Wild West Lives On : Ripe with history, the Newhall area of the Santa Clarita Valley is today a quiet town that growth bypassed

In August of 1923, an actor named William S. Hart rode around a place called Melody Ranch in a town called Newhall, playing a Western hero named Wild Bill Hickok. More than 70 years later, Melody Ranch hosted the Western’s remake, this time starring actor Jeff Bridges.

Newhall, a part of the city of Santa Clarita that is roughly 11 square miles with nebulous boundaries, is ripe with the history of the Old West. The first gold strike was made there, six years before the discovery at Sutter’s Mill that set off the Gold Rush.

Newhall was home to the first successful oil wells west of Pennsylvania and has the oldest existing oil refinery in the West. The last grizzly bear shot in California was shot in Newhall in 1912.

Hart, a movie star, writer and director of Western feature films, was the first movie-maker to emphasize realistic settings and authentic action in his work. He chose Newhall, a dusty town flanked by picturesque, wooded canyons about 30 miles north of Los Angeles, because it looked so much like a place where cowboys and Indians might duke it out in the best Western melodrama. And indeed, it was.

Incorporated in 1989 as part of the city of Santa Clarita (which also includes Valencia, Canyon Country and Saugus), Newhall constitutes about one-fourth of the city’s estimated 150,000 residents. It is the oldest section of the city, and remains the least developed in a valley that struggles to maintain a commitment to slow growth in spite of an influx of Angelenos fleeing smog, crime and congestion.

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Newhall residents appreciate its uniquely western heritage, especially since the community is in the shadow of the master-planned development of Valencia, on the northern side of Lyons Avenue. They celebrate the differences.

“Newhall has had its share of outlaws and banditos ,” said longtime resident Jerry Reynolds, curator of the Santa Clarita Valley Historical Society, who moved to Newhall with his wife Myrna in 1972. “But today it’s generally a story of hard-working businessmen and slow growth. Most of the growth has bypassed Newhall, which is really just a bedroom community today.”

Valencia was built in the 1960s by the Newhall Land & Farming Co., formed by descendants of the original landowner Henry Mayo Newhall. Newhall, an auctioneer, purchased the Rancho San Francisco, a Mexican land grant, in 1875. The Southern Pacific Railroad came through a year later, running passengers and freight between Yuma, Ariz., and Seattle. Newhall became one of the hundreds of “tank towns” that supplied water for the trains’ steam engines.

The town was a supply center for the entire Santa Clarita River Valley, until the founding of Valencia, curator Reynolds said. After that, things shifted: retail stores moved off San Fernando Road and into stucco mini-malls on Lyons Avenue. Condos filled in the empty spaces, which produced a need for more mini-malls even farther away. The development of Canyon Country epitomized the condo-and-mini-mall phenomenon while Newhall stayed pretty much the same.

The residential neighborhood of Happy Valley, an area of odd custom homes on large lots off Calgrove Boulevard, was begun in the 1940s. Prices there now start at $180,000 for a two-bedroom house “that probably needs some fixing up,” said Mike Lebecki, a real estate agent with ReMax Santa Clarita. There’s Hidden Valley, “which makes no sense since it’s built on a hill,” Lebecki said. Prices range from $260,000 to $400,000 for 2,500 to 3,800 square feet. “These are big view estates built in the mid-1980s,” Lebecki said. There’s Friendly Valley, a full-service retirement village that is completely self-contained, composed of attached duplexes that cost between $40,000 and $180,000.

There’s also the Princess Tract off Sierra Highway, built in the early 1960s, with price tags between $140,000 and $180,000 for 1,100 to 2,000 square feet. “It’s one of the older tracts, but it doesn’t look like a tract because the trees are all filled in,” Lebecki said. “That’s the big attraction.” And at the higher end is Peachland Estates near Happy Valley, an upscale development of four- and five-bedroom custom homes begun in the 1980s. Homes there are about $700,000 for 3,000 to 4,000 square feet on about a half-acre.

There is more estate housing in Placerita Canyon, where huge ranches sprawl along the side of the road, which winds through the canyon. The road is marred by potholes during the winter rains because of an ongoing dispute between the homeowner’s association and the county, which says it is a private road and should be maintained privately.

