by Dick Miller
“I Love the SLO Life” bumper stickers and license plate frames are commonplace on the Central Coast. Like local firms styled SLO Baked Bread and SLO Roasted Coffee, they affirm pride of place and betray a hint of nostalgia for supposedly simpler, more agrarian times when life was less hectic and change came in more measured steps.
Although San Luis Obispo today is officially classed as an urban county, development is largely confined to a narrow corridor along Highway 101. Most of the region remains distinctly rural in fact and flavor. Many residents prefer life in the SLO lane; others would gladly trade village inconveniences for shopping malls. Most seem deeply conflicted, tugged at once by the lure of growth and the fear of sprawl.
Central Coast history is, of course, predominately pre-history, dating back at least 10,000 years. European voyagers did not make landfalls until the 16th century -- Chinese traders surely had plied the California coast long before -- but overland settlement from New Spain waited for more than a century. During the intervening proto-historical era, invasions of Old World plants, animals, and human pathogens set off pandemics of ecological change.
From the very beginning the Central Coast has had many peoples with many histories. By the time missionaries, soldiers, and secular settlers made their way up El Camino Real the western Mexican population was already an Indio-Euro-Afro-Asian mestizo mix. Franciscans founded Mission San Luis Obispo in 1772. Mission secularization in the 1830s left behind a havoc of cultural conquest, but also pockets of Native American cultural survival. John C. Frémont seized San Luis Obispo for the United States in 1846. The pastoral legacies of mission and Californio times lingered on into the 1860s, until the double disasters of catastrophic drought and mountainous debt forced most of the old ranchos into bankruptcy.
During succeeding decades enterprising newcomers, both old-stock Americans and recent Swiss-Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, and other immigrants arrived to jump-start the local economy through fishing, farming, ranching, and dairying. By the late 19th century wheat fields, nut groves and rangeland spread across the county north and east of the Cuesta Grade. Dairy herds grazed the coastal terraces, producing record-setting shipments of butter and cheese. Rich coastal and inland valleys yielded bumper crops of fruits and vegetables.
Yet late 19th century SLO remained a sparsely settled backwater still paced by the tides, the seasons and animal power; its culture balkanized by rugged terrain, poor roads, history and habit. A few coastal ports offered limited outlets to oceanic trade.
After 1876 a regional railroad provided important passenger and freight service from San Luis Obispo city to its port at Avila Bay, and southward through the rich Arroyo Grande and Santa Maria valleys. But the Southern Pacific mainline did not reach SLO until 1894, and did not connect the Central Coast to Los Angeles until 1901.
Local booster claims of coming greatness could not overcome the hard fact that in 1900 the county population tallied only 16,000, SLO city a mere 3,000. At the dawn of the 20th century SLO’s population density put it squarely on the frontier line that Frederick Jackson Turner had recently proclaimed the farthest edge of civilization.
Petroleum, beans, and war fueled the region’s take-off into the 20th century. Oil deposits underlay the Central Coast. Locals had mined small asphaltum seeps since prehistoric times; the name of Pismo Beach commemorates Pizmu, the Chumash word for the tarry globs that often washed ashore. Deep-well drilling began around the turn of the century. After 1902 pipelines from the nearby Guadalupe and Santa Maria fields, and from the distant Central Valley, converged on Avila Bay. For a time SLO boasted the world’s longest oil pipeline and the second largest oil port on the Pacific Coast. SLO County grew apace, reaching a population of 22,000 in 1920, thanks also in part to the establishment of a normal school, afterwards Cal Poly University.
The Great War brought good times to local agriculture. Sugar beet, beef, and bean prices spiked. Dry beans were an ideal relief crop for battle and famine-wracked Western Europe. High profits and federal subsidies encouraged local growers to expand their acreage and buy machinery on time. When the bubble burst in the early ‘20s, local agriculture began its long slide toward the Great Depression.
Meanwhile auto tourism surged. Sun-parched Central Valley residents had been caravanning to local beaches since the 1880s.
During the ‘20s newly paved roads, affordable cars, aggressive tourism promotional campaigns, and new roadside conveniences, including gas stations, auto camps, and the “motel” (San Luis Obispo claims the first so-named, built in 1925), kept seaside communities humming and local boosters optimistic. The leading SLO newspaper carried the hopeful masthead, “California’s Next Big City.” Hollywood tales of fantasy weekends at William Randolph Hearst’s hilltop castle and the allure of mysterious Big Sur only added to the Central Coast mystique. When reality hit hard a decade later, Dorothea Lange took perhaps the most haunting of all Depression-era photographs, Migrant Mother, at a dismal rain-drenched pea picker’s camp in Nipomo, twenty-some miles south of San Luis Obispo.
World War II federal pump-priming pulled SLO out of the Depression, and Cold War jitters maintained the momentum. Camp Roberts, Camp San Luis Obispo, and Camp Cooke (later Vandenberg Air Force Base), became sprawling military training bases. Continuing the funding flow begun earlier by New Deal WPA spending, wartime federal dollars coursed through local banks and underwrote an expanded civilian infrastructure, including the San Luis city water system. During the war military personnel and their dependents sustained the local economy; many liked the area so much that after the war they returned to become permanent residents. Post-war GI Bill tuition payments subsidized the expansion of Cal Poly into a ranking engineering school. Between 1940 and 1960 the SLO county population increased 144 percent.
Late 20th century SLO lived off farming, ranching, tourism, public sector payrolls, and an influx of relocating retirees who had cashed out appreciated real estate elsewhere or floated in on corporate golden parachutes. New developments along Highway 101 increasingly had the look of Southern California. After the decline first of dairying, and later the fisheries, cattle and fresh vegetables became the county’s leading cash crops until wine grapes moved to the forefront in the 1990s. Government services and agencies expanded until public employees made up fully 20 percent of the local workforce. The county’s largest employers were now a public university, a public utility, and health and elder care corporations. The county population increased to 257,000 by the turn of the 21st century, but SLO demography retained its traditional character. Nine out of ten SLO residents were white.
Asians and African Americans together made up less than 5 percent of the whole. Although local agricultural workers were overwhelmingly Latino/Latina, Hispanics made up only 18 percent of the county population, half the California average.
In recent years economic uncertainties have slowed local development, as have overdrawn water resources, increasing sensitivity to environmental impacts, and mounting conviction that the preservation of the SLO Life depends on the preservation of open space. Public policy debates now turn on the counter-claims of Pro-Growth, No-Growth, SLO Growth, and Smart Growth. Central Coast residents seem poised at a fork in the road, recalling their pastoral heritage and imagining their ever more urbanized and globalized future. History matters more than ever in the SLO Lane, as residents reflect on where they’ve been, and ponder where they might be heading.
[*History in the SLO Lane originally appeared in the program of the 28th Annual Conference of the California Council for the Promotion of History (CCPH), meeting in San Luis Obispo in October, 2008. Used here by permission of the CCPH.]
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