1Start hereFree
Pacific Grove Gate
A Carriage Ride Built to Sell Land
Free sample · 2:59You're at the Pacific Grove Gate, where Sunset Drive meets 17-Mile Drive and the town gives way to forest. Just ahead is the gatehouse, where nonresidents pay a toll to keep going. That toll is the first clue to this whole road. You're about to drive through a forest of Monterey pine and cypress, and almost all of it is privately owned.
To understand why, picture a different starting line. In the 1880s this road didn't begin at a gate. It began at the front steps of the Hotel Del Monte, a grand seaside resort over in Monterey. The hotel belonged to the Pacific Improvement Company, which was owned by the Big Four railroad barons: Charles Crocker, Mark Hopkins, Collis Huntington and Leland Stanford. These were the men who had funded the Central Pacific Railroad. Their railroad brought wealthy guests to Monterey, and their hotel gave those guests somewhere to stay.
Then the company needed something for them to do. By 1892 it had laid out a scenic carriage road winding through the forest and along the coast toward Carmel. The hotel called it the 18-Mile Drive. History knocked a mile off somewhere along the way.
Guests rode out by horse and carriage. They stopped at a beach to pocket agates and pebbles polished smooth by the waves, and they gawked at oddly shaped trees, one of them nicknamed the Ostrich Tree. In 1891, President Benjamin Harrison took the ride in a coach pulled by six bay horses, the harness trimmed with bunting and roses. A local paper reported his verdict: "This is a lovely spot. I only wish I could stay here a week."
That wish was exactly the point. The drive was a pleasure outing, but it was also a sales pitch. The company wanted rich visitors to fall for the scenery and buy large residential plots on its land. Every ocean view along this road was, in a sense, a showroom.
The people already living on that coast didn't fit the brochure. About 30 Chinese fishermen and their families had a village on the rocky shore near Stillwater Cove. Chinese American girls sold shells and polished pebbles to the passing tourists. As anti-Chinese hostility grew in Monterey, the Pacific Improvement Company worked to erase that community, tearing down attempts to rebuild the fishing village.
By 1907, the carriages were gone, replaced entirely by automobiles. In 1919 a developer named Samuel Morse bought the company's land here, and his company still runs this road under a newer name, the Pebble Beach Corporation. The Hotel Del Monte didn't stay a hotel. After World War II, the Navy took it over, and today it's part of the Naval Postgraduate School.
So when you pass that gatehouse, you're doing what Harrison did. You're a guest on somebody's private sales route, and the view is still the pitch.
Drive southwest on 17-Mile Drive, then turn right onto Spanish Bay Drive, about two minutes. There, a famous golfer helped bring a little bit of Scotland to the California dunes.
Photo: Unknown author, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Photo: Alexander Hatley, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Photo: Tuxyso, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Photo: schnaars from San Jose, CA, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Photo: Ilya Grigorik, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Photo: Bernard Gagnon, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
