National Register visit 182: The Homestead Acre. Today would be the 137th birthday of Minnie Hill Palmer, and the Homestead Acre is the simple cottage where she lived for 56 years. Minnie was a native of the San Fernando Valley community of Chatsworth, even before it was Chatsworth. Her family, the Hills, moved here as homesteaders in 1886, the same year Minnie was born. Over the years they became entrenched in this growing agricultural community. They grew crops and sold fruit to the Southern Pacific workers who built the Santa Susana Tunnel; Minnie’s brother Lovell co-owned the general store, served as postmaster and later ran a dynamite distribution company.
The Homestead Acre was built by the Hills in 1911. It had no chimney or fireplace, no plumbing and no electricity until after WWII. The local creek had arsenic in it, so they had to take a wagon to an artesian well nearby to haul back water for cooking and drinking. Humble stuff, but this was home to generations of Hills.
After a few years in Montana, Minnie and her husband Alfred returned to the Homestead Acre in 1920 to care for her ailing mother. One by one her family moved or died. In the 1950s, Minnie sold off her 230 acres to a sports center nearby, with financial assistance from a co-owner of Oroweat Bakery (!). A condition of the sale was that Minnie could stay in her house on a 1.3 acre of land, rent free. And that she did ‘til 1976. She gardened every day, baked for friends and family, watched soap operas and collected the balls that people would thwack into her garden from the golf links next door.
This cottage is one of the few physical connections we still have to the west Valley’s pioneer days. You can visit the first Sunday of every month, when the Chatsworth Historical Society holds its monthly open house.
I'm visiting all the landmarks in LA County listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Read more about this one and many more at etandoesla.com...
All historic photos courtesy Chatsworth Historical Society except:
📷 Southern Pacific Railroad, 1914 & Chatsworth Park Tunnel, ca. 1904 (West Valley Museum / CSUN Library)
📷 Roy Rogers new mini-golf links, 1959 (Valley Times Collection / Los Angeles Public Library)
#chatsworth #losangeles #pioneers #lahistory #sfv #818 #sanfernandovalley #royrogers #trainhistory #southernpacific #oroweat