New Museum Keeps Old Lancaster Alive

As W. M. (Bud) Redman leads an impromptu tour of the Western Hotel/Museum in downtown Lancaster, he ventures deeper and deeper into the memories housed in the city’s oldest building and newest cultural center.

“This was my room right here,” says Redman, the city’s 86-year-old treasurer.

He scrutinizes a photograph on the wall from the early 1900s; stiffly posed members of a social club stare back at him: “Jesus, there’s some old-timers.” Redman’s family migrated from Missouri in 1911, in hopes that the desert air would improve his mother’s poor health.

Like Redman, the 101-year-old Western Hotel is a Lancaster institution. It reopened recently as a small city-run museum, which mixes history with a bit of anthropology to recount the frontier saga of Lancaster and surrounding Antelope Valley.

Community interest moved city officials to rescue the building from destruction in the 1970s. The staff of the Lancaster Museum/Art Gallery researched and re-created the hotel’s past, using newspaper archives and the help of Redman and other old-timers who supplied oral histories, photos and keepsakes.

Some exhibits feature photographs, period clothes, furniture and artifacts of people who lived or stayed at the hotel.

Other sections are devoted to American Indian tribes of the region; to former Lancaster resident Judy Garland, who was born Frances Gumm and whose father managed the Valley Theater down the street; and to the pronghorn antelope, which gave the valley its name before a wholesale slaughter wiped out the population by the 1940s.

The museum fulfills the wishes of Myrtle Webber, hotel proprietor from 1914 to 1974, said curator Norma Gurba.

“She had three wishes,” Gurba said. “That the hotel be made a state historical marker, which happened in the 1950s, that it be restored and that it be turned into a museum.”

At the heart of the city on Lancaster Boulevard, the hotel served as a central backdrop for those who founded and built the community: laborers, land speculators, immigrants, scholars, church groups, chamber-of-commerce types, drinkers, scoundrels.

And no shortage of characters, as Redman recalls in his Western drawl: He describes Webber’s husband, George, as a “dried-up little fella” who kept a saloon in the hotel and “liked to get in the jug pretty well.”

Webber was an Englishman; many of the valley’s early settlers were either from England or Germany. He emigrated in 1886, two years before shoemaker and businessman Louis Van Rockabrand built the hotel, originally named the Antelope Valley Hotel.

Webber’s original ambitions were considerably more picturesque than the hospitality business. He headed a project for the London Daily Telegraph in which the pulp from the abundant Joshua trees was to be developed as a paper source. There were stories that Webber hoped to set up a business selling Joshua tree lumber for the manufacture of wooden prosthetics, Redman said.

A contingent of Chinese laborers chopped down scores of trees that were shipped to England, according to museum research, but the London newspaper soon abandoned the idea as costly and ineffective.

Webber stayed, became manager of the hotel in 1903 and purchased it in 1908. He married Myrtle Sullivan in 1910 and placed the property in her name four years later.

Previous owners included Joshua Constable, who changed the name to the Gillwyn Hotel and whose handbill on a museum wall reflects the prejudices of the times: “I never employ Chinese or colored labor.”

The museum exhibits show that the valley’s current boom-town image has had other incarnations. A pre-1900 advertisement touts: “Lancaster: the coming city of the plain.” Unsavory land dealers used doctored pictures depicting oranges on Joshua trees and cardboard cityscapes in the desert to lure customers, Gurba said.

And a newspaper clipping quotes turn-of-the-century Palmdale resident C. W. Dodenhoff’s statement that he enjoyed his visit to Lancaster (population 250), but was glad to get back to the “rural precincts of Palmdale” because he “could never appreciate the rush and hurry of life in a big city.”

Although the word “city” was highly inaccurate, Lancaster grew thanks to the advent of the Southern Pacific Railroad, alfalfa- and fruit-based agriculture and the construction of the California Aqueduct between 1905 and 1913.

George Webber set up a “tent city” next to the Western Hotel to accommodate hundreds of aqueduct workers. Redman recalls the tent city because his grammar school was across the street.

Of the aqueduct workers who frequented saloons at the hotel, and others grouped around Lancaster Boulevard and the Sierra Highway, Redman says, “There were a few fights. They’d get a little inebriated, but not bad.”

The Western Hotel became a town center. The dining room was the birthplace of the Lancaster Chamber of Commerce. It became a makeshift hospital during the influenza epidemic of 1918. Redman and his family came down with influenza, and he has a distinct memory of Myrtle Webber taking a buggy out to their ranch to care for the family.

“Everybody knew Myrtle,” says Redman, who stayed at the hotel when he first moved to town in 1921 to drive a truck for the Union Oil Co. “She was a good woman.”

In 1934, Myrtle Webber became a widow. She sold the land next to the hotel to the federal government, and the Depression-era Works Progress Administration built a post office that remains today. Webber also displayed her toughness by surviving a 1935 gas explosion that damaged the hotel.

The building functioned both as a hotel and community meeting place for almost four more decades. Webber was active in civic affairs and Republican politics: A 1950s-era photo shows her with then-Vice President Richard Nixon.

Webber was placed in a convalescent home in 1971 and died in 1978 at the age of 110. In her absence, the hotel decayed, was vandalized and finally was condemned as unsafe by Los Angeles County in 1974.

A campaign initiated by an eighth-grade history class from the Park View School prevented demolition, however. The Western Hotel Historical Society raised $40,000 to buy the property, and the city began the restoration process, which involved physically moving the building back 10 feet from Lancaster Boulevard.

Redman went on to become a car dealer and an original member of the Antelope Valley Fair Board of Directors. He was appointed city treasurer in 1978.

Redman believes that the hotel’s new look is a bit too modern, but he generally is pleased with the effort to preserve a place where his life and Lancaster’s history intertwine.

“They fixed it up pretty nice,” he says. “It’s nice to have it here for posterity’s sake.”