Old Santa Susana Stage Road
Historic stagecoach route through Santa Susana Pass in California.
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The Old Santa Susana Stage Road, also known as the Santa Susana Wagon Road, is a historic route through the Santa Susana Pass near Chatsworth, California. It served as a key artery linking the Los Angeles Basin with inland Ventura County and was part of the main stagecoach route between Los Angeles and San Francisco from 1861 until 1876. The road is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is also recognized as a Historic-Cultural Monument of Ventura County and the City of Los Angeles under the name Old Stagecoach Trail.
History
In 1859, the California Legislature set aside $15,000 to upgrade an existing wagon track through the Santa Susana Pass, with Los Angeles and Santa Barbara counties chipping in extra funds. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, it threw a wrench into the Butterfield Overland Mail’s southern stagecoach line, which had been running since 1858 from St. Louis through El Paso, Fort Yuma, and Los Angeles, then up to San Francisco via the Tejon Pass. To keep the mail moving, the government hired the Butterfield Company to run a new route between Los Angeles and San Francisco over the improved Santa Susana Pass road.
The first mail stage made the trip through the pass on April 6, 1861. This new path split off from the Tejon route at the north end of the Cahuenga Pass, following the old coastal road—El Camino Viejo, once part of the El Camino Real to Ventura and Santa Barbara—as far as Rancho Los Encinos, then cutting northwest across the San Fernando Valley toward the Santa Susana Pass. The steep drop on the valley side earned the name Devil’s Slide; horses often had to be blindfolded, chains were added to the brakes for extra stopping power, and passengers got out and walked.
From 1861 to 1875, this stagecoach road served as an alternative to El Camino Viejo, eventually becoming the main route between Los Angeles and San Francisco. In 1867, William E. Lovett took over the mail contract, running passengers and mail through the Santa Susana Pass as well as between Los Angeles and San Diego. Everything changed in 1876 when the Southern Pacific Railroad punched a tunnel through Newhall Pass, linking Los Angeles to San Francisco by rail.
Stagecoach travel quickly faded, and the Santa Susana Pass road was demoted to local use, while stage traffic to Santa Barbara reverted to the coast route. A new wagon road bypassing the crumbling Devil’s Slide opened in 1895, first called El Camino Nuevo and later the Chatsworth Grade Road, which stayed in use until the current Santa Susana Pass Road was built in 1917. Today, hikers in Santa Susana Pass State Historic Park can still spot the deep wagon ruts carved into the Devil’s Slide.
In 1939, the Native Daughters of the Golden West set a plaque into the sandstone to mark the Old Santa Susana Stage Road.
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Sources
Compiled from Wikipedia and the sources listed below. Text from Wikipedia is available under CC BY-SA 4.0; this entry is adapted from it.
- Wikipedia: Old Santa Susana Stage Road (CC BY-SA 4.0).
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