“Someday – not now, perhaps, but someday — there will be a road through some of the prettiest Puget Sound country a motorist can find,” Tacoma Daily Ledger reporter C. R. “Corky” Maybin wrote in the auto section Aug. 10, 1919.
Maybin had crossed from Tacoma to Gig Harbor on the newly inaugurated car ferry and driven along Henderson Bay’s “pretty coves” from Purdy to Longbranch in his Chevy 490 roadster, a popular model introduced in 1915 that sold for $490.
There were, in fact, roads connecting those coves in Henderson Bay, Maybin continued, but they belonged “to the day of Old Dobbin,” built for horses, not automobiles. Motorists had to make the best of it, using them daily only “through necessity.”…