The Ranch of 55 acres was purchased in 1933 by a (fictious?) "Jessie M. Murphy, widow," with that name appearing on no other public records.
By 1938 it was clear that the real owners were Winona and Norman Stephens, a wealthy American couple with a marked affinity for National Socialism and Hitler's New Order in Germany.
Winona, who was seriously into "the para-normal," came under the spell of a mysterious Rasputin-like Nazi known in local lore only as "Schmidt."
The Stephens spent more than 4,000,000 dollars to develop the estate into a sealed off utopian Nazi hide-a-way which would include a huge mansion designed by Lloyd Wright.
Schmidt, with his psychic powers, had determined that in the coming war with the axis, America would be destroyed by the German Master Race.
One year after America's downfall, it would be safe to re-emerge into the waste land that had been Los Angeles, and establish an Aryan Civilization allied with Hitler and his Third Reich.
The day after Pearl Harbor, according to the L.A. Times, the F.B.I. came and took Mr. Schmidt away.
In 1948 Huntington Hartford (his H.H. Foundation) bought the ranch (and adjacent land), hired landscape architect-architect Lloyd Wright, and built an "Artists' Colony".
It operated from 1951 until Hartford stopped its funding in 1965.
The city of Los Angeles bought the property in 1973 for open space.
The 1978 Mandeville Canyon brushfire destroyed all burnable structures in 1978.
(source: wikimapia)
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