The predecessor to Highway 1 between Ventura and Santa Barbara was essentially a series of piers.

After a surge of automobile ownership in the first decade of the 1900s, a group from Santa Barbara raised private and public funds to construct a one-and-a-half-mile route made from eucalyptus beams skirting the coastal mountains that blocked easy passage between the two cities.

On Nov. 24, 1912, thousands of people attended a dedication celebration that featured beef and coffee served on long tables and speeches by local dignitaries. News dailies marveled at the highway’s spectacular scenery — “a pleasure not to be enjoyed anywhere in the country,” one wrote.

On opening day, a correspondent for the Santa Barbara Morning Press reported that a few accidents and instances of car trouble caused traffic. In a charming bit of naïveté, he added, “But all that will in time be overcome.”

After a little more than a decade, the causeway was replaced by landfill and paved road. Further north, crews used steam shovels and dynamite to lay highway along the harrowingly steep Big Sur coast, finishing the job in 1937. It was then that the north-south artery known to Californians simply as “the One” was completed, extending 656 miles from the white sands of Orange County to the misty redwoods of Mendocino County.

More from the California Sun

• Photos: Rare September snow dusts June Lake in Eastern Sierra
• Highway 1 used to be a wooden boardwalk for cars
• Swooning over San Francisco’s Tetris house
• The strange boundary line that divides California in two
• The little-known third redwood

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