Solana Beach: The Colonel's Cove
Near La Jolla, California
In nineteen twenty-two, Colonel Ed Fletcher paid twenty dollars an acre for a hundred and forty acres of coastal scrubland from a farmer named George Jones. Fletcher had a vision: a planned beach town with proper access to the water. The problem was a bluff standing between the lots and the surf.
His solution was to hire one man with a fire hose connected to Lake Hodges Dam. Using hydraulic pressure alone, that worker spent three months blasting tons of earth away to carve Fletcher Cove. The beach opened on a Fourth of July in the mid nineteen twenties, with horse races on the sand. Mexican farmworkers from Rancho Santa Fe settled nearby in the nineteen twenties, founding La Colonia de Eden Gardens, one of the oldest neighborhoods in the area. Solana Beach spent decades as unincorporated county land before incorporating as its own city on July first, nineteen eighty-six.
