Leucadia History, Street Names, and the Town Called Merle

I drive Vulcan and Neptune most days of my working life, and it took me years to stop and actually wonder why a funky stretch of North County coast is sign posted like a map of the ancient Mediterranean. The answer turned out to be better than I expected — and it includes a stretch of roughly twenty years when this place had two names and the Post Office preferred the other one. Here's the story behind the street names.

— Nikol Klein, Compass Luxury | Voted Best Real Estate Agent in Encinitas — San Diego Magazine Best of 2026

Hygeia. Hymettus. Eolus. Vulcan. Phoebe. Neptune. Piraeus. Orpheus. Athena. Urania.

Read them in a row and they sound like an index to a classics syllabus. They're street names in a beach town, and you can drive the whole collection end to end in about ten minutes.

A Name Borrowed From the Ionian Sea

Leucadia takes its name from Lefkada, one of the Ionian Islands off the western coast of Greece. The community dates to roughly 1870, and the naming is credited to a group of English settlers — spiritualists, by most accounts, who came looking for religious freedom and found a bluff-top stretch of coastal sage scrub that suited them.

They translated the name as place of refuge, or sheltered paradise. Both readings turn up in the local histories, and neither is a strict translation, but both tell you exactly what these people thought they had found.

Before they arrived, the place was nearly called something far less romantic. Nathan Eaton — a Civil War veteran from New York, beekeeper, and by every description an eccentric of the first order — settled the first 80 acres south of Batiquitos Lagoon in 1875. He built his house out of boards and metal powder cans scavenged from the railroad camp, drove a wagon held together with bale rope, and scattered salt bush seed from his pockets as he went. An early proposal put his name on the map as Eatonville. The spiritualists won that one.

The street names followed, applied over the community's early decades — the local histories credit a San Diego development company with formalizing them. And here's the detail most retellings get slightly wrong: they aren't strictly Greek. Vulcan and Neptune are Roman. Hymettus is a mountain in Attica, Piraeus is the port of Athens, Sparta and Marathon are towns, Olympus is a mountain, and Urania is a muse. What's on those signs isn't a pantheon. It's a whole classical geography — gods, muses, mountains, and a harbor — scattered across a few square miles of California coast.

The Town That Was Also Called Merle

Now the part that surprised me.

The United States Post Office balked at Leucadia. Too long, too strange, too much trouble on a cancellation stamp. So for official purposes, this place became Merle — named for the second son of E.B. Scott, a newspaperman and railroad superintendent who helped lay out the town in 1888.

Scott had arrived by train with his family in 1883, uncertain whether they'd stay. He wrote later about the "cool and pleasant ozone breezes and wildflower beauties of creamy-white, pink, yellow, gold and crimson, scattered everywhere." They never left. Anyone who has watched the light go gold over the 101 on an August evening knows the feeling he was describing.

Merle was not a passing clerical footnote. A geological map from 1898 records it as a registered town. Postcards mailed as late as 1908 still carry the Merle cancellation. For something close to two decades, this community answered to two names depending on whether you were talking to a neighbor or addressing an envelope.

Leucadia outlasted the paperwork. The tiny post office Scott applied for still stands at 1160 N. Coast Highway 101, and it remains one of the most quietly beloved buildings in town.

The Trees Were a Mistake

The eucalyptus canopy — the thing everyone photographs, the thing the community has organized to protect and replant — exists because of a failed business decision.

When the Santa Fe Railroad came through in 1881, crews planted eucalyptus by the countless thousand, reasoning that a fast-growing hardwood would make excellent railroad ties. The wood split as it dried. It was useless for ties.

So the trees were simply left to grow. Within a generation they had become the landmark that told drivers coming south from Los Angeles they were nearly to San Diego. The spiritualists, meanwhile, planted cypress groves among them at their outdoor meeting ground — a place called Spirit Woods, where local folklore has them dancing in white robes. You know it today as Leucadia Roadside Park.

An accident of failed forestry became the single most recognizable feature of the neighborhood.

What Survived

Leucadia became part of the City of Encinitas at the 1986 incorporation, alongside Olivenhain, Cardiff-by-the-Sea, and the two Encinitas districts. On paper, it stopped being its own town.

In practice, nobody told Leucadia. The 1887 Victorian rail depot was moved north up the coast and painted lemon yellow; it pours coffee now as the Pannikin. A World War II aircraft-spotting station on the eastern hill is commemorated by a bronze plaque, and the ocean view it was chosen for is formally protected as a historic view corridor — one of the very few places on this coast where a sightline is preserved by designation rather than luck.

That is the thread running through all of it. Leucadia is a place that has repeatedly refused to be tidied up — by the Post Office, by the railroad's plans for its trees, by incorporation. Having built my practice across this coast and closed more than $200M in sales here, I'd tell you that refusal is precisely what buyers respond to. You cannot manufacture a neighborhood that spent twenty years arguing with the mail.

Ten names out of the ancient Mediterranean, hiding behind the eucalyptus and a row of surf shops.

Which of those streets do you know and love by heart?

If Leucadia has your attention — whether you've lived under those trees for decades or you're just starting to look here — I'd welcome a conversation about what makes this stretch of coast hold its value.

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— Nikol Klein | Top 1% Luxury Agent | Voted Best Real Estate Agent in Encinitas — San Diego Magazine Best of 2026 | CA DRE #01982201