Pacific Grove: The Dry Town That Stayed Dry for Eighty Years

In the summer of eighteen seventy-five, the Methodist Retreat Association established a tent-camp community on pine-covered dunes at the tip of the Monterey Peninsula. Lots were thirty by sixty feet and rented for fifty dollars apiece. The idea was a summer camp for pious Californians, a place to read the Bible, hear lectures, and be improved. They kept the butterflies. They did not keep the saloons.

When Pacific Grove incorporated as a city in eighteen eighty-nine, the founders wrote a prohibition on alcohol directly into the city charter. This was not unusual for American Methodist communities of the period; what was unusual was how long they held the line. The prohibition lasted until nineteen sixty-nine. Eighty years of legal dryness in a state where the wine industry was already well established, where the fishing wharves ran on beer, and where no one else on the Monterey Peninsula shared the commitment.

Pacific Grove was, for eight decades, the kind of place where you could live your entire life without ever being legally offered a drink in public. The grocery clerk was not going to slip you anything. The church social was not going to surprise you. The dry laws were real and enforced.

The occasion that ended the prohibition was the opening of the Pacific Grove Art Center in nineteen sixty-nine. Alcohol was first served legally in public at the opening reception. Whether the Art Center's founders chose the moment deliberately as a statement, or whether it was simply the first occasion that felt appropriate for a toast in a community that had finally decided to allow them, the record does not say.

Pacific Grove today is one of the most pleasant small cities on the California coast. It still takes its peculiar values more seriously than its neighbors do.