Historian’s Presence Helps Preserve Past

Virginia Watson’s appetite for local history was whetted more than 40 years ago when she ran into Emma Johnson Graves, reportedly the first white child born in the San Fernando Valley. The pioneer often rode her horse near Watson’s property, where she befriended Watson and her young daughter.

“I started writing about Emma,” the author said, “and my love of history grew from there.”

As volunteer curator of Chatsworth’s Historical Society Museum, Watson, 76, has collected as many stories as she has artifacts from the San Fernando Valley’s earliest settlers. In the process, she has taught generations of later residents about the land they now occupy.

“It’s important to know what happened in the past so we don’t make the same mistakes twice,” Watson said. “People need to remember the past to keep it alive.”

To that end, the self-described “chronic volunteer” was instrumental in founding the Chatsworth Historical Society, whose initial project was saving the Pioneer Church, the community’s first religious and public gathering place.

Built in 1903, the church attained the status of a city historical monument in 1963, after a lobbying effort by Watson and the historical society.

Two years later, the society, with help from Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, got the city to move the building from its original home on northern Topanga Canyon Boulevard to its current site at Chatsworth’s Oakwood Memorial Park. “Virginia is such a dynamo,” said Lila Schepler, a historical society board member. “She’s one of those wonderful people who has a very positive attitude. She believes anything can get done. And when she’s on board, it does.”

Watson’s research into Valley history began in earnest in 1952, when a property title search revealed that the land she and her husband had purchased was once part of Mission San Fernando. At the time of Watson’s discovery, the northwest Valley was home to citrus, walnut and olive groves. The historian and her husband were busy raising horses and rabbits along with their two daughters. Watson remembers Chatsworth as a “rancher’s paradise.”

The Indiana native was no stranger to the hidden treasures of the City of Angels. She had settled in Highland Park as a young girl when her family followed her father, a postal worker, to Los Angeles during the Depression.

Watson spent her youth haunting the Native American exhibits at the Southwest Museum and frequenting Sycamore Grove Park in Arroyo Seco, later the site of the Pasadena Freeway.

After graduating from Franklin High School in Los Angeles, she met Henry M. Watson on a blind date and the couple married in 1940. They had been married 52 years when he died in 1992.

In the 1950s she began writing features for the Valley News and Green Sheet, an association that lasted more than 20 years.

In 1967 she published “A Child’s History of Chatsworth,” and later, “Chatsworth History,” which is still in print.

Watson is now writing a biography of early Valley resident Minnie Hill Palmer, whose clapboard house, a city monument, sits next to the society’s museum in Chatsworth Park South.

“How do you know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve come from?” Watson asked rhetorically. “That’s my motto and I live and work by it.”

Personal Best is a weekly profile of an ordinary person who does extraordinary things. Please send suggestions on prospective candidates to Personal Best, Los Angeles Times, 20000 Prairie St., Chatsworth, 91311. Or fax them to (818) 772-3338. Or e-mail them to valley@latimes.com