The Road Ahead
The Automobile’s Impact on California
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Sunday: Noon – 3pm
The Road Behind
Local Stories for The 2025 Road Ahead Exhibit
The automobile! If ever there was a change in California life, it was the twentieth century advent of the automobile. Henry Ford’s first Model T rolled off his new assembly lines in 1908 and, in no time, mobility possibilities were altered forever. The new internal combustion engine brought on this revolution, marking the demise of passenger rail transport and many fewer horses on farms.
The revolution also helped reduce “the differences in outlook between the farmer and the city dweller,” according to historian Walton Bean.
Cars, trucks and tractors began to appear in Alamo, Danville and San Ramon after 1910 and transformed agricultural practices. Use of the horse gradually declined along with the need for workers to tend them, although horses were still employed regularly on valley farms and ranches well into the 1930s.
18 horses pulled the Wiedemann’s gas-engine powered harvester combine on the Sherburne hills 1931 (pictured above on right)
The first cars in the Valley
Everyone remembered the first family car. Tassajara Valley’s Rose Bettencourt (Ferreira) said her father bought a Hudson to go to visit her brother at Camp Lewis, Washington, during the Great War. In Sycamore Valley, Charles J. and Kate Wood bought a Chalmers for their first car in 1911. Young George learned to drive it when he was twelve or thirteen, as soon as he could reach the pedals.
The family took it on trips to Clear Lake and Yosemite around 1915 even though the roads were rough. At Clear Lake, George recalled that “the dust was so deep you couldn’t see the chuck-holes.”
The Woods also bought the first truck in Sycamore Valley. George again: “I’ll never forget when ol’ Charlie Goold saw that thing running down the road. He thought it was a runaway because it was going ten miles per hour. Teams never went more than two or three mile per hour.” Mr. Goold saw the top of the fast-moving load but, since the dirt road was recessed from use, he could not tell that a truck was carrying the load.
The College Equal Suffrage League staged unique publicity events, often using their “Blue Liner,” a special seven-seated touring car which drew men in small towns to see the car and hear the Votes for Women message. They brought the car to a public Danville Grange meeting in 1911 where woman suffrage was debated.
Cars soon appeared on the county roads which included Front Street and Hartz Avenue in Danville, navigating the dirt roads with pot-holes and struggling with wet clay in the winter. An auto camp was made available on Front Street on the vacant Danville Grammar School site after 1922.
Supervisors Look at the Main Road
In 1915 the County Board of Supervisors toured Danville looking at the condition of the roads through town. This was the transition from horses and horse drawn buggies or carts to the increasingly popular cars and trucks. The Danville Sentinel wrote on May 14, 1915: “The road through Danville is blacklisted in every automotive center in the cities and drivers are warned to remain off the road leading through the town.”
Pledges were made, subject to landowners cooperation, to begin work to improve the roads in a few weeks, “as soon as is practicable…It is proposed to build a regular boulevard.” The County expected “the people of Danville (to) built suitable curbs and gutters.” At that time the wooden sidewalks with curbs on Hartz Ave. were two feet tall, a convenient height for horses and wagons but not for cars.
Two-foot sidewalks on East Prospect and North Hartz, c. 1922 (pictured above on left side)
Gasoline service stations began to appear in each community. The San Ramon General Store eventually had two gas pumps out front. Oscar Olsson opened a service station at Hartz Ave. and Diablo Road in Danville before 1920; initially he wheeled a portable gas pump out to fill cars in the road. Olsson also acted as the agent and sold cars from Nash, Buick and Ford and others. Patrons would put in an order for a car and he would bring it to Danville from Oakland or San Francisco.
Years later in a Tri-Valley News interview, Hazel Wiester recalled when her husband bought his first car. He “bought from the only garageman in town.” A twenty percent slope on a Danville hill became the testing ground for new automobiles. “If a car couldn’t make it up the hill, no one would buy it.”
The Good Roads Movement
Good Roads groups had originated in the nineteenth century when some aggressive bicycle groups lobbied for a state bureau of highways. When the automobile became a reality after 1910, California voters supported better roads by approving $73 million for highway construction between 1910 and 1920. A 2-cent gas tax was initiated by the state in 2023
Danville’s Grange Master, Will Stewart, called a Martinez meeting in 1909 which initiated the first Good Roads League in the County. Stewart, who was involved in the Grange and other improvement organizations, was responsible for laying out most of southern Contra Costa’s main roads.
In 1919, the local Good Roads Campaign Committee and County Board of Supervisors supported a bond issue election for roads in Contra Costa County. This ad appeared in the Contra Costa Courier and Danville Journal :
VOTE FOR AND WORK FOR GOOD ROADS
Five Reasons Why
- Because, good roads mean prosperity. Contra Costa is a wealthy county
- Because good roads mean an annual saving of thousands of dollars to the taxpayers
- Because, under the proposed bond issues, we get good roads now.
- Because, unless the bond issue is voted the Supervisors must increase the tax rate or curtail the road building program. This would be a calamity.
- Our industries demand good roads, farmers require them; taxpayers are willing to pay for them.
On July 22, 1919 the bond issue passed easily, with Danville supporting it 182 to 1, Alamo 65 to 0, and Tassajara 58 to 1.
A Paved Danville Highway (pictured above center)
Finally, the road from Walnut Creek to Danville was paved, one of the first in the County. Initially the pavement ended abruptly south of town. Fay Tarlock wrote: “Motorists blissfully enjoying the smooth road, did not notice the sudden ending into the mud or dust, according to the season. The one garage in town had a jolly period of prosperity.”
The center of this new highway had a raised bump, about six inches high and fifteen inches wide, which presented a real challenge to passing drivers. In an interview, San Ramon’s Ruth Boone said it was someone’s goofy experiment which didn’t work out; the bump was finally removed in 1930.
Californians loved their cars
In 1926 a Los Angeles Times article said it all: “Our forefathers in their immortal independence creed set forth ‘ the pursuit of happiness’ as an inalienable right of mankind. And how can one pursue happiness by any swifter and surer means . . . than by the use of the automobile?”
The road we know today as Danville Blvd., Hartz Ave. and San Ramon Valley Blvd. became State Highway 21 in 1935 and kept that designation until the I-680 freeway opened in 1964 to Danville and 1966 to Dublin. The new freeway led to increased development throughout the Valley. San Ramon Valley population was 4,630 in 1950, 25,899 in 1970 and 85,085 in 1990.
At the important Danville intersection of Hartz and Diablo, a 1934 census reported 3,700 vehicles passing north and south. By 1949 the number was nearly 16,000. In July of 1956 there were 27,000 vehicles. Little surprise that, when the valley’s first traffic signal appeared in 1972, it was located at that intersection.
Our streets are no longer the pot-holed and murky roads of a century ago. But as we all have noticed, gas taxes are forever
Sources: Walton Bean and James Rawls, California An Interpretive History (p.304 ff), Beverly Lane, Yesteryear in the SRV; Contra Costa Courier & Danville Journal, 1919; John Mercurio and Steve Minniear, Highway 21; Fay Tarlock, Danville – A Portrait in The Valley Pioneer, 1958; interviews with Rose Ferreira (1977), George Wood (1984) and Ruth Boone (1990).
Written by Beverly Lane to accompany the exhibit The Road Ahead, The Automobile’s Impact on California at the MuseumSRV Jan. 27, 2025