ECV Marker
Marker and Monument
Home of the Chiriaco Family
Cafe, manged by the Chiriaco Family |
We found this marker at Chiriaco Summit, which is the high point of Highway 10 in the Mojave Desert. Originally there was only a gravel road that paralleled the Bradshaw Trail from the Coachella Valley to Blythe. The land was purchased by Joe Chiriaco, an entrepreneur from Alabama. After traveling west to attend a college football game in the Rose Bowl in 1925, he decided to stay and found employment with the Los Angeles Bureau of Water and Power (now Los Angeles Department of Water and Power or LADWP). He heard of plans to pave Box Canyon Road, so he purchased Shaver Summit and broke ground on a service station and general store. The hearsay proved true, and on August 15, 1933, the same day that cars began traveling over the brand-new U.S. Highway 60, Shaver Summit was open for business.
Even more bustle came to the area when construction began on the Colorado River Aqueduct in the mid-1930s. This project of epic scale, which brought water to Riverside from Lake Havasu, tunneled through the mountains north of town. Joe worked on the project as a surveyor. Around this time, he met his wife, Ruth, a nurse from the Coachella Valley.
In 1942, Joe had an unlikely visitor: General George S. Patton. Patton had the daunting task of training a million men to endure the harsh conditions of the Sahara Desert in Northern Africa, and he had found the right place: 18,000 square miles of Mojave and Colorado Desert – the entire southeast corner of California and part of Arizona. The area would be known as the California/Arizona Maneuver Area (CAMA). Patton chose a site a mile east of Shaver Summit to establish the headquarters of his operation, Camp Young. During the time the base was active, Joe was visited by countless soldiers who were drawn “like bees to blossoms” to his well-stocked general store. Operations were conducted until 1944, when the Allies declared victory in the Sahara.
|