If we don’t write down our history, it’s going to get distorted and forgotten.

There was an unusually large turnout of 28 women and two men at the monthly meeting of the Friends of the Canoga Park Library on Tuesday morning, several visitors having joined the regulars in the community room of a bank building on Topanga Canyon Boulevard to hear the speaker, Catherine Mulholland.

She is the granddaughter of the illustrious engineer William Mulholland, who built the aqueduct that changed the course of the Owens River and the history of Los Angeles. She is writing a history of the old West Valley community of Owensmouth, and that was the subject of her talk.

As it was also a business meeting, treasurer Doris O’Donnell gave the financial report. Thanks to the success of a mini book sale, the treasury had grown from $26.31 in November to $205.82 in December, she said. Expenditures were $5 for the November meeting and $10 for the purchase of a book on Triunfo Canyon.

Head librarian Willa Kurtz reported that the library finally got the drinking fountain that it had awaited for several years.

“We’re still basking in the glory of the drinking fountain,” Kurtz said. “People say, ‘Do you have a drinking fountain?’ and we say, ‘Yes.’ It doesn’t seem natural.”

At last it was time for Mulholland, a child of the San Fernando Valley in a way that few people have been. Mulholland grew up on the 700 acres of the Mulholland family ranch at Nordhoff Street and Corbin Avenue.

Canoga Park, which was then called Owensmouth, was the center of her social world. It had the church, the dance hall and the movie house.

“This valley was the center of my universe,” Mulholland said. “I was a native daughter.”

When she graduated from Canoga Park High School in 1940, Mulholland left the Valley. After that, she lived in Berkeley and New York, returning 30 years later to be close to her mother again.

“I returned to a totally transformed area,” Mulholland said. “I realized that progress is a terrible destroyer. It’s a builder, but it’s also a destroyer. It’s a destroyer of the past.”

She decided to write a history of the early years of her community. She said she conceived of it as a “record of its people, the way the British do so well.”

“If some of us don’t put it down while we’re still alive, it’s going to get distorted and forgotten and fall through the cracks,” she said. “We’ll know nothing more about this town in 1909 than we’ll know about a little English town before the Norman Conquest, when many of the records were destroyed.”

She thought she would begin with the Owensmouth Gazette, later to become the Canoga Park Herald, the community’s newspaper.

“Somewhere, about 20 years ago, the files of that little paper were destroyed,” Mulholland said. “Terrible. Terrible.”

But Mulholland was fortunate. She learned that the personal papers of H. J. Whitley, one of the developers who bought the southern half of the Valley in 1909, had been found in the 1950s and preserved in the UCLA special collections library, where they had scarcely been examined.

She spent a year going through them.

There she found valuable bits of the story of five powerful men who formed a syndicate to buy up the vast wheat farms of Isaac Lankershim and his son-in-law, Isaac Van Nuys, and divide them into the grid of roads and lots that is the Valley of today.

The business deal was wrapped in drama, both within the group and in the world at large.

Mulholland quoted from the musings of Margaret Whitley, who wrote after her husband’s death of the “ingratitude, falsehood and unfaithfulness” of her husband’s business colleagues. Yet, in another passage, Mulholland said, she described her husband as a “genius who succeeded but failed when he became too grasping.”

“What went wrong to create all this rancor and bitterness between these men?” Mulholland asked.

She offered a fleeting answer by giving brief sketches of the other four men. They were Harrison Gray Otis, founder of the Los Angeles Times; Harry Chandler, Otis’ son-in-law and second publisher of The Times; Otto Brant, head of Title Insurance & Trust Co., and Moses Hazeltine Sherman, a member of the Los Angeles Water Board who had stirred controversy by joining a syndicate that bought land in San Fernando.

“Godfather Otis christened the town Owensmouth,” Mulholland said.

The name’s obvious reference to the diversion of water from the Owens River would later entangle it with the popular story that the five developers used influence to enrich themselves by bringing water to the semiarid land they owned.

Mulholland, who learned her grandfather’s part in that story firsthand, characterized the popular version as “myth and fancy.”

But she conceded that Owensmouth “became a moniker the citizens of Owensmouth would have some doubts about later.” So much so that they changed it to the old railroad name, Canoga.

She had no illusions about the the five men and their motives.

“Their appetite for land was insatiable and unbounding,” Mulholland said. “These men were going to have their fingers in every pie.”

Then she ended her talk abruptly.

“In my book I want to continue this story,” Mulholland said. “Today I have just given a prologue.”

Even the prologue sounded better than the record of an English town before the Norman Conquest.