WOODLAND HILLS : Statues Pose in Background at Pierce College

Children no longer flock to the Miner ‘49er or his daughter, Clementine, and Two-Gun Rosie the Kickin’ Queen has lost part of her nose.

The Old West never looked so old.

Welcome to California Registered Historical Landmark No. 939, where about a dozen faded, cement statues of Western folk icons sit incongruously on benches behind the Pierce College agriculture department, painted eyes fixed on the hilly farmland like the homeless of another era.

“I guess they found a home on these benches,” mused Mick Sears, agriculture and natural resources department chairman, who said he rarely notices the statues anymore. “But they’re pretty much hidden from people.”

There are no signs pointing the way to the larger-than-life figures and Boot Hill “graveyard,” which were visited by tens of thousands of schoolchildren during the late 1980s.

But that was before Pierce cut off funding for student tour guides and allowed its livestock on the farm to dwindle by about 66%, Sears said.

“We can’t do group tours anymore, but we still get a few picnickers on weekends,” Sears said. “Most of them say something like, ‘What are these statues doing here?’ ”

Visitors, he said, usually stop to read the irreverent epitaphs on the Boot Hill headstones, such as the memorial to Trapper Joe, “Hanged by Mistake By a Burbink Mob. A Sorry Job;” or to Red Finn, who “choked on a cork floating in a jug of gin. Dyed in good spirits.”

The once-garishly painted folk art pieces were created by John Henry Ehn, a Michigan-born animal trapper, about a decade after he came to the San Fernando Valley in 1941.

Ehn gave up trapping soon after he arrived and devoted his life to folk art. The concrete statues and Boot Hill headstones took about 30 years to complete at Ehn’s Sun Valley home, which he dubbed Old Trapper’s Lodge.

After Ehn died in 1981, his family and a Los Angeles-based conservationist successfully lobbied the state to designate the lodge, statues and Boot Hill a historic landmark. The statues and headstones were moved to Pierce in 1988 after the family sold their father’s property, said Rosemarie Farish, Ehn’s youngest daughter.