BILL ANALYSIS
SCR 37
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Date of Hearing: August 9, 2010
ASSEMBLY COMMITTEE ON TRANSPORTATION
Bonnie Lowenthal, Chair
SCR 37 (Wiggins) - As Amended: April 21, 2010
SENATE VOTE : 33-0
SUBJECT : State Route 29
SUMMARY : Designates a segment of State Route (SR) 29 as Robert
Louis Stevenson's Historic Trail to Silverado. Specifically,
this bill :
1)Recounts the nineteenth century history of Robert Louis
Stevenson's Silverado Squatters travelogue and the Old Bull
Trail in Napa and Lake Counties.
2)Designates the segment of SR 29 from post mile 37.9 to post
mile 39.5 in Napa County as Robert Louis Stevenson's Historic
Trail to Silverado.
3)Requests the Department of Transportation (Caltrans) to
determine the cost of appropriate signs consistent with the
signing requirements for the state highway system showing this
special designation and, upon receiving donations from
nonstate sources covering that cost, to erect those signs.
EXISTING LAW : Assigns Caltrans the responsibility to operate
and maintain state highways. This includes the installation and
maintenance of highway signs.
FISCAL EFFECT : Unknown. This bill was withdrawn from the
Senate Appropriations Committee pursuant to Senate Rule 28.8.
COMMENTS : In the 1850s, volunteers built the Old Bull Trail
from what is today the City of Calistoga over Mount St. Helena
in Napa County to what is today Middletown in Lake County. Due
to grades exceeding 35 percent along the Old Bull Trail, which
prevented wagon travel, the Legislature, in 1866, authorized
John Lawley to construct a private toll road to replace most of
the Old Bull Trail starting approximately 1.5 miles north of the
City of Calistoga.
The toll road over Mount St. Helena was completed in 1868 with
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grades of just 12 percent. This toll road is still in use today
as a public road and is known both as the "Old Toll Road" and as
"Lawley Road."
In 1872, John Lawley, along with William Montgomery and William
Patterson, founded the Monitor Ledge Mine on Mount St. Helena
just off the Old Toll Road and later renamed that mine and the
surrounding community "Silverado." During one point in its
short three-year life, the mining town of Silverado housed over
1,000 people. Many more people came and went during that time
in search of fortunes, every one of whom traveled the toll road
and the 1.5 mile remnant of the Old Bull Trail that connected
that toll road to Calistoga and to the rest of the Napa Valley.
In the summer of 1880, a young author, running low on cash, and
his new bride left their honeymoon suite in the resort town of
Calistoga to become squatters in the mining town of Silverado,
which had been abandoned five years earlier. That author was
Robert Louis Stevenson. He detailed his trip to Napa Valley in
his travelogue, The Silverado Squatters. In The Silverado
Squatters, the best-selling author introduced the world to the
beauty of the Napa Valley and the quality of its wine, famously
describing it as "bottled poetry."
In a chapter of The Silverado Squatters entitled "Starry Drive,"
Stevenson recounted the brilliant night sky above the 1.5-mile
remnant of the Old Bull Trail as he rambled back to his
honeymoon perch one summer evening. Few roads have ever been
described so vividly.
In 1921, a local farm bureau successfully petitioned the County
of Napa to name a series of rough roads and trails running along
the eastern spine of the Napa Valley as "Silverado Trail" after
the mining town Robert Louis Stevenson made famous.
Although that collection of roads running along Napa Valley's
eastern spine ended at Tubbs Lane just north of the Old Toll
Road, the County of Napa ended the newly named Silverado Trail
1.5 miles short of the Old Toll Road because the county was
making arrangements to turn that 1.5 mile-stretch of road over
to the state to incorporate it into a new modern highway. As a
result of Napa County's decision to incorporate this stretch of
historic road into a modern highway, the history of this pioneer
pathway, Robert Louis Stevenson's "Starry Drive," and the last
leg of the trail to Silverado, has been lost.
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That stretch of road predates John Lawley's Old Toll Road, was
originally built by California pioneers in the 1850s shortly
after California's statehood as part of the Old Bull Trail, and
is now memorialized by a historical marker in Middletown in Lake
County.
REGISTERED SUPPORT / OPPOSITION :
Support
Napa Valley Vintners Board of Directors
Letters from 11 individuals
Opposition
None on file
Analysis Prepared by : Howard Posner / TRANS. / (916) 319-2093