 Work on the auto highway began in 1915 at a meeting held at the Battle House Hotel in Mobile, Alabama; and, by the 1920s, the trail linked St. Augustine, Florida, to San Diego, California, with its center and headquarters in San Antonio, Texas.The work at San Antonio, and indeed nationally, was overseen by an executive committee consisting of prominent San Antonio businessmen which met at the Gunter Hotel weekly.Promoters of the Old Spanish Trail claimed that it followed the route used by "Spanish Conquistadors" 400 years earlier, but there was never anything resembling a continuous trail from Florida to California in Spanish times.