The west is so young

Coming from the east coast, we're used to towns/cities celebrating their 200 to 250 year anniversaries of incorporation. This year Grover Beach City celebrates its 50th anniversary. It reminds me of the time T and I visited my aunt and uncle in Cambridge and because he was a don, we could walk on the lawns at St. John's College as long as we were with him. My uncle said that tradition was fairly new. When we asked for really how long ago, he said oh probably 4 or 5 hundred years ago!

From the Grover Beach website beachcalifornia.com:

"History of Grover Beach: In 1887 D.W. (Dwight William) Grover founded Grover City. The 35-year old lumber man from Santa Cruz purchased the land from Michael Price, founder or Pismo Beach for approximately $23K. Like Price's Pismo, Grover hoped to build a a hotel and railroad station near the beach. Calling it the place where the tide lands and the rails meet, his attempts to get a rail stop failed when Southern Pacific Railroad built a station at Oceano less than 3 miles away.

Like so many developers along the California coast during this time after the Mexican government relinquished rights to California and it became a U.S. state (in 1850), D.W. Grover laid out streets in a grid pattern, hoping to sell lots. He gave the streets names of popular beaches of the time and set aside land for a train depot, a hotel and a city park, promoting Grover City as the "grandest summer and winter seaside resort on the Pacific Coast".

Unlike areas where growth happened more rapidly through the discovery of oil, establishment of a deep sea port or proximity to an established city such as Los Angeles or San Francisco, it took nearly 50 years for Grover to see any substantial growth. Horace V. Bagwell purchased 1100 acres in 1935 and created a new marketing ploy, calling the area the "home of the average man", with land prices in the working man's range. Timing his project with the end of the Depression, he provided a place for families to find affordable housing and things starting taking off as World War II ended in the mid-1940's.

Grover was incorporated on December 21, 1959 and officially renamed as Grover Beach in 1992. In 1996 Amtrak began rail service with two daily stops at a newly constructed train station at 150 Grand Avenue at Pacific Coast Highway. The station, pictured above, is one of the most eye-catching structures in the City of Grover Beach."