Recognition for the Bards

The story entitled “McGraths Everywhere” on May 6 said that the McGrath family “at one point owned all the beachfront property from Ventura to Port Hueneme, including the area that is now the Channel Islands Harbor. . . . “

This is utterly incorrect and ignores the key person to whom the building of the Channel Islands Harbor should be attributed: Richard Bard.

It was back in the 1950s that a deed of gift of more than 100 acres from Bard’s family estate, Berylwood Investment Co., to the county of Ventura got the ball rolling. The McGrath family sold the additional needed parcels to the county at a later date.

The Bard land came from the original Rancho de Santa Clara o’La Colonia, the largest rancho in Santa Barbara turned Ventura County purchased by Abraham Lincoln’s then Secretary of War, Tom Scott, in the mid-1800s. Thomas Bard, Richard’s father, managed the land for Scott and later went on to the U.S. Senate.

I recently completed an exhaustive, several-year adventure researching and writing the history of the Channel Islands Harbor. This research included access to all of Richard Bard’s documentation on the Port of Hueneme and Channel Islands Harbor that is the basis of a soon-to-be published book on the subject.

This error doesn’t surprise me. Bard never gave much attention to accolades. His conspicuous absence of ego is flanked by a near three-decade crusade to give Ventura County not only a commercial port of call, but a recreational harbor. This is evidenced by the specific wording Bard insisted upon in the deed of gift--that the land must always remain for public use and not be sold to private interests or it shall revert back to the Bard family.

Richard Bard died in 1969; his family is mostly forgotten, but his generosity endures--hopefully for years to come. He was one of Ventura County’s great statesmen in every sense of the word, in fact and deed. We could use someone like him today.

LOUISE ANN NOETH

Oxnard