Las Cruces, a Lost Service Town
By Curt CraggThe town of Las Cruces has been lost. It’s not even a ghost town, because there aren’t any “ghosts” of the buildings that were once there. The only remaining reference that there even was a town of any kind is a steel truss bridge that is practically hidden on the west side of Highway 101 as you travel south in the middle of Santa Barbara County.
Fortunately what did survive in the scrapbooks of the families of some of the service station owners and the archives of the State Highway Department were some images of what this small service town once looked like on the coast of California.
If you were traveling north on the coast highway leaving Santa Barbara in the 1930’s and 40’s you were headed into a vast open space of coastline and inland valleys all the way to San Francisco. Along this route at about 15 mile intervals you would encounter small service towns, and occasionally a town of some size like Santa Maria or Salinas.
Las Cruces was the first town you came to as you left the coastline and rounded into the Gaviota Pass, a narrow gap bordered by rock faces leading into the Santa Ynez Valley. It was situated at an Y intersection where the coast highway branched off to the west as Highway 1 to the town of Lompoc on the coast, or went straight on a winding path around the Nojoqui grade and eventually ending up in the somewhat bigger service town of Buellton about 15 miles to the north.
In the 1930’s as you traveled north on the coast highway and came to Las Cruces you first encountered the El Camino Garage.
After the El Camino Garage there was store, a restaurant, a Shell station and a row of visible gas pumps.
(More to Come....)
