NOW & THEN: ‘New’ Priest Grade a community project,
In Tuolumne County, where residents have a cando attitude when it comes to community improvements, perhaps the most ambitious do-it-yourself citizen undertaking was the start of construction of New Priest Grade more than a century ago.
With motor vehicles quickly replacing wagons, stagecoaches and buggies, it was time to provide an alternative to the original steep and incredibly twisty Priest Grade, also called the Grizzly Gulch Wagon Road when it was completed in 1859.
In 1911, Supervisor Salvador Ferretti of the South County district had the county surveyor scope out a new route on the opposite or north side of Grizzly Gulch. While the efforts of the new supervisor were well intentioned, his constituents rebelled when they learned the revenue to build the road would come from property tax increases.
Instead, they came together under the leadership of Charlie Baird, the Groveland Hotel owner, and Frank Cassaretto, the town’s principal merchant, to raise private funds so they could proceed on their own. About $12,000 ($312,000 today) was quickly pledged in labor, materials and equipment. George C. Donaldson, a highway engineer, was hired to map the new alignment. Rightof-way purchases began and soon manual labor, like brush and tree removal and grading a roadbed, began at the top of the hill on a path to the Tuolumne River.
Work halted in April 1912 when two homesteaders and a mine owner refused passage over their property. Undeterred, the citizens, just about out of money, turned to Ferretti to ask that the county take over the project, this time without the tax burden of the previous proposal. In July 1912, Ferretti prevailed on his colleagues to assume construction and funding, as well as adopt the Donaldson survey as official.
The two landowners, Joseph Cavagnaro and his son, Fred, were mollified when it was agreed the road would cross a large stone culvert so their cattle could have grazing access to both sides of their bisected land. The county ultimately spent $27,000 to complete the citizen-driven and much-needed improvement.
When the road opened to the public on Nov. 19, 1914, its surface was compacted earth to a width of 14 feet. It was 7.8 miles long and rose 1,600 feet in elevation from bottom to top, with grades from 5% to 8%. Three spring-fed troughs were placed along the way for the convenience of travelers when their radiators boiled over. Six months later, the county transferred ownership and maintenance responsibilities to the state. The grade was widened to 24 feet 10 years after that.
The new road, soon popular for Yosemite-bound traffic and the Hetch Hetchy project, was christened “Priests Hill Highway” but usually called New Priest Grade as it is today. A 3-foot-tall solid granite marker reading “Priests Hill Highway Completed in 1914” was placed either at the top or bottom of Grizzly Gulch. In about 1950, it was uprooted and graced the backyards of two families over the years. It wound up recently in a Tuolumne County Road Department yard, from which the historic relic traveled to the Carlo M. De Ferrari Archive where Andy Mattos, records and archive manager, washed away years of dirt and debris.
Mattos contacted the Southern Tuolumne County Historical Society, which accepted the 107-yearold monument. Today, it greets the public again at the Groveland-yosemite Gateway Museum, another example of the enterprising residents of the South County, who raised the funds to build the museum and adjacent library.