Chesapeake Bay Bridge opened, greatly improving access to the Delmarva Peninsula from Baltimore, Maryland, and Washington, D.C., and spurring a great deal of growth and new investment in the Bethany Beach area. That year, Richard Hall and Elizabeth "Iggie" Hall purchased about 130 acres (52.6 hectares) of marsh land and old farm land from the Delaware Shore Land Corporation. Doing business as the South Bethany Corporation, the Halls sold 50-by-100-foot (15.2-by-30.5-meter) lots to people wishing to build vacation houses on the Delaware coast and named the new community "South Bethany" in order to exploit the popularity among vacationers of Bethany Beach, just to the north. The Halls conceived of South Bethany as strictly residential, with no businesses of any kind within its boundaries. For the next 10 years, the South Bethany Corporation worked to drain and raise marshland to allow additional buildable lots and dug of canals in the community to ensure that people who purchased a lot in South Bethany would have either direct access to the beach along the Atlantic Ocean – where the community provided no lifeguard service, its only safety measure being a torpedo-style life preserver hanging from a post on the beach – or would reside along a canal offering access to inland bays and rivers by boat. By 1959, when a lot cost $1,050 and required a $200 down payment, they had sold 500 lots in South Bethany. Access to the community was via Delaware Route 14, known as Coastal Highway, a paved two-lane road with no shoulders. As the community grew, Route 14 became inadequate for the automobile traffic South Bethany generated, and in 1958 Route 14 was expanded into a four-lane divided highway; it was redesignated as a portion of Delaware Route 1 in the 1970s. At the time, the Delaware Army National Guard would drive its tracked self-propelled anti-aircraft guns from its barracks north of Bethany Beach down Coastal Highway through Bethany Beach and South Bethany to its training grounds just south of South Bethany, where it would engage in antiaircraft training, firing at target drones flying over the Atlantic. Incorporation and expansion 1960s through 1990s Although Iggie Hall of the South Bethany Corporation tried to have South Bethany incorporated as a town even in its early years in order to improve services in the community, she had no success. Meanwhile, a group of South Bethany residents formed the South Bethany