A Stop on the Big Oak Flat Road Part 1 - Rainbow Pool
- Kathy Brown
- May 1
- 4 min read
By Kathy Brown, Groveland Yosemite Gateway Museum/Southern Tuolumne County Historical Society
The Big Oak Flat Road, built in the 1800s as one of the earliest transportation routes into Yosemite Valley, still serves as Groveland’s Main Street. It was originally the western portion of a trans-Sierra trail used by the MeWuk people of this area to trade with the Paiutes of the Mono Lake region. With the arrival of the Gold Rush it served the miners and settlers as a pack trail between the early gold camps of Big Oak Flat, Garrote (Groveland) and Second Garrote and onward into the mountains.
The development of an actual road was initiated in 1868 by private companies formed to create a transportation route to Yosemite Valley after the Valley was designated as the first public-use lands in the nation by Abraham Lincoln in 1864. The majority of the construction work was done in the early 1870s, much of it by Chinese workers. Until the road’s celebrated completion to the Valley in 1874, the last part of the journey, a steep switchback descent from the Valley’s north rim to the Valley floor, could only be done on foot or by pack animal.
For many years the road closed as soon as seasonal rains and snows began about 13 miles east of Groveland near what is now known as the Rainbow Pool area. It reopened when the melt occurred in Spring. An 1870s guest book from Groveland’s very first hotel, the Washington (Savory) Hotel in use 1850s - 1880s, is on display in the Groveland Yosemite Gateway Museum. Its entries note the seasonal arrival and departure of Yosemite’s Valley’s early businessmen and residents such as J.M. Hutchings, John Muir and Jeremiah Hodgdon who often stayed at the hotel on their way to and from the Valley.
The development of the Big Oak Flat Road created the need for stopping places along its route where meals and overnight accommodations for travelers could be found. A change of horses, blacksmith services, stage and wagon repairs, water and feed for horses were all needed on the journey to the Valley. Use-tolls collected along the way helped pay for the road’s continued construction, improvements, and completion to the valley floor.
Before 1870 the road crossed the South Fork of the Tuolumne River on just a few logs felled across the river at a low water point near Rainbow Pool. It was impassable in winter. The Big Oak Flat Road Company hired James Lumsden to build a covered bridge spanning the narrow part of the river just above a waterfall for a safer and easier crossing. Prior to this, a station for the turnpike was located at Colfax Spring just west of Rainbow Pool area. In the mid 1860s Charles Elwell built a watering stop there at spring that provided a reliable source of good water. Constructing the covered bridge at the Rainbow Pool area created an ideal place to collect tolls - one that could not be circumvented by travelers. The toll booth was then moved to the entrance of the covered bridge.
In about 1895, John Cox, already in his 60s, moved to the area. He had been a bugler for the Confederate Army and a reporter in San Francisco before his arrival. The reason he became a loner far from city life is unknown. He served as the solitary toll collector for the turnpike there there for 20 years. He built a cabin for himself over the huge rock at the bridge making it convenient for him to collect tolls of arriving freighters, stages and foot travelers. The pool below the bridge became his bathing area. It is said that the sounds of his bugle were heard as travelers left his toll area. Teamsters delivering food and goods to areas beyond the toll area made sure Cox was supplied with his needs. He lived within earshot of those arriving at the bridge until the tolls were no longer collected.
In 1901 after two steam-driven locomobiles traveled the Big Oak Flat Road to Yosemite, an urgent letter arrived at company headquarters from John Cox, “What toll should I get from the new horseless vehicles that occasionally struggle by?” Headquarters answered, “50 cents for each passenger each way” and also with that reply a definition of an automobile as “a vehicle not used with horses.” At 80 years plus, Cox’s twenty-year career as toll keeper ended in 1915 when use of the road became free under its transfer to Tuolumne County. In 1934 the county transferred the route to the state.
Watch for Part 2 of A Stop on the Big Oak Flat Road - Cliff House.
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