The mill closed in 1893, and the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and several fires reduced the town to almost nothing by 1921; in 1922, the road that would become Highway 128 was built, re-using portions of the train bed. The inn remained open until the 1970s; the Navarro Mill Company House, and the Mill Superintendent's House (now home to the Navarro-by-the-Sea Center, a nonprofit group that maintains the buildings) also remain. The town at the mouth of the Navarro River was not the only town in the area called Navarro. After the mill at the mouth of the Navarro burned down in 1902, G.C. Wendling built a new mill on the North Fork of the Navarro River, near the inland tip of what is now the park. In 1905, the town of Wendling was founded around the mill. In 1914, the Wendling Mill was purchased by the Navarro Lumber Company, at which point the town of Wendling also became known as Navarro Mill and eventually Navarro. In order to distinguish it from the inland Navarro, the town at the beach became known as Old Navarro, Navarro Ridge, or Navarro-by-the-sea. In 1970, the beach and Fletcher's Inn (by then known as the Navarro-by-the-Sea Hotel) came to the attention of the California Supreme Court in the law case Dietz v. King, also known as Gion–Dietz because it was decided together with another case, Gion v. City of Santa Cruz. Starting in around 1949, the owners of the hotel had posted a 50 cent toll on the dirt access road to the beach, although beachgoers had not always paid the charge. The King family bought land including the beach and the road in 1959, and blocked public access to the beach; the Dietzes, representing the public, sued in 1966. The Supreme Court considered the hundred-year-long history of free public access to the beach (interrupted only during World War II, when the U.S. Coast Guard used it as a base for their patrols) and ruled that the access road was a public right-of-way. The Paul M. Dimmick State Park, a site now part of Navarro River Redwoods, was established in 1928; it was named after a former superintendent at the Albion Lumber Company. The surrounding land of Navarro River Redwoods State Park was purchased on behalf of the California state park system by the Save the Redwoods League in 1987. The parks department also