Pacific Grove, the Butterfly Town
Near Monterey, California
The tidy town of Pacific Grove began as a religious camp. In eighteen seventy five, Methodists founded a seaside retreat here, pitching tents in the pine forest for summer camp meetings and prayer. The landowner David Jacks sold them small lots, and a strict moral code soon followed, banning alcohol, gambling, and dancing, with a fence and gates locked at night and a curfew for the young.
Pacific Grove would remain the last dry town in California, refusing to serve alcohol in public until the fourth of July, nineteen sixty nine. The old Chautauqua Hall, built in the early eighteen eighties for lectures and learning, still stands. But the town's most famous visitors have wings.
Every autumn tens of thousands of monarch butterflies travel here to escape the cold, clustering so thickly in the pines that the branches seem to come alive. Pacific Grove has called itself Butterfly Town, and it protects them fiercely. For decades the town has made it a crime to harm a monarch, and today the fine can reach one thousand dollars.
In nineteen ninety the citizens voted to buy and preserve their Monarch Grove Sanctuary, so the butterflies would always have a home.
