For decades after it was built in the 1920s and before parts of it became State Route 302 in the 1960s and the Key Peninsula Highway in the 1980s, the county road from Longbranch to Wauna was simply the Gig Harbor-Longbranch Highway.
It had also briefly been Permanent Highway 13 until the segment that would become SR 302 was designated Secondary State Highway 14B in the 1930s.
Those names have come and gone, but are preserved in old maps, newspaper articles, and county and state archives. Those sources are layers in a palimpsest that, taken together, tell the history of the most important road on the Key Peninsula. As those layers are peeled back, they add depth and texture to the peninsula’s history since settlers arrived in the late 1800s…