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The Valley Yesteryear : Profiles: Five longtime residents remember when.

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

The memories of the San Fernando Valley’s oldest longtime residents are set on astage swept clean by progress, and only the smallest props--insignificant details, really--remain, often unrecognized for what they are.

Examples? Catherine Mulholland, the granddaughter of the aqueduct builder, knows that the clump of 75-year-old grapefruit trees on the northwest corner of Corbin Avenue and Nordhoff Street in Northridge is the last remnant of the working area of her father’s 640-acre ranch. But the employees of the neighboring K mart, who pick those sweet grapefruit, know nothing of their significance.

Olive Witmer Reynolds, whose father arrived in Van Nuys with his family in 1914 to found the Missionary Church and went on to own a lumber mill and a hotel, recently watched her childhood home near Vesper Avenue and Vanowen Street bulldozed to make room for an apartment building.

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And she wonders: Did anyone save the exquisite paneling and cabinets--handmade from South American mahogany and other precious woods--in the elegant formal dining room? The indoor working fountain?

One wing of the Lankershim ranch home, built by the family whose patriarch, Isaac, bought much of the south half of the Valley in 1869 from California’s last Mexican governor, remains. But it is not in its original location near the intersection of Lankershim and Ventura boulevards. It is now the Chapel in the Canyon at 9012 Topanga Canyon Blvd. in Canoga Park. The rest of the house was moved as well, but James Dodson of the Valley College Historical Museum said no one knows where.

To be sure, some landmarks still stand. A handful of adobes, such as those built by the de la Osa family in 1849 in what is now Encino, or by the Lopez family in 1882 in San Fernando, are open to visitors.

But for those arriving in the Valley today, there is precious little to tell them that this huge chunk of urban sprawl was dusty, rural, open, relatively remote and even wild in some areas as recently as 50 years ago.

The Valley’s history seems more evanescent than that of other places, perhaps, because its development came relatively late, with dramatic suddenness.

It was but 76 years ago that water arrived in the Valley, via a 233-mile aqueduct from the Owens River in the Sierra. And the coming of that water presaged the dramatic growth of all of Los Angeles and spurred the founding of Van Nuys in 1911, Canoga Park in 1912 and other developments.

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Growth continued, but in the 1940s, the Valley’s population was only 150,000, and 70% of the land was being cultivated, one history says. Since the end of World War II, however, the population has exploded tenfold.

Such growth has strained the fabric of the Valley’s collective memory. Many founding families have moved on and taken their histories with them. And so the memories of those who remain must be tapped.

People such as Whitley V.N. Huffaker, left; Ray F. Orton, right; Floriza Husbands, above; Margaret Richter, part of a pioneering real estate clan; and Sam Greenberg, whose family was the first of Jewish descent to live in the Valley.

Olive Reynolds said the enormous change has seemed gradual.

Yet, she said: “There is nothing at all the same. The significant thing is that it is a totally 100% different flavor and environment, a different feel. There is nothing that seems to remain of the old flavor.”

Except memory.

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