Paso Robles, California

Coordinates: 35°38′27″N 120°39′14″W / 35.64083°N 120.65389°W / 35.64083; -120.65389
Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Paso Robles, California
City of El Paso de Robles
Overlooking southern Paso Robles
Overlooking southern Paso Robles
City Manager
Ty Lewis[4]
 • Councilmembers[6]
List
 • 
ZIP codes
93446, 93447
Area code805/820
FIPS code06-22300
GNIS feature IDs254139, 2410415
Websiteprcity.com

Paso Robles (

2020 census, the population was 31,490.[9]

Etymology and pronunciation

The city's full name is El Paso de Robles, which in Spanish means The Pass of the Oaks.

People differ on the pronunciation of the city's shortened name of Paso Robles. While its Spanish pronunciation is PASS-oh ROH-blays, residents anglicize the pronunciation as PASS-oh ROH-buhlz. This anglicized version has been used in the city phone message.[11]

History

This area of the

Central Coast, known as the City of El Paso De Robles, Paso Robles, or simply Paso,[12] is known for its thermal springs.[12] Native Americans known as the Salinan lived in the area thousands of years before the mission era.[13] They knew this area as the Springs or the Hot Springs.[14] A tribal site on present-day Paso Robles was named elewexe, Obispeño for "Swordfish".[15]

Paso Robles is located on the

vineyards
.

In 1864, the first El Paso de Robles Hotel was constructed and featured a hot mineral springs bath house. Three locations (Paso Robles Inn, River Oaks Hot Springs,[16] and Franklin Hot Springs[17]) have offered the mineral bath hot spring experience which brought people like Ignacy Jan Paderewski to Paso Robles.

James and Daniel Blackburn donated two blocks to the city for a public park to be used for the pleasure of its citizens and visitors. Two exceptions were made to requirement that it be used for a public park - allowing the building of the Carnegie Library, and the conversion of the library to a museum. The grounds were laid out by a Mr. Redington and a planting day was held when each citizen set out his own donation. Originally, the whole park was hedged in by a fence of cactus, and in 1890, a bandstand was built with money raised by private theatricals.

In 1886, after the coming of the

Southern Pacific Railroad (SPR), work began on laying out a town site, with the resort as the nucleus. Two weeks after the first train arrived on October 31, 1886, a three-day celebration was held, including a special train from San Francisco bringing prospective buyers, who toured the area and enjoyed the daily barbecues
. On November 17, the Grand Auction was held, resulting in the sale of 228 lots.

The local agent for the SPR when it arrived in Paso Robles was R. M. "Dick" Shackelford, a Kentucky native who had come to California in 1853 to dig for gold. Shackelford had a varied career, going from gold mining to hauling freight by ox team, to lumbering, which took him to Nevada, where he served one term as a delegate in the state's first legislature for Washoe County.[18] By 1886, Shackelford had returned to California and was living in Paso Robles, where he began buying up extensive property, building warehouses, and starting lumber yards along the railroad's route. Shackelford also established the Southern Pacific Milling Company, which had a virtual monopoly on local milling until local farmers, in an effort to break Shackelford's stranglehold, themselves organized their own milling cooperative, the Farmers' Alliance Flour Mill.[19][20]

Paso Robles Clock Tower

In 1889, the same year that Paso Robles incorporated as a city, construction began on a new hotel. The hotel required over one million bricks and cost $160,000. The El Paso de Robles Hotel opened for business in 1891. The hotel was three stories tall and built of solid masonry, set off by sandstone arches. This ensured the hotel was completely fireproof. The hotel also featured a seven-acre (28,000 m2) garden and nine-hole golf course. Inside, it had a library, a beauty salon, a barber shop, and various billiard and lounging rooms. The new hotel also offered an improved hot-spring plunge bath and 32 individual bath rooms. The 20 by 40-foot (12 m) plunge bath was considered one of the finest and most complete of its time in the United States.

A year after the hotel's construction began, in 1890 the five-story Granary Building (still standing into the 2020s, albeit renovated) was built in order to store grain.[21][22]

On January 17, 1914, one of the world's more well-known concert pianists and composers came to the hotel:

Ignace Paderewski.[citation needed] After three weeks of treatments at the hotel's mineral hot springs for his arthritis, he resumed his concert tour. He later returned to live at the hotel and bought two ranches west of Paso Robles.[citation needed
]

During the next 30 years, the hotel was visited by other notables: Boxing champion

Phoebe Apperson Hearst (the mother of William Randolph Hearst), and actors Douglas Fairbanks, Boris Karloff, Bob Hope, and Clark Gable all stayed at the El Paso de Robles Hotel. When Major League baseball teams used Paso Robles as a spring-training home, the Pittsburgh Pirates and Chicago White Sox
stayed at the hotel and soaked in the mineral hot springs to soothe tired muscles.

For a time, Paso Robles was known as the Almond City because the local almond growers created the largest concentration of almond orchards in the world. The ranchers in the outlying areas were very important to the Paso Robles area. On these ranches were cattle and horses, grain crops (primarily wheat and barley), garden produce, and fruit and nut orchards. Many of these ranchlands and orchards have become vineyards for the many wineries that currently draw tourists to the area.

To show their appreciation to the ranchers, in October 1931, the businesspeople established Pioneer Day,

Carnegie Library now houses the Paso Robles Historical Society museum.

