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)

HARRY CAREY RANCH
) (Clougherty Ranch)
HABS No. CA-2712 (Page 3)

Ranch after the family that owned the ranch for about forty years. The Cloughertys held
the ranch in the name of their company, the Clougherty Packing Company, the producers
of the "Farmer John" line of meat products. Throughout this report,\the property will be
referred to by the more common name, the Harry Carey Ranch.
)
The Harry Carey Ranch is located in the chaparral-covered foothills north of the Santa
Clara River and south of the Santa Clara portion of the Angeles National Forest. The
property is roughly four miles north of Saugus and five miles north of the relatively new
community of Santa Clarita. All of the ranch buildings, except the Caretaker's House,
) are clustered midway up a small ravine that drains into the west side of San Francisquito
Canyon. The Caretaker's house is located about .5 miles to the southeast, on the opposite
side of the canyon, at the main ranch gate on San Francisquito Canyon Road.

This remote mountainous area has historically served as ranch land, with the Newhall
() Land and Cattle Company dominating local ranching and land development for decades.
More than anything, the rough topography and water scarcity kept the region from
changing rapidly and ranching remained the prominent economic activity despite oil
discoveries in the 1870s and the arrival of filmmakers and actors in the 1910s.
throughout the 1950s, residences located in the canyon's tributary to the Santa Clara
River tended to be small ranches, where people raised some stock and kept horses. The
•
communities of Saugus, Newhall, and Valencia remained small isolated towns with
minimal residential areas until modem Interstate 5 was completed through nearby Castaic
Valley in the mid 1960s. Suburban growth boomed after the freeway opened, and
developers have been constructing housing tracts throughout the region ever since. Santa
2
Clarita was not incorporated until 1987.

The Harry CaretRanch developed out of two of these local historical trends: ranching
and the movie business. Although Harry Carey rais.ed cattle and stabled horses on his
ranch, and had purchased some of the ranch land from the federal government under a
livestock entry, he was primarily a film actor. His work in the genre of Western films
directly influenced the design and construction of this property where he and his family
lived in the 1920s and 1930s. In the mid-1940s the property passed through the hands of
several individuals, including John F. and Irene T. Blanchard and Laura Madeline
C) Wagnon and Catherine McCaleb. These short-term owners reportedly planned to convert
the property into a dude ranch. The swimming pool and tennis courts appear to date to
this period, however, the project was not successful. The next long-term owners of the
ranch were the Cloughertys, who purchased the property as a vacation retreat sometime
in the 1950s. The Clougherty family held the property until 1998 before selling to the
current owners, Montalvo Properties LLC, who are in the process of developing
residential tracts on the former ranch land. 3

2
Leon Worden, Santa Clarita Valley: A Concise History (Newha1l, CA: Santa Clarita Valley Historical Society,
C 1997), 6-1 I; PhiJip Scorza and Frank Wright, eds., "Santa Clarita Valley: A Pictorial History (S.I.: Sierra Vista
Publishing, 2000), passim.
() 3 "Joint Tenancy Deed," Harry and Olive Carey to John F. Blanchard, II, and Irene T. Blanchard, recorded April 18,
1945, Deeds 21887: 152-154; "Grant Deed," John and Irene Blanchard to Laura Madeline Wagnon and Catherine