Generals Highway: From Colony Road to Modern Gateway
Near Three Rivers, California
The road that carries visitors from Three Rivers into Sequoia National Park traces a history almost as dramatic as the trees at its end. What is now called the Generals Highway began as the Colony Mill Road, built by hand between October eighteen eighty six and the summer of eighteen ninety by the utopian Kaweah Colony. Their road climbed eighteen miles from the canyon floor to Giant Forest, an engineering achievement for a group working without professional surveyors or heavy equipment.
When the United States Army took over administration of Sequoia National Park, soldiers improved and extended the road in nineteen oh three for wagon travel. A formal survey in nineteen nineteen produced the route plan for a modern two-lane highway. The man who conducted that survey, a government engineer named George Welsh, named both the highway itself and four giant sequoias flanking the road at the park's edge.
He called those trees the Four Guardsmen. They stand roughly two hundred fifty to two hundred seventy five feet tall and are estimated to be about fifteen hundred years old. Construction of the modern Generals Highway proceeded through the nineteen twenties.
The road reached Giant Forest on June twenty third, nineteen twenty six. The final northern section was dedicated on June twenty third, nineteen thirty five, in a ceremony that brought a convoy of six hundred sixty nine cars and nearly twenty five hundred people from both ends of the park. The project cost two and a quarter million dollars in nineteen twenties and thirties money.
The name honors the two sequoias at the highway's ends: General Sherman to the north and General Grant to the south.
