Mt. Wilson Toll Road

As you contemplate the four thousand foot rise of the San Gabriel mountains before you, a very apparent and steadily graded road cut disects the view to the top. This is the old Mount Wilson Toll Road and for decades, until the Angeles forest high speed roadway is built in the 1930's, this road is a popular and manageable way of getting to Mt. Wilson's peak and the lodge and campsites up there.

The Allen Sphinx ranch barley and hay fields would have been to the west of the Toll House at the base of the Mt. Wilson Toll Road and above Altadena Drive. Both photographs are taken from the ranch property with the road and toll house in background in the 1920s.

The road was built in 1891 by the Pasadena and Mount Wilson Toll Road Company - guided by the ever present Benjamin Eaton - to provide access to the newly installed Harvard telescope and observatory on the summit of the bump below Mt. Wilson called Mount Harvard to this day. Eaton was to be paid upon completion by a consortium of business men from Pasadena who had been gathered and agreed to invest in the road. Their handshake agreement for payment of 1000 dollars was refused when he was done on the basis they did not have a written contract.

The original road was 10 miles long and 4 feet wide, but was later expanded to 6 feet wide to accommodate increased foot and pack animal traffic. In 1917, the road was used to transport equipment and materials for the construction of the Mount Wilson Observatory, including the 100-inch telescope mirror at the Mountain's top and the road was widened to 10 feet to accommodate larger vehicular traffic from that point forward.