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.

What the plaque says

In the spring of 1852, over one hundred Mormon men donated a full thousand man-days of arduous labor, to construct a road up Waterman Canyon, past this spot, and into the prime timber, where some of their enterprising brethren established six sawmills by 1854. The lumber hauled over this road, thereafter, was used, not only to build San Bernardino, but also throughout Southern California, where the boards were sometimes called, "Mormon Banknotes."

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lake Gregory — 0.9 mi
  A New Deal dam built by a Redlands orange grower, for the opposite reason to every other lake on this mountain.
• Lake Arrowhead Village — 6.1 mi
  A reservoir that lost in court and became a resort — and the 1920s village that made its name was burned down on purpose.
• SkyPark at Santa's Village — 7.0 mi
  The Christmas park that opened six weeks before Disneyland, and franchised itself on advice from the McDonald brothers.
• Original McDonald's Site — 7.5 mi
  The corner where two brothers invented fast food, now an unofficial museum the corporation has never blessed.

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