Building the Road to Yosemite
Near Groveland, California
The road through Groveland toward Yosemite did not build itself. In the early eighteen seventies, competing road companies raced to complete the first wagon road to Yosemite Valley floor, knowing that whoever finished first would control the lucrative tourist trade. The Big Oak Flat Road, passing through the town then still called Garrote and the nearby community of Big Oak Flat, was completed in eighteen seventy-four, reaching the valley floor and connecting the Sierra Nevada's most famous scenery to the Central Valley and the Bay Area for the first time by wheeled vehicle.
Chinese workers are said to have done much of the labor on roads like this one. Many took jobs grading and blasting the switchbacks through steep Sierra terrain because the wages offered to Chinese workers, though lower than those paid to white workers, were steady and the work was real. The road they built through the granite and chaparral opened Yosemite to mass tourism.
Stage lines soon began carrying travelers toward the valley, and Groveland became an overnight stop on the route. The alignment today is State Highway One Hundred Twenty, and it still passes through Groveland, still climbing toward the high country along much of the old Big Oak Flat Road route.
