Instead of Utopia, It Left a Lot of Lots to Be Desired

Before the subdivisions carved the land into tiny pieces, before the hungry city of Los Angeles swallowed it whole and belched out a suburb, before it was known to the world as Tujunga--it was Utopia.

At least, that was how William Ellsworth Smythe saw it.

“It is . . . a very beautiful spot, the Vale of Monte Vista, between the Verdugo and Sierra Madre ranges,” Smythe wrote 80 years ago.

So the stately, bearded gentleman with the pioneer’s heart set out to cultivate paradise, to create a colony of hale and hearty folk who returned to the soil, shunning the greed and anonymity of industrial life for “a little land and a living.” Get your acre lot for $800. Escape the big city.

Dozens of families answered Smythe’s call. And the Little Lands colony, the origin of modern Tujunga, would bloom, then wither in less than a decade--but not before becoming a little-known slice of local history as one of the few, if not the only, experiments in Utopian living within the borders of present-day Los Angeles.

The year was 1913. The horizon appeared bright and boundless as Smythe, a journalist turned irrigation champion, looked out on the sunny, wind-swept northern outskirts of Los Angeles.

Later, Smythe would say that “the land selected me,” with its majestic beauty and invigorating air, as he scouted sites for the second of his back-to-nature communities in Southern California.

The first, near San Diego, was flourishing. Set up four years earlier, San Ysidro bustled with more than 110 families who tilled their acre plots, harvested fruit and vegetables, then sold their surplus at a cooperative market.

San Ysidro embodied Smythe’s ideal: a modest agrarian community close enough to the city to reap its social and cultural advantages, but far enough away to be immune to its evils.

“A little land and a living, surely, is better than desperate struggle and great wealth, possibly,” Smythe told a full house at the Garrick Theater in San Diego in 1908.

Such ideas had become fashionable at the turn of the century among Americans disenchanted with the increasingly money-obsessed culture around them.

“The whole movement was a reaction against the capitalist, competitive industrial society,” said Robert V. Hine, history professor emeritus from UC Riverside and an authority on Utopian colonies in California. “These people wanted to live cooperatively, not competitively.”

In the “Monte Vista valley,” Smythe joined with Marshall V. Hartranft, who had taken an option on the land in 1907. Hartranft had originally envisioned creating “another town like Glendale,” with orchards, a college and other industries.

Smythe’s dream won out.

He and Hartranft set aside 240 acres for the original town site. The first six lots were sold on March 17, 1913, for Little Lands, which was also known by its Spanish name, Los Terrenitos.

Within a month, eager Little Landers laid the cornerstone for their rustic community clubhouse on Sunset Boulevard, just north of Michigan Avenue (now Commerce Avenue and Foothill Boulevard, respectively). Bolton Hall--named for a writer whose works heavily influenced Smythe--was the focal point of colony life, scene of meetings, dances, music and literary programs.

Men, women and children--209 in all--signed the register at the ceremony. Up went the blue-and-white Little Landers pennant.

“That’s the nicest garden soil I ever saw,” said a man who moved to Los Terrenitos from the San Ysidro colony. “The water is the sweetest I ever tasted, and as for the scenery, well, I want to live there the rest of my days.”

The scenery was one thing, the soil quite another.

Littered with granite boulders, gravel and sand, the earth produced lovely country gardens but did not support crops easily. “The stones were more numerous in some spots than we had supposed,” Smythe later acknowledged.

“It wasn’t good fruitful land. Sunland was growing peaches and olives and everything, while Tujunga just grows cactus,” said Mary Lou Pozzo, current president of the Little Landers Historical Society.

Mabel Hatch, who arrived in Tujunga after a long, hot buggy ride from the Sun Valley train station, wept with her father when they saw the land they had bought.

“It was so barren, so unfriendly and so unlike the rolling, green hills of our native Michigan,” she told an interviewer years later. “We could hardly bear it in the beginning.”

But Smythe held fast to his Little Lands beliefs, molded over the course of three to four decades.

