Search and Destroy: December 2010

Here is an excerpt from an essay I wrote for a class:

Records say Jessie M. Murphy purchased Murphy Ranch from Hollywood cowboy Will Rodgers in 1933. Because there is no other record of Jessie Murphy in existence, experts, including Palisades Historical Society president Thomas Young, have concluded that Jesse Murphy was an alias. The name Murphy Ranch, however, stuck. The Actual owners of Murphy Ranch were Winona and Norman Stephens, a wealthy couple with silver mining interests in Colorado, who also had a fascination with the occult. The Stephens somehow came under the influence of an extremely puzzling and mysterious character named Herr Schmidt, who the Stephens believed had supernatural powers, including, apparently, the ability to see into the future. Schmidt told them that Germany would emerge victorious from World War II and in America, chaos would ensue. He persuaded them to spend an estimated $4 million converting Murphy Ranch into a secluded, self-sufficient hideaway. After the war, he told them, they would “emerge from their mountain retreat and impose order on society”. One somewhat questionable source says that at one point there may have been as many as forty Nazi sympathizers living in the compound. Unfortunately for them, their operation was being monitored by the authorities and on December 8th 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor, the compound was raided and arrests were made. One source suspects that Herr Schmit and possibly others were taken to an internment camp for fascist supporters in Sun Valley. It seams the Stephans were not imprisoned but after Schmidt’s predictions failed to manifest they eventually sold Murphy Ranch to The Huntington Hartford Foundation in 1948, who converted the property into an artists colony. One source claims author Henry Miller “may” have lived there. In 1973 the city of Los Angeles bought the property and opened it to the public. All burnable structures burned in a 1978 brushfire, however, much still remains from both the Stephens era as well the artists’ colony. Today the remnants of Murphy Ranch are covered in graffiti and serve as an under the radar attraction for hikers.

Here are some pictures I took of cool stuff at the ranch: