Credit: Betsy J. Green
I was only researching the history of a house on East Haley Street for my Great House Detective column in July 2021 . But something unexpected happened, and I ended up wandering all over Santa Barbara. The house on Haley has an old sandstone hitching post on the front parkway. The homeowners are especially proud of their post. I wondered how many hitching posts we still had and where they were.
While writing my Way Back When series of history books , I had noticed that hitching posts were disappearing. “Hitching posts along State Street must go,” announced a local paper in 1914. “This morning, the street department started a crew … digging the posts out of their concrete foundations …. Posts which have been doing duty for numerous years have disappeared.”