Planning for growth in the Sacramento region is not a new idea. There was a time when Sutter’s Fort sat virtually alone on a knoll amid fields and grazing lands. Today, the view from the Fort is much different.

Growth, however, was always the area’s destiny. As early as the late 1840s, ambitious plans with a grid filled by streets were drawn for Sutterville, but the eventual founding of the City of Sacramento usurped Sutter’s development plans.

In 1855, when Sacramento was a metropolitan center of 15,000, one of the area’s first great transportation initiatives was completed. The Sacramento Valley Railroad, developed by Col. Charles Wilson and a young engineer named Theodore Judah (who later led engineering on the plan to build a railroad across the Sierra), sent its first locomotive on the 22-mile trek to Folsom. The SVRR’s vice president was another young man, William Tecumsah Sherman, who in 1848 had helped plan the City of Sacramento but is far more famed as a Civil War general.

While the Gold Rush brought the most famous influx of new residents to the area and instantly created burgeoning new towns, it may have been the Golden Spike that had the greatest long-term effect. When the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railways were connected at Promontory Point, Utah, on May 10, 1869, the new transcontinental railroad which terminated in Sacramento opened the door for the first time to thousands of Easterners who could now traverse the Sierra Nevada in relative comfort.

Later, railroad companies would offer bargain basement fares to bring Americans west—often to encourage people to settle on land owned and developed by the railroads. Railroads also opened the East to California and the West, meaning that agricultural products that supported the local economy could now be shipped to new markets.

Just as today, Sacramento has built a reputation for innovation in planning. In the 1920s, John Nolen, who would later be called “The Father of American City Planning,” was hired to shape the growing city. His designs for the City of Sacramento are important factors in the shape it has retained to this day.

The construction of Highway 50 to replace Folsom Boulevard and Interstate 80 to supplant Auburn Boulevard as the primary eastern thoroughfares had much the same effect as the opening in 1940 of the West’s first freeway, the Arroyo Seco Parkway (now the Pasadena Freeway), in Los Angeles. The automobile now made it possible live in outlying cities and in developments—dubbed “suburbs”—that were too far away for people who worked in the urban area.

More and more, individual towns were becoming part of a larger overall region with shared interests and economies. Although some enclaves are now just memories on the map, cities and communities still strive to maintain their own identities and destinies. Today, however, local governments realize that the planning decisions they and others make will have effects throughout the region and that their futures are indelibly linked.

The Blueprint Project, designed to guide the region’s growth through 2050, is the next step in the region’s history of planning ahead to maintain the best possible quality of life. The challenges of meeting the needs of the region’s rapidly growing population—driven in part by past planning efforts designed to make the region an attractive place to live and do business—are large but hardly unprecedented. A process that began in the middle of the 19th century will undoubtedly continue in the middle of the 21st when the success of the Blueprint Project is reviewed and new strategies are employed to carry the region through the end of the century.