In the region’s early days, the California Central Railroad connected Placer and Sacramento counties. Today, Sierra College Boulevard is a link between the two municipalities, with an institute of higher learning, nature preserve and a variety of housing tracts along the way.
Stretching southward from Highway 193 at Lincoln to the Sacramento County line, Sierra College Boulevard was a sleepy side street before being awakened by a blitz of residential and commercial development in the last quarter of the 20th century. The meandering byway got its moniker from its namesake campus in Rocklin.
Before the modern community college was constructed, the county’s core of higher education was located in Auburn. Known as Placer Junior College, the school was established in the late 1930s on land that served as the city’s first regional park.
Now the site of Placer High School, the original campus’s buildings reflect Mission-style architecture with courtyards connecting the sets of classrooms. The walls were adorned with Gold Rush vignettes painted by workers hired through President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration; a program designed to stimulate the economy when unemployment in the U.S. was rampant.
Placer Junior College was renamed Sierra College in 1952, then moved to raw land in Rocklin nine years later. The opening of the contemporary campus set off an explosion of new retail and commercial venues, office strips and apartment complexes. Tracts of new homes followed, spreading out from the campus to the south.
The boulevard’s north side remained more pastoral, slicing from Interstate 80 north to farm and ranch lands on the outskirts of Loomis, Penryn and Lincoln. It kept a slow pace until the Twelve Bridges master-planned community began adding an 18-hole golf course, Del Webb’s Sun City Lincoln Hills development and clusters of upscale neighborhoods to the landscape.
Now Sierra College Boulevard is a handy shortcut, taking traffic from the Loomis Basin to sprigs of homes sprouting on the valley floor. But the majority of residential growth is south of the college, where homes perch in the hills cresting above Roseville’s professional and financial district.
Not far from the business hub is access to the newly opened Miners Ravine Overflow Channel Retention Basin Facility Project. The big name represents a small nature preserve with a paved walkway that ties to Roseville’s skein of bicycling and walking trails.
As traffic whizzes by on Sierra College Boulevard, birds and butterflies flit and flutter through the wetlands vegetation and stands of native oak. With interpretive exhibits, wildflowers and benches edging the track, the passive park is a place for exercise, education and observation.
Fresh neighborhoods, parcels holding expansive estates and long-established subdivisions play leapfrog along the avenue, through Roseville and portions of Granite Bay. Sierra College Boulevard simply blends into Hazel Avenue at the Placer-Sacramento county line, with Highway 50 and Rancho Cordova a few more miles to the south.
While mirroring Placer County’s diversity, Sierra College Boulevard is graduating from a bucolic back road to a throbbing thoroughfare.