport's future, not a settled fact about its present.

Geographically, Davenport is now almost entirely surrounded by land that will never become new subdivisions. The former Coast Dairies ranchland north and east of town -- roughly 7,000-plus coastal acres -- was donated to the federal Bureau of Land Management by the Trust for Public Land in 2014 and folded into the California Coastal National Monument as the Cotoni-Coast Dairies unit in January 2017, now open to public hiking and biking access via a trailhead at Cement Plant Road and Warranella Road. Separately, in early 2014 the Sempervirens Fund and conservation partners acquired roughly 8,500 acres of CEMEX's own timberland -- the "CEMEX Redwoods" -- running from near the shuttered plant north through San Vicente Canyon up toward Empire Grade and Bonny Doon, permanently protecting that land from development as well. That combination of a fixed, tiny town footprint and a permanently protected surrounding landscape is precisely why this is a genuinely thin real estate market rather than a growing one: there is essentially no room for Davenport's housing stock to expand, for better or worse.

What There Actually Is To See and Do

Davenport's one real dining-and-lodging landmark is the Davenport Roadhouse Restaurant & Inn, housed in the historic Davenport Cash Store building (a classic early-1900s general store) at 1 Davenport Avenue, renovated and reopened in 2006 and currently operating as a nine-room inn, restaurant, and retail shop; the building next door, once the town's public bath house, is now a small separate bed-and-breakfast. Local coverage (Lookout Santa Cruz) has reported on the Roadhouse changing hands after roughly five years under its prior owners, so confirm current ownership and operating details directly before relying on any specific claim about the business.

The coastline itself is Davenport's real draw: Davenport Beach, just off Highway 1, has parking and restrooms and allows leashed dogs, while Davenport Cove -- known locally as "Shark Fin Cove" or "Shark Tooth Beach" for the distinctive rock formation and sea-arch tunnel at its mouth -- sits about 0.7 miles south and has become a well-known, informally-accessed photo spot without official trail maintenance; multiple beach guides explicitly warn that the bluff-top trail has difficult footing and that erosion causes sudden, unwarned cliff collapses. January through April brings Humpback and Gray whale migration visible from the bluffs. Beyond the coastline, the newly public Cotoni-Coast Dairies BLM land offers hiking and biking access into the former ranchland north of town via the Cement Plant Road/Warranella Road trailhead -- genuinely new public access, not a decades-old amenity.