Old Highway 399, Part 1: Ojai Freeway (CA 33) in Ventura

There is nothing like a route that ends at the sea, and US 399 is no exception; US 399's southern terminus has always been the City of San Buenaventura in California, better known as Ventura, the county seat of Ventura county (753,197 [2000]), with a population of 106,744 [2006]. Ventura traces its history back to the famous Fr Junipero Serra (see US Highway 395 Part 2 for his biography and his original mission in San Diego), who founded the Mission de San Buenaventura at the mouth of the Ventura River in 1782. San Buenaventura is the Spanish name for the Franciscan St. Bonaventure, a 13th century Catholic theologian and philosopher who was declared a Doctor of the Church by Pope Sixtus V in 1588. This mission was Serra's last; only a small portion of the mission remains today along Main Street (old US Highway 101) a couple blocks east of old US 399 on Ventura Avenue (Ventura Ave is in Part 2). After California was ceded to the United States with the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the region, regarded as relatively difficult to access by transport in those days, remained the domain of local landowners and squatters even after the incorporation of the modern city in 1866. One of these landowners was railroad tycoon Thomas Scott, who sent his assistant Thomas R. Bard westward to handle his holdings; Bard, in turn, established the local oil industry with the Union Oil Company in 1890, over which he presided; Union Oil was the source of the original Union 76 gas brand, became the famous Unocal during a 1983 corporate reorganization, and is today now part of Chevron (or, as some prefer, the former Standard Oil of California). The original Union Oil offices in Santa Paula still stand and are a state historical landmark. At their peak, the Union Oil fields in Ventura produced some 90,000 barrels a day, and many are still in operation. Oil is a constant theme along US 399, and we'll encounter many oil fields all the way to the end in Bakersfield.

Despite the presence of the oil industry and the nearby citrus groves (another original member of Sunkist Growers along with Riverside), the area remained lightly settled into the 20th century due to the steep and hazardous Conejo Grade to the south, and the inconsistent beach route north (or, as an alternate, the difficult Casitas Grade through the inland route to Santa Barbara, today traversed by CA 150). The Conejo Grade and the rickety beach routing became the initial alignments of US 101 in 1928, but US 399 was the first dependably passable inland route built in the region as the Maricopa Highway (Legislative Route Number 138 Ventura-Coalinga [1935, 1955]), not completed until 1933 (the particularly stunning and difficult mountainous portion is the subject of Part 3 and Part 4). By 1930 the region barely had over 10,000 residents for the first time, but did not explode to its current size until the construction of the Ventura Freeway (modern US 101) between 1959 and 1969; by 1970, the region boasted nearly 60,000.

Although the state had always intended a road from Ventura to Bakersfield and designated it for survey as early as 1913 (for more about that, see Part 3), US Highway 399 was not an original US highway as designated with the first designation of US highways in 1926. Instead, it was added in 1934 (without a number initially, as the 1934 California Division of Highways map at right shows, and eventually assigned US 399 as the third and southernmost spur of US 99) as a connector from the coast to the inland Central Valley when its construction was completed; this portion of the highway was LRN 138 [1935, 1955] between Ventura and the Cuyama Valley. The original routing of US 399 in Ventura, as we mentioned above, is Ventura Avenue and was built more or less in the valley of the now greatly diminished Ventura River, splitting the western coast ranges with its flow in antiquity. US 399 follows this routing until Oak View, when it deviates along a parallel grade and connects to the modern Maricopa Hwy north of Ojai and Meiners Oaks. The old surface street alignment connects to the modern and common routing into Casitas Springs more or less directly, so we will do it as the second of two parts in this region (i.e., Part 2).