Baker Highway Maintenance Station

Baker Station is a remote highway maintenance compound beside Highway 108 at 6,207 feet in the Sierra Nevada, within the Stanislaus National Forest. Built in the early 1930s by the California Highway Commission's Division of Highways, it sits on the site of a 19th-century toll station on the Sonora-Mono Wagon Road. The station housed the workers and machinery that kept the high-elevation stretch of the trans-Sierra highway open west of Sonora Pass. Eleven historic buildings survive in two clusters: a residential row facing the highway, with superintendent's, foreman's and workman's cottages, a dining hall, social hall and bunkhouse, and an operational area with a truck shed and generator house. Residential buildings are wood-clad, while work buildings use corrugated metal. The State used the station until the 1960s, intermittently until 1981, and then abandoned it. Its minimal alteration, rustic materials and deliberate social layout make it a rare tangible record of early state highway maintenance in California.