Power Inn Road looked a lot different in the days when the Pony Express rider Sam Hamilton carried mail along the trail that approximated today’s Folsom Blvd., linking Sacramento to St. Joseph Missouri. He changed horses at 5 Mile House in the town of Brighton, a moniker which remains as a street name at the top of what today is Sacramento’s largest industrial and business park. By the turn of the century, the area was an agricultural cornucopia of vineyards, hops fields and dairy farms serving the Capital City’s burgeoning population. But people also needed electrical power, so in 1908 Great Western Power Company paid a whopping $10 for two acres to build an electrical substation. Italian immigrant Louis Basso, who bought 5 Mile House across the road in 1921, converted it to a popular road house called Basso’s Place or the Power Inn. The road to the inn went by a variety of names until after WWII when “Power Inn Road” took hold.