L.A.’s Outback : Sandberg : The extinct town made its mark in history by being the nest of an alleged Nazi spy.

The community with the most colorful past doesn’t exist anymore. It’s still found on most maps, but Sandberg is nothing more than a few cement slabs and a rock wall located next to the Ridge Route, the first major highway connecting Los Angeles with the San Joaquin Valley.

A plywood sign erected by car enthusiasts at Pine Canyon Road and the Ridge Route, just north of Sandberg, celebrates the famous roadway: “The Old Ridge Route through the Angeles National Forest was opened in 1915 and hailed as a miracle of modern engineering, providing safety with a maximum speed of 15 m.p.h. and a saving of 44 miles over the former road.”

Sandberg was built by Herman Sandberg, a local rancher originally from the Swiss-German border. It became a well-known and necessary stop along the rugged Ridge Route, whose twisting curves prompted a magazine writer of the era to observe that the road would “give a backache to a king snake.”

“We went from Los Angeles to Bakersfield--took us all day,” groaned Don Metcalfe, a 73-year-old Three Points resident who remembers as a boy plodding through the mountains in a Model T Ford with his uncle.

With its hotel, filling station and stables, Sandberg was a welcome sight for weary travelers, Metcalfe said. Among the amenities were a good dance floor, terrific steaks and, at least for a few years, slot machines.

“It was quite an impressive place,” said Jerry Reynolds, a Santa Clarita Valley historian. “It was all made out of logs, a sort of Swiss chalet structure.”

But Sandberg went into decline when the Ridge Route was replaced by Highway 99 to the west in 1933. Highway 99 eventually was replaced by the Golden State Freeway in 1970. After most of Sandberg burned up in a fire in 1962, no one bothered to rebuild it.

While interviewing old-timers in the area, Reynolds picked up a story about a motherly German woman who, according to authorities, had set up a radio transmitter in the mountains to beam military secrets to the Nazis during World War II. Reynolds later found newspaper reports from 1944 describing the woman’s arrest by FBI agents and labeling Sandberg as a hotbed of seditionists.

“The editor was a bit dramatic in his presentation,” Reynolds said. But as for the alleged spy, he doesn’t know what became of her.

Sandberg’s only surviving building from the fire was hauled off by a forest ranger to a ranch a few miles away. It was the Sandberg brothel.

Reynolds said a former owner of the ranch told him her ranch hands refused to use the three-bedroom building as a bunkhouse. “They claimed it was haunted,” he said. The men supposedly saw a bluish apparition, possibly a woman.

“It’s kind of sad,” Suzanne Spahn, who lives nearby, said of the last relic of Sandberg. “I’m glad the forest ranger saved it.”