In December 1940, a fire completely destroyed the El Paso de Robles Hotel. Guests staying the night escaped unharmed. The night clerk who discovered the fire suffered a fatal heart attack immediately after sounding the alarm. Within months after the blaze, plans for a new hotel to be built on the site were drawn up. The design was an entirely new concept: A garden inn-hotel, designed to accommodate motor vehicle travelers. By February 1942, construction was complete and the Paso Robles Inn opened for business.[24][25][26]

In 1955, scores of national media[27][28] came to Paso Robles after pop-culture icon and actor James Dean was pronounced dead in town following his tragic car accident just east of the city. A roadside memorial in his honor stands in nearby Cholame, for fans to pay tribute to the star.[29]

Through the 1960s and 1970s, the City of Paso Robles experienced significant growth. The area's wine industry flourished, the California Mid-State Fair expanded into a regional attraction, and local lakes, such as Lake Nacimiento, became family vacation destinations.

In 1995, a new library building, combined with city hall, was completed; acclaimed novelist Ray Bradbury spoke at the dedication to a crowd of about 600 in attendance.[30]

The waters

Historic brochure for Paso Robles Hot Springs resort, circa 1910[31]

As far back as 1795, Paso Robles has been spoken of and written about as "California's oldest watering place"—the place to go for springs and mud baths. In 1864, a correspondent to the

San Francisco Bulletin wrote every prospect existed of the Paso Robles hot springs becoming the watering place of the state. By 1868, people were coming from as far away as Oregon, Nevada, Idaho, and even Alabama. Besides the well-known mud baths, the Iron Spring and the Sand Spring bubbled through the sand and were said to produce delightful sensations.[32]

In 1882, Drury James and the Blackburn brothers issued a pamphlet advertising "El Paso de Robles Hot and Cold Sulphur Springs and the Only Natural Mud Baths in the World". By then, the inn had first-class accommodations - a reading room, barber shop, and telegraph office; a general store, a top-of-the-line livery stable, and comfortably furnished cottages for families who preferred privacy to quarters in the hotel. Visitors could stay in touch with the rest of the world, as two daily mail deliveries were available, as was a Western Union telegraph office and a Wells Fargo agency with special rates for guests. As the springs became more a destination of the well-to-do as a place to go to socialize, the original purpose of the springs—to heal—became peripheral.

The bathhouse was erected over the sulfur spring in 1888, with a plunge and 37 bath rooms. In the following year, work began on the large Hot Springs Hotel (today the Paso Robles Inn), which was completed in 1900 and burned down 40 years later. Since the privilege of using the baths was restricted to guests of the hotel, and many sufferers of the

ailments
the baths cured could not pay the rates of the fashionable hotel, a few businessmen in Paso Robles made arrangements with Felix Liss for the right to bore for sulphur water on a lot that Liss owned. A sulfur well was reached, a bath house was built, and baths were offered at an affordable rate of 25 cents. The establishment was later offered to the city and is currently the site of the Municipal Pool.

Wine

Paso Robles’ growth industry—wine—has a long history with the area. Wine grapes were introduced to the Paso Robles soil in 1797 by the Spanish conquistadors and Franciscan missionaries. Spanish explorer Francisco Cortez envisioned an abundant wine-producing operation and encouraged settlers from Mexico and other parts of California to cultivate the land. The first vineyardists in the area were the priests (padres) of the

Mission San Miguel
, and their old fermentation vats and grapevine artwork can still be seen at the mission, north of the city of Paso Robles.

Commercial winemaking was introduced to the Paso Robles region in 1882, when Andrew York, a settler from Indiana, began planting vineyards and established the Ascension Winery at what became York Mountain Winery and is now Epoch Winery. When York purchased the land, it was primarily apple orchards, with a small plot of wine grape vines. York found that the climate and soil were more suitable for vineyards and he expanded the vineyards. Within a few years, he found that the vines were yielding more than he could market, prompting him to build a small, stone winery.

Following Andrew York's early success in the wine business, Gerd and Ilsabe Klintworth planted a vineyard in the Geneseo/Linne area around 1886. They were licensed to sell jugs of Zinfandel, port, and muscatel, as well as some of the area's first white wine made from Burger grapes. The Casteel Vineyards in the Willow Creek area were planted just prior to 1908. Casteel wines were stored and aged in a cave cellar. Cuttings from the old vines provided the start for other vineyards, still producing in the area today.

As the popularity of wines began to grow, so did the Paso Robles wine region. Lorenzo and Rena Nerelli purchased their vineyard at the foot of York Mountain in 1917. Their Templeton Winery was the area's first to be bonded following the repeal of Prohibition.

The early 1920s saw a flurry of winemaking activity when several families immigrated to the area to establish family vineyards and wineries. Sylvester and Caterina Dusi purchased a vineyard in 1924. The old head-pruned Zinfandel vines are now owned and cultivated by their son, Benito. The Martinelli, Busi, Vosti, Steinbeck and Bianchi Winery vineyards were also established around this time.

The Paso Robles wine region gained more notoriety when

Petite Sirah and Zinfandel on his Rancho San Ignacio vineyard in the Adelaide area. Following Prohibition, Paderewski's wine was made at York Mountain Winery. The wines produced from grapes grown on Rancho San Ignacio went on to become award winners. Paso Robles' reputation as a premier wine region became firmly established as a result of this and later successes, and through to the late 1960s and early 1970s, a new generation of vineyard pioneers came forth and flourished in the Paso Robles area.[33]

The entirely rebuilt clock tower stands downtown neighboring the city park.
The entirely rebuilt clock tower stands downtown neighboring the city park.

San Simeon earthquake