1919 Del Monte Properties Company Map of Pacific Grove, California

This is a 1919 Del Monte Properties Company map of Pacific Grove, on the Monterey Peninsula, California. It was created to advertise an 'Absolute Auction', in which the highlighted red lots were sold without reserve. Today this area represents some of the world's most valuable real estate.

The Auction

Del Monte Properties ran advertisements in the Monterey Daily Cypress and Monterey American for two weeks before the auction, extolling the event as an investment opportunity. These advertisements made it clear that the three hundred lots to be sold without a reserve would go to the highest bidder, no matter the price. The day after the auction, the Monterey Daily Cypress and Monterey American stated that 196 lots had been sold on Thursday at prices between one-half and one-quarter of what could have been achieved had they been offered to summer tourists.

A Short History of the Del Monte Properties Company

The Del Monte Properties Company was founded in 1919 by Samuel Finley Brown Morse (1885 - 1969), a distant cousin of Samuel Finley Breese Morse, inventor of the telegraph. Morse began working California real estate in 1916. He convinced the Pacific Improvement Company to build the Pebble Beach Golf Links and the Del Monte Lodge. Five days after these properties opened, Morse founded the Del Monte Properties Company and bought the Del Monte Unit (which included the newly built properties in Pebble Beach) from the Pacific Improvement Company. In a letter to a friend, Morse described the purchase as including '18,000 acres of land on the Monterey Peninsula, all of the Pacific Grove and Pebble Beach areas, Del Monte Forest lands (which are traversed by 17-Mile Drive), the Los Laureles Rancho (more commonly called the Del Monte Rancho) Hotel Del Monte and all improvements, Pebble Beach Lodge and all improvements, and the capital stock of the Monterey County Water Works, which supplies water to the towns of Monterey, Pacific Grove and Carmel.' Today, the company is known as the Pebble Beach Company.

Publication History and Census

This map was likely created and published by Barry and Austin Auctioneers to publicize the Pacific Grove auction. Two examples are cataloged in OCLC. One is part of the David Rumsey Map Collection at Stanford University and the other is part of the collection at the University of California Santa Barbara.