Santa Clarita Valley History In Pictures
> CHARLES SITZMAN COLLECTION   > PICO CANYON
Signal (Marker) Tree
Pico Canyon

Click image to enlarge | Download archival scan

Three people sit or stand in the signal tree (aka marker tree) at today's 24940 Pico Canyon Road, Stevenson Ranch, in this undated photograph (probably late 1920s) from the Charles Sitzman Collection. The girl in front appears to be Barbara Sitzman, which could put this into the 1930s. The view is to the north.

In an audiotaped interview from December 20, 1996, transcribed by local historian Stan Walker, Barbara Sitzman decribes the photo as follows:

Picture of a 4-trunk oak tree still down near the condos at the mouth of the Pico Canyon that was in "Ripley's Believe it or Not."

While "Ripley's" called it "An oak tree with 4 trunks / Newhall, Cal" in a feature published July 28, 1930, it didn't actually have four trunks. It probably had one trunk that split when two top branches were affixed to the ground by local indigenous people centuries earlier, when the tree was young, as a directional marker — probably pointing the way to the Pico Springs, a source of asphaltum. (Over time, one of the two earthbound branches fell away.) The only time we see the tree having two (or four) distinct trunks is in the artist's conceptual drawing in "Ripley's."

When it was built in 2000, the Extended Stay America hotel was required to preserve the marker tree and another nearby heritage oak tree and work around them — which is why the hotel has the has a footprint that accommodates a small oak grove.


SZ2001: 9600 dpi jpeg from original photograph. Also catalogued as 090-ms-0016-112.jpg. Santa Clarita Valley Historical Society collection.
SIGNAL (MARKER) TREE
PICO CANYON

thumbnail

Sitzman Photo ~1920s

thumbnail

Ripley's 7/28/1930

thumbnail

1930

thumbnail

Sitzman Photo 1930s

thumbnail

Sitzman 7/4/1936

thumbnail

RPPC 1936

thumbnail

~1970s/80s

thumbnail

Limb Falls 2019

RETURN TO TOP ]   RETURN TO MAIN INDEX ]   PHOTO CREDITS ]   BIBLIOGRAPHY ]   BOOKS FOR SALE ]
SCVHistory.com is another service of SCVTV, a 501c3 Nonprofit • Site contents ©SCVTV
The site owner makes no assertions as to ownership of any original copyrights to digitized images. However, these images are intended for Personal or Research use only. Any other kind of use, including but not limited to commercial or scholarly publication in any medium or format, public exhibition, or use online or in a web site, may be subject to additional restrictions including but not limited to the copyrights held by parties other than the site owner. USERS ARE SOLELY RESPONSIBLE for determining the existence of such rights and for obtaining any permissions and/or paying associated fees necessary for the proposed use.
comments powered by Disqus