Stearns Wharf

Stearns Wharf stretches into the Pacific Ocean as a wooden pier supported by over two thousand three hundred pilings. Completed in eighteen seventy-two by local lumberman John Peck Stearns, it functioned for decades as the longest deep-water pier between Los Angeles and San Francisco. It exists because residents once had to row cargo and passengers through dangerous kelp and breakers to reach the shore, a barrier that effectively isolated the town until this structure allowed ships to dock directly.