Franklin Riley founded Morro Bay in 1870 as a port — not a town to live in so much as a place to load things: wool, potatoes, barley, dairy goods bound for somewhere else. That was the Central Coast's essential logic for decades. The wharf at Morro Bay, the pier at Cayucos built by Captain James Cass to move cargo up and down the coast, the 1,685-foot pier at Avila Beach handling goods and passengers from 1908 — every one of them was infrastructure before it was scenery. Ships working into Port San Luis did it without a lighthouse until 1890, a fact made vivid on April 29, 1888, when the Queen of the Pacific limped in blind and settled to the bottom 500 feet short of the pier. Nobody died, but the argument was made. The light went up. Some places earn their landmarks the hard way.
