Posts Tagged ‘National City’

D. C. Collier had his new automobile on the streets yesterday for the first time and the vehicle, when it was not speeding up and down the street, was the center of an admiring throng. . . He has the distinction of being the first San Diegan to own an automobile. –San Diego Union, Feb. 13, 1900

San Diegans marveled at the sight of Charlie Collier’s automobile in 1900. His three-wheeled “French designed” vehicle could speed up to 25 miles per hour and go 50 miles on three quarts of gasoline. For most San Diegans, it was the first automobile they had ever seen.

Read the story of how San Diego Discovers the Automobile.

Jubilation greeted the opening of the Sweetwater Dam in the spring of 1888. On the heels of the great land “boom of the eighties,” National City and the south bay reveled in the completion of an engineering marvel, the tallest masonry arch dam in the United States, which created San Diego County’s first large reservoir of water–an essential key to the region’s growth and prosperity.

The story of Building the Sweetwater Dam.