Big Sur Bakery Cookbook - Michelle Wojtowicz [6]
The history of Big Sur didn’t start with the opening of Highway 1, of course. The original inhabitants around here were the Esselen, the Salinan, and a division of the Ohlone called the Rumsien—all nomadic hunter-gatherer Native American tribes who lived in the Big Sur area for centuries before Spanish settlers got here in the 1770s.
Those Spanish didn’t do good things for the Native Americans, but they did give Big Sur its name. After snagging some prime beachfront real estate and setting up their capital on the Monterey peninsula, they began referring to the area below them as El Pais Grande del Sur: the Big South Country. They might as well have called it “The Large, Impenetrable Area That Has Great Natural Resources but Is a Pain in the Ass to Get To” since, without a road or a permanent port, Big Sur was basically unreachable.
Still, some settlers managed to set up ranches in the area, and in 1821 Big Sur (along with the rest of California) became a part of Mexico when the Mexicans won their independence from Spain. Things changed again in 1848, when California became part of the United States after the Mexican-American War. For Big Sur residents, the main impact of these various political shifts had to do with land: Mexico gave out land grants; subsequently, the 1862 Homestead Act lured Americans to the area by promising free 160-acre plots to settlers. While still difficult to get to, Big Sur then evolved into the home of a bunch of different businessmen: cattle ranchers, farmers, miners, millers, fishermen, and woods-men, to name a few. Many of the first settlers’ names can still be found all over the area—the Pfeiffers, the Partingtons, the Posts. It wasn’t until the completion of Highway 1 in 1937, thanks to money from the New Deal and convict labor, that the area became easily accessible to outsiders. But Big Sur wasn’t connected to the California electric grid until the early 1950s, and even today some people proudly live without electricity.
Photographs by Sara Remington
As for the Bakery itself, our building was built around 1936 by Frank Post’s daughter Alice (of the famous Post Ranch family) and her husband, Steve Jaeger, who’d come to Big Sur during World War I to break horses. Steve and Alice anticipated that the opening of Highway 1 would bring tourists to Big Sur, so they built a gas station and a ranch house that was divided into two parts: a café, which is now the front of the Bakery, and their home, which is now our dining room. They called it the Loma Vista Inn and opened every season from April to October until sometime in the mid-1970s, when Alice passed away. (The building then went through a few more incarnations before we got here.) Alice and Steve’s niece Norma, who lives on the property above us, has tons of black-and-white photographs of the building’s beginnings, one of which hangs right inside the Bakery’s front door. It shows a group of people gathered around what’s now the Bakery’s side door, right around the time when Highway 1 first made it easy to travel to Big Sur by car. The caption says “Loma Vista Open House 1937,” so the photo was taken about a year after the building was built.
It turned out that Steve and Alice were right: once there was actually a paved road, it was inevitable that tourism (not to mention celebrities) would follow—drawn by the serenity, the natural beauty, and the breathtaking backdrop of the Pacific Ocean. Orson Welles and his then-wife Rita Hayworth bought a cabin on a whim here in 1944 that, rumor has it, they