Utopia Scheme Didn’t Live Up to His Dream

In a little-known piece of local lore, the San Fernando Valley was home to the only utopian colony within the borders of present-day Los Angeles, a short-lived but colorful experiment set up by a Massachusetts idealist named William Ellsworth Smythe.

In 1913, Smythe visited what would eventually become the community of Tujunga. Enraptured by its majestic beauty and invigorating air, he persuaded a local landlord to allot 240 acres for a cooperative colony of families to support themselves on acre lots purchased for $800 apiece.

It was the newest outpost to embody Smythe’s philosophy, following the success of his back-to-nature community established four years earlier near San Diego.

“A little land and a living, surely, is better than desperate struggle and great wealth, possibly,” declared Smythe, a sometime journalist who made his name by championing irrigated farming in the Midwest and West.

Within two years, the new “Little Lands” community-- which also went by its Spanish name, Los Terrenitos--attracted 500 men, women and children, who tilled their irrigated lots and gathered at the community clubhouse for town-hall meetings, dances, and music and literary programs.

But the area’s rocky soil, which Smythe had underestimated, soon proved too large a problem for the colonists. So, too, did World War I, which sapped the community of able-bodied young men.

And eventually, the lure of quick money in real estate ended the dream, as the Little Landers sold off their subdivided lots in the 1920s to land-hungry developers at a handsome profit.

As for Smythe, who held tenaciously onto his ideals, he became an official with the federal government after the Great War. In 1922, he died in New York at the age of 61.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

To commemorate

the bicentennial of the San Fernando Mission and the San Fernando Valley for 200 days we will feature people-some famous, some notorious-who left their mark on the area.