The Story of the KP Highway, Part II

It was possible for the Dort to be easily driven at 30 miles an hour without inconvenience to the passengers.”

“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.”

Later that year, 20-year-old Fred Rouse would concur. “The roads are in bad shape,” he told the Ledger’s local correspondent. It had taken him five hours to drive from Gig Harbor to his parents’ house in Longbranch, “including two hours getting out of a ditch.”

It was like driving an obstacle course.

The drawbridge between Purdy and the Wauna sandspit often got stuck; the spit flooded and was washed out regularly at high tide and during storms. To make it up the hill to the old Ira Creviston Road, which ran roughly from today’s 94th Ave NW to Longbranch, drivers had to negotiate the steep McLeod-Alexander Road, part of which is now Goldman Drive NW. The venerable old Ira Creviston Road itself, a dirt track by then in its fourth decade, was routinely described as “rough.”

The 20th century was coming of age; automobiles were here to stay, and governments at all levels had their work cut out for them. The call for better roads, a movement first launched by bicyclists in 1880 and amplified nationwide by the American Automobile Association, founded in 1902, was getting louder.

Lawmakers, county surveyors and engineers, and the press were paying attention.

A Role for the State

Early Washington laws did not have much to say about county roads other than detailing the process county commissioners had to follow when “establishing, laying out, and vacating” roads. The only requirement, that county roads had to be 60 feet wide, was in effect aspirational: commissioners were free to approve a lesser width on a road petition.

The state established standards that improved roads had to meet for the first time in 1893. The law specified a road’s width, incline, and drainage, and required improved roads to be surfaced with a durable material such as macadam, gravel, or crushed stone to “permit…heavy freighting by team and rapid driving during any time of the year.” Counties were still responsible for building and maintaining county roads.

In 1907, the state took on a more active role through the newly established state highway board, the precursor to the Department of Highways and today’s WSDOT. Counties had to submit their plans for improving a given road to the board for review. If the plans were approved, the state paid for half of the cost of construction.

Finally, in 1911, a new state law went even further, providing for improved county roads known as Permanent Highways, a name intended to highlight their permanent surface material and construction. Once again, counties submitted plans and drawings to the highway board, but this time, if those plans were approved, the state paid for the full project out of its Permanent Highway Fund, itself funded from each county’s property taxes.

Permanent highways became popularly known as state roads, but they were still county roads.

And so it was that on June 28, 1919, ironically only a few weeks before Maybin’s article lamenting the condition of the roads on the peninsula, the highway board gave the green light to Pierce County’s plan for improving the first segment of the road between Gig Harbor and Longbranch. By the time the call to contractors went out in March 1920, the project covered the 2.1 miles from Purdy to the top of the Wauna hill.

“Peninsula Roads to Be Improved,” the headline in The (Tacoma) News Tribune read on July 18, 1919. Better roads would mean “rapid development of the rich territory served,” the paper added, a development stymied “principally by the lack of good roads.”

The proposed road was designated as Permanent Highway No. 13 on the state’s records, but for decades to come it would be known as the Gig Harbor-Longbranch Highway, the name used by the commissioners in their proposal to the state.

New and Improved

Construction on the first 2.1 miles got under way in the spring of 1920.

By the time that project was completed the next year, the drawbridge had been replaced with a new, fixed span, high enough to allow passage of marine traffic; the sandspit had been built up and planked “to such an extent that it would take a cyclone to wash it out,” the News Tribune reported.

There was also a new road segment, surveyed by county engineer Wilton I. Lippard in the summer of 1919. An iconic switchback known to everyone on the Key Peninsula today as the Wauna Curves, it featured an easier grade than the steep McLeod-Alexander Road.

By the time the entire Gig Harbor-Longbranch Highway was completed at the end of 1923, it was made up of a mix of new and existing roads, built or improved to permanent highway standards.

Two significant new roads were built, bypassing the old Ira Creviston Road: the 5.1 miles from today’s Creviston Dr NW to Key Center, and the roughly 2 miles from Creviston Road SW to Longbranch. With minor realignments, the rest of the highway followed the route established by older, existing roads.

The highway was graveled and would not get paved until the 1930s. The first sections to be paved were the Wauna Curves in 1930 and a mile north of Key Center in 1931, both paid for by the state’s Farm-to-Market Road fund created in 1929 using a 3-cent-a-gallon tax on gas. And a 1941 map shows the entire length of the highway as paved or surfaced with “oil mat,” an older term for chip seal.

The past was history.

Highway to the Future

“A successful effort has been made in the making of the new highway to eliminate as many curves as possible,” Roy McMillan, the News Tribune’s automotive editor at the time, wrote after touring the peninsula in his Dort automobile in May 1923. “The road (is) in such condition,” he noted, “that it was possible for the Dort to be easily driven at 30 miles an hour without inconvenience to the passengers.”

The development of the highway, McMillan concluded, “will mean that, in the next decade, this section of Pierce County is due for the recognition its merits deserve.”

About time, Ira Creviston might have added.

The first installment of this two-part series was featured in our September 2026 edition.