The area, now popular with tourists and naturalists, was once a wilderness dotted with cattle ranches and small farms; electricity did not reach it until the mid-1950s. The splendour of its scenery and the loneliness of its 19th-century homesteaders have been interpreted by Robinson Jeffers (Jeffers, Robinson) in poems such as Women at Point Sur (1927). The poet's home (which he built of local rock and stone) is one of the Big Sur's landmarks. Many other writers, among them Henry Miller (Miller, Henry) and Jack Kerouac (Kerouac, Jack), lived in the region and celebrated it in their work. In the mid-1980s a comprehensive zoning plan was adopted by Monterey county authorities that strictly limited commercial development along a 68-mile (109-km) stretch of Big Sur's twisting and mountainous shoreline.