Born Dec. 24, 1861, into a wealthy Massachusetts family, he passed up the chance to attend Harvard in order to become an apprentice newspaperman at age 16. He was enthralled by Horace Greeley’s writing--a street in Los Terrenitos was named after his boyhood hero--and Greeley’s urging to “Go west, young man!”

Smythe eventually landed at the Omaha Bee, where he made his mark on American agriculture and gained national recognition.

Horrified by the ravages of the Great Drought of 1890, especially the sight of horses and cattle being shot by farmers within sight of running streams, Smythe mounted an editorial campaign for widespread irrigation--a concept so radical that his bosses insisted Smythe’s articles appear over his own signature.

The editorials turned out to be a resounding success. Smythe organized local and state irrigation conventions, founded Irrigation Age magazine, and traveled and lectured extensively.

“I had taken the cross of a new crusade,” Smythe penned in “The Conquest of Arid America.” “To my mind, irrigation seemed the biggest thing in the world. It was not merely a matter of ditches and acres, but a philosophy, a religion, and a program of practical statesmanship rolled into one.”

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Smythe’s passion led to his Little Landers creed: that a man could support himself and his family on just an acre of irrigated earth, with a goat for milk, some chickens and pigeons for meat.

But in Los Terrenitos, practice had trouble matching theory.

There was the poor-quality soil. There was also the inexperience of many of the settlers, who included retirees, asthma victims in search of a favorable climate, “lots and lots of spinsters” (said Mabel Hatch), middle-aged bachelors, artisans and journalists.

“They didn’t mind raising the stuff on the side, but they weren’t trying to make a living off it,” said Bill MacGowan of Laguna Niguel, Smythe’s great-great-grandson.

Some of the settlers stumbled under the hardship of the colony’s early days.

“I, for one, didn’t know there was any place in the world where you did not have street lights, ice, gas to cook with and mail delivered to your door,” Hatch wrote afterward. “But we learned! How we learned!”

Smythe was available for guidance on some issues, but packed up his Little Landers of Los Angeles office in 1914 to spread his gospel for a new settlement up in Hayward.

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In 1915, two years after its founding, Ashby described Los Terrenitos as having achieved “almost miraculous” progress.

The colony boasted “a beautiful clubhouse, an excellent system of roads, 200 or more comfortable if not elegant homes, and upward of 500 souls,” Ashby wrote.

But time was running out.

World War I raged, sapping the community of its able-bodied young men. Gophers plundered the crops, trees refused to grow, pigeons died of disease.

“And the rocks,” Mabel Hatch wrote. “Always and always the rocks.”

In 1917, the dream was crumbling, although more families continued to move to the area.

By then, after hot debate, the Little Landers had changed their settlement’s name to Tujunga, said to be an Indian word for “Village of the Old Woman.” The town meetings had faded into nonexistence, and only $17.30 sat in the town treasury.

Then came the acrid whiff of scandal. Concerned that settlers were being exploited, a state commission launched an investigation into irrigation colonies founded by Smythe and others all over California.

Smythe was called to testify.

Ultimately, the settlements escaped rebuke in the commission’s report, but the negative press hurt Smythe’s cause. Backers of a fourth Little Landers colony near Palo Alto pulled out after the commission issued its report.

In Tujunga, the residents discovered that they could find greater fortune in real estate. With Los Angeles growing by the day, many subdivided their acre farms into eight separate lots, worth between $400 to $800 each.

Critics of Smythe’s vision pounce on the irony that Los Terrenitos eventually fostered suburban sprawl and the very sense of loneliness and isolation its founders had tried to escape.

As for Smythe, he left California after the war ended and became a federal government official. In 1922, at the age of 61, he died in his Fifth Avenue apartment in New York.

By January 1925, visiting Stanford economics professor Henry S. Anderson could find only one of the original colonists still living in Tujunga.

“It was a grand dream that was never fulfilled,” said longtime Tujunga resident Tom Theobald, who arrived in 1920 as a 4-year-old.