Firm as is Rock We Stand: Early Morro Bay s Growing Pains

Photo:Eric Demarcq/Flickr/Creative Commons License

Morro Bay is confusing. To borrow a line from the movie Clueless, the iconic beach town is in its own way a full-on Monet. From a distance, it is almost unbelievably picture perfect -- with its towering rock, soaring birds, large trees, and serene inlet dotted with anchored sailboats. Up close -- the picture gets a bit more complicated. Bird droppings cover many boardwalks, sidewalks and windows. At night, the Embarcadero, a long stretch of waterfront lined with fish and chip shops, kitschy gift stores and docked booze cruises, is packed with tourists ready to party. In the early morning, a walk farther down the waterfront reveals many weather-beaten, hardworking dock workers tending to old boats in the shade of a giant power plant, while tourists get breakfast at greasy spoons or charming cafes. All in all, it makes for a fascinating picture, equally gritty and idyllic, artsy and utilitarian, but ultimately, extremely beautiful.

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In 1769, the Spanish expedition party of Governor Gaspar de Portola was making its way up the California Coast. In September of that year, they arrived in what is now San Luis Obispo County, and camped along the shore. Voyage diarist Father Crespi remembered:

Not far from the camping place there was a small village of heathen which seemed to be nomadic, for we did not see a single house. About 65 persons came to see us as soon as we arrived, and presented us with a sort of porridge made with roasted seeds which tasted like almonds and everyone liked very much. The governor returned the gift and they were all pleased. To the south an estuary of immense size enters this valley, so large that it looked like a harbor to us; its mouth opens to the southwest and we noticed that it is covered with reefs which cause a furious surf. At a short distance from it, to the north, we saw a giant rock in the form of a morro [snout, promontory], which at high tide is isolated and separated from the coast by little less than a gunshot.

What the expedition saw was a 24-million-year-old volcanic plug, long considered a sacred site by the numerous Chumash and Salinan communities who lived around it. With the dawn of the Spanish era, many of these people became wards of the brutal mission system, or fled farther inland. Morro Bay remained underdeveloped and isolated throughout the Mexican and early American period. In the late 1860s, settlers began trickling into the area. During this time, Morro Rock also began to be quarried. In 1864, a farmer named Franklin Riley moved his family to what is now the town center. It was a hard life. When the wind blew, the flying sand was terrible, his daughter remembered. It cut off at the top of the ground anything that was planted. It filled the houses and was blown into the water wells, no matter what was done.

Photo courtesy of the Moro Bay Historical Society

Despite the hardships, Riley believed the natural inlet was ideal for building a port, which would enable the export of products from the surrounding dairies and rancheros. To combat the wind, he planted cypress and eucalyptus seeds along the dusty streets. He started planning a town site. 1870 is given as the official year of Morros founding (the Bay would be added later). In 1872, a map of Morro, signed by Rileys friend, the surveyor Carolan Mathers, was drawn up. A year later, a large wharf connected by a long chute to a new warehouse was opened in Morro. For a few years it flourished, enticing commercial schooners going up and down the coast. A man named John Schneider remembered watching the pranks his friends would pull while working at the warehouse:

[They] would flood the chute with kerosene The sacks loaded with grain would speed down the chute so fast that the crew in the hold of this ship would not dare reach out to stop them. So the bags struck the hull and burst, sending the grain helter-skelter. This brought on the uproar the two lads wanted. A big Irish crewman would stick his head out of the hold and yell at the top of his lungs, They've iled the chute!

Sadly, the wharf did not prosper for long. Morro failed to secure big freight companies to dock there, and a series of wrecks convinced captains it was not a safe place to enter. The warehouse was eventually converted into a dance hall. Most of the areas smattering of residents continued to farm. However, during the 1890s, a new industry developed in the small town. Hardworking farmers from Bakersfield and the Salinas and San Joaquin Valleys began coming to Morro in the summer, camping at places like the Snider Family Campground. Farmer Henry Hartwell Rhodes recounted his times at Morro years later:

The people who lived on these plains, when the harvest was over and before, travelled to the summer camps on the beach. Those camps were scenes of many joyous weeks of camp life, boating, swimming, bathing and clam digging. At night a great bonfire was built from the beach drift and sagewood which was plentiful. Around this the older people sat and ran over again the many instances of farm life on the hot sandy plains or reminisced of younger days, while the younger folks danced-and such dances we had-all out under the stars, the surf at our back and a large hole dug in the middle of the campground in which [we] roasted clams enough for all. It was usually 12 o'clock before our night finally broke up. How could we, who were doomed to spend the long summer months 35 or 50 miles away, working 16 hours a day, feel anything but contempt for our work and a longing for the cool foggy coast?

As tourism increased, so did the number of new year-round residents, which included many Italian, Portuguese and Swiss families. But Morro was still a tiny place (the population did not exceed 400 until the late 1930s). During the next few decades, Morro was continuall

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