Cultural Landscape Report for Morro Bay State Park Campground, California Department of Parks and Recreation

Hammond, John; Olmsted Center for Landscape Preservation

Morro Bay State Park is located on the shore of Morro Bay, an estuary on the California Coast between Los Angeles and San Francisco. The bay, four miles long and nearly two miles wide at its widest point, collects water from a number of creeks, including Los Osos and Chorro Creeks. Extensive tidelands and salt marsh encircle the bay and brackish and freshwater wetlands cover the broad Chorro Creek delta. Morro Bay is separated from the Pacific Ocean by a four-mile-long sand spit extending from the southern end of the bay nearly to its northern end, where it terminates to form the bay’s mouth. The park was created in 1934 as one of the first California State Park units and was developed primarily through efforts of the CCC between 1934 and 1939. This development included the construction of roads, buildings, picnic areas, campgrounds, water and drainage systems, and a variety of other projects within the park. Today, their efforts are evident in the layout of the park and in the constructed features, including stone walls, curbing, gutters, forty-seven stone picnic tables, and the campground combination building. The roughly thirty-acre campground, located in the southern portion of the park on the shore of Morro Bay, originally consisted of twenty trailer camp sites and twenty-eight tent sites. Since the CCC left in 1939, the campground has been expanded and updated and today represents a mixture of 1930s CCC, post-war, and recent development. The campground has expanded to include 140 camp sites, five combination buildings, a trailer sanitation station, and other services, organized around a series of circulation loops with either pull-through trailer parking or parking spurs. The campground is nestled within long eucalyptus windrows across the main park road from the boat marina. The original campground represents a typical example of Park Rustic design as it was practiced within the National Park Service in the 1920s and 1930s, and of CCC workmanship that characterized that era of national and state park development. The layout of the campground follows the models set out in the National Park Service design manual, Park and Recreation Structures: Overnight and Organized Camp Facilities. In addition, the stone features found in the campground, including stone picnic tables, curbing, gutter, and the 1937 combination building illustrate the design and workmanship of the CCC in the 1930s.

Cultural Landscape Report for Morro Bay State Park Campground, California Department of Parks and Recreation

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