“Newhall is probably the most diverse (in all of Santa Clarita) as far as types of housing,” said Glenn Adamick, assistant planner for the city of Santa Clarita. “Some areas are still very rural. But then you have the older track homes from the ‘50s and ‘60s, and tiny bungalows in East Newhall built in the 1920s.” Adamick estimated there are about 6,000 single-family homes in Newhall.

Bert Zook, 56, has bought one of them. Zook purchased a three-bedroom, two-bath 1965 house with attached garage on Walnut Street for $155,000. Recently divorced, he moved to Newhall from Burbank, and is now just down the street from the automotive business he has owned for 16 years.

His 2,200-square-foot house is on a quiet cul-de-sac. The pie-shaped lot is home to mature trees that shade his back yard in the afternoon. Zook said he has always loved Newhall, “but since it has been incorporated as a city, there have been lot of positive changes. The street maintenance is much better.”

There is also “virtually no crime,” said Operations Lt. Marvin Dixon with the Santa Clarita Valley sheriff’s station. He says crime has virtually leapfrogged from the San Fernando Valley to the Antelope Valley.

“We’re actually blessed,” said Dixon, pointing out that Santa Clarita is ranked fourth safest of U.S. cities with populations of more than 100,000. “That’s why there are a lot of policemen living up here--they know how safe it is,” he said.

Most of the crime is graffiti vandalism, which the city chases after with a posse of graffiti abatement experts to wipe it out as fast as it occurs.

“Most of my buyers are from the San Fernando Valley who come up here because we are still a bedroom community, not far from L.A., with a low crime rate,” said Loretta Rollins of RR Gable Realtors. “There’s still a small-community feeling.”

Newhall, at the southern end of Santa Clarita, is generally perceived to be much farther north, yet it is only 20 minutes from Los Angeles.

Stewart Tracy, 39, and his wife, Jacqueline, 29, commute into Los Angeles every day. They bought a two-bedroom, two-bath 1940s Spanish-style home for $155,000.

“It had been completely remodeled in 1990. There was literally only one original wall left standing,” said Tracy, whose home has vaulted ceilings, exposed beams, Mexican pavers on the floor and solid oak cabinets throughout.

The Tracys each spend about an hour a day commuting. And in the evenings, they take their children, Adrian, 8, and Stephen, 1, for a walk in the park. “You would never think of doing that anywhere else,” Tracy said.

Good schools that benefit from high parent participation are another reason people move to Newhall. “We are small and that lends itself to parents becoming involved,” said Dr. Anne Hazlett, assistant superintendent of the Newhall School District, which has six elementary schools, two of which won national distinguished school awards last spring.

Education is a tool the city is trying to use to thwart construction of a 190-million-ton capacity landfill in Elsmere Canyon, the place where Fremont blazed a trail south to the San Fernando Valley in 1847. Residents are learning how the dump might foul the area’s ground water and streams and affect traffic and noise levels in the valley.

“It’s always been a sort of us-against-them mentality,” said John Boston, 44, who has lived in and around Newhall since 1964 and currently rents a house in Placerita Canyon. “We’ve always been sort of a dumping ground for the county’s unwanted projects--their dumps and prisons.”

Boston, who edits the entertainment section of the hometown newspaper, the Signal, characterized Newhall as a place where you still see dusty fellows saunter up to the bar with an ounce of dirt rolled up in their shirt sleeves or appear at the Way Station, a coffee shop on San Fernando Road, wearing spurs.

“It’s really an area in transition,” Boston said. “The old-timers are trying to maintain an old-time feeling.”

Newhall Home Sale Data

Sample Size (for 10-year period):1,286 Ave. home size (square feet):1,868 Ave. Year Built:1968 Ave. No. Bedrms:3.36 Ave. No. Baths:2.22 Pool:23% View homes:10% Central air:56% Floodzone:59% Price Range(1993-94) :$75,000-680,000 Predominant Value:$101,000 Age Range :5-88 years Predominant Age :27 years AVERAGE SALES DATA

Year Total $ per Median Sales sq. ft. price 1995* 4 $133.03 $227,500 1994 76 $119.72 $254,434 1993 56 $128.91 $218,159 1992 94 $139.99 $222,073 1991 84 $149.84 $248,827 1990 101 $157.97 $266,108 1989 151 $158.36 $248,299 1988 267 $129.07 $244,512 1987 227 $108.90 $199,581 1986 226 $95.48 $173,724

*1995 data current through January.

Source: TRW Redi Property Data, Riverside