La Jolla’s pioneer families took great pride in owning and operating automobiles, often photographing themselves in their Sunday best beside their cars as they posed for pictures en plein air by dusty roads and beaches. The archives of the La Jolla Historical Society are filled with such photos, primarily taken in the early 1900s as the automobile became more a part of everyday life. Starting Thursday, Dec. 3, a selection of these photographs reproduced from the originals will be on view in Wisteria Cottage, 780 Prospect St., as part of an exhibition titled “All Roads Lead to La Jolla.” It will be open Thursdays and Fridays through December and January coordinating with the Society’s presentation of the “Antique Motor Car Classic” at La Jolla Cove on the Jan. 9-10 weekend. The exhibit also will be open free to the public after the Christmas Parade Dec. 6. So what did La Jolla’s early cars look like and who were the proud drivers behind the wheel? The first car recorded on the streets was Lord Auberon Herbert’s ” horseless carriage” that arrived with the British aristocrat’s visit to the Green Dragon Colony in 1903. It caused a commotion as he drove it along Prospect Street, especially on one occasion when he tipped over with a lady passenger on board. Pioneer Frank Booth was actually the first La Jollan to own and drive a car here — a novelty vehicle of the early 1900s with high “buggy-type” wheels and hard tires. It was manufactured by International Harvester and Booth named it “the scissors grinder.” With the advent of Ford’s popular model T’s, cars became more prevalent on the dusty roads of La Jolla (serious paving was not undertaken until 1918). Anson and Nellie Mills became a familiar sight tooling around on afternoon drives along the beach. Squire Wilson and Willie Wetzell proudly posed for photographs in front of their fancy little motorcars. The Scripps ladies were an awesome sight in their fancy larger ones — Eliza Virginia driving herself in a grand old Packard and Ellen Browning being driven by British chauffeur Fred Higgins in her magnificent 1926 Rolls Royce (one of the phenomenal Silver Ghosts, which today is considered one of the most valuable collector cars with a value of $35 million). Although early cars in La Jolla take on an aura of the picturesque with their dressed-up passengers and antique mechanical designs, driving them on the dusty — or muddy — roads was often another matter. In the winter rains, the Biological Grade (now La Jolla Shores Drive past Scripps Institution of Oceanography) was usually impassable and horses and wagons stood by to pull drivers to safety. La Jollan Sibley Sellew recalled in an oral history in 1964: “The roads to town were, well, they were horse and buggy roads and if we got any rain at all we just couldn’t make it in a car.” Nonetheless, all roads did continue to lead to La Jolla, as new and improved paved streets and highways became the order of the day during the progressive years of the 1920s. In 1926, Muirlands developer Harold James Muir had an idyllic view of La Jolla as a place of beautiful homes in harmony with their owners’ “swift motors” in a landscape “as clear cut as a picture in a camera obscura — lovely homes above a curving shoreline, white roadways where swift motors pass and re-pass, but beyond all the eternal blue of the sea, both changeless and changeable.” Indeed, a different time — no parking problems or traffic! — “Reflections” is a monthly column written for the La Jolla Village News by the La Jolla Historical Society’s historian Carol Olten. The Society, dedicated to the preservation of La Jolla heritage, is located at 7846 Eads Ave.; open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Mon.-Fri.