Mormon Road

In the spring of 1852 something over a hundred men gave a thousand days of labour to cut eleven miles of wagon road up Waterman Canyon, and by 1854 six sawmills were running at the top of it. The timber that came down paid for everything else. Boards cut here framed San Bernardino and then travelled across southern California, traded so freely that people called them Mormon banknotes. A colony short of coin had made lumber do the work of money.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Original McDonald's Site — 7.5 mi
  The corner where two brothers invented fast food, now an unofficial museum the corporation has never blessed.
• Wigwam Motel — 9.3 mi
  Nineteen concrete teepees on Foothill Boulevard, the last of Frank Redford's Wigwam Villages and still renting rooms.
• Cajon Pass — 10.0 mi
  The gap the San Andreas tore between two mountain ranges, and the doorway every westbound traveler has used for two centuries.

More markers nearby

• Garcés-Smith Monument — 3.5 mi
• Daley Toll Road Monument — 4.5 mi
• The Arrowhead — 4.6 mi
• Sycamore Grove — 6.6 mi