Barbara Horton, 86; Co-Founded the Dorland Arts Colony

Barbara Horton, 86, a naturalist and environmentalist who co-founded the Dorland Mountain Arts Colony in Temecula, died Tuesday of cancer at her home in Pasadena.

Born in Oxnard and raised in Altadena, Horton traveled through the wilderness in India and Africa a number of times and wrote about wildlife conservation issues. Her book “Tiger River: Nine Days on a Bend of the Nauranala” (1993) describes a trip to India to observe tigers in 1977.

She was a longtime member of the Southern California chapter of the Nature Conservancy and was instrumental in the group’s acquisition of the Dorland family estate in Temecula in 1974. The 300-acre property was then designated a nature preserve.

Several years later, Horton and her longtime friend Ellen Dorland, whose family had owned the estate, added residential cottages to the property and established it as the Dorland Mountain Arts Colony in 1979. (The property was deeded to the colony’s board of directors in 1988.) Composers, writers and visual artists live and work at Dorland for up to two months at a time.

A graduate of Stanford University, Horton went on to study music theory and composition at the Sorbonne in Paris. She was a student of ballet and established her own school, the Curtis Ballet School in Pasadena, in 1930. The school closed in 1966.