What’s with Monterey? California started here: Monterey was the capital of Spanish and then Mexican Alta California from 1777 to 1846. The state’s first constitution was written in its Colton Hall in 1849, and then the sardines came, Cannery Row boomed and busted, and the deep blue bay fed it all. Our retro Monterey, California logo is for the people who know that story, or want to.
This is the Monterey hat: our retro Monterey, California logo embroidered in black thread on a classic cotton dad cap, the hand-lettered vintage type stitched rather than printed. It is a Monterey cap with no slogan and no cartoon otter, just the town, the plainest of our Monterey hats and the Monterey California hat for a walk along the bay in the fog or a summer a thousand miles from Point Lobos. A Monterey Bay hat for people who are from here, people who left, and people who came for a weekend and never got over it.
The bay was Rumsen Ohlone country long before Sebastián Vizcaíno sailed in and named it for the Count of Monte Rey in 1602. Settlement came 168 years later: on June 3, 1770, Gaspar de Portolá and Father Junípero Serra founded the Monterey presidio and the mission, and Serra moved the mission to Carmel the next year. From 1777 to 1846 Monterey was the capital of Alta California, Spanish and then Mexican, and the town still shows it. The 1794 Royal Presidio Chapel is California’s oldest stone building; the 1827 Custom House is its oldest government building and California Historical Landmark Number One; Colton Hall is where delegates wrote the state’s first constitution in 1849. Walk the Path of History past the Larkin House and the Cooper-Molera Adobe and you are inside the Monterey Colonial style that carries the town’s name.
Then came the sardines. Monterey’s first cannery opened in 1902; by the 1930s the canneries ran day and night and the town called itself the Sardine Capital of the World. The street was Ocean View Avenue until 1958, when the city renamed it Cannery Row after the novel. By then the fish were gone, the run collapsed around 1950, and the canneries went dark. In 1984 the old Hovden cannery at the end of the Row reopened as a window on the bay, and Monterey Bay itself became the reason to come: sea otters in the kelp, sea lions at Breakwater Cove, whale watching out over the submarine canyon, the rec trail along the water, and Point Lobos a few miles south. California’s first capital turned out to have a second act. The full Monterey history is on our Monterey page.
The cap is an unstructured six-panel, low-profile dad cap with a Permacurv visor, made from breathable cotton (all colors 100% cotton; the camo variation is 65% polyester / 35% cotton) with a self-fabric hideaway strap, antique-brass buckle, matching undervisor and four-row visor stitching. The black logo is a classic embroidered finish, durable and vintage-inspired; because embroidery uses thread, not ink, slight differences from the digital product image are normal and part of the process, as explained in our Embroidery footer. One size adjustable, so it is a Monterey souvenir with no size to guess. We are the Monterey gift shop that never closes: Monterey apparel and Monterey Bay souvenirs drawn in-house, not bought by the pallet. As with everything we make, profits support hunger relief.
