Another glass of Mexican wine

Snow-packed streets in Victorville lead to the Stewart Hotel in this undated photo. It was here where silent film actor William S. Hart convalesced in the winter of 1920 while members of his crew purloined Mexican wine from a stopped Santa Fe freight train. (Courtesy of Mohahve Historical Society and Victor Valley College)

By Matthew Cabe
Victorville Daily Press

In a late-blooming but wildly fruitful film career, William S. Hart established himself as an actor who portrayed cowboys with authenticity and integrity, both unwavering.

A Broadway actor with Shakespearean chops who first performed on stage in 1888, Hart was 49 when he starred in his first silent Western, “His Hour of Manhood,” in 1914.

Hart’s Westerns were informed by his childhood. Though born in Newburgh, New York — a still-small town on the Hudson River, 125 miles south of where the horses run track in Saratoga Springs — Hart’s formative years were spent in the rural Midwest with ranchers, Civil War vets, outlaws, gold prospectors and saloon proprietors.

And so he saw the Old West differently from what had been depicted on screen in the early dawn of motion pictures.

According to a bio on the Hart Museum website, his films are distinguished by “gritty realism,” and Hart is credited for creating the “good bad guy” role — immoral characters who find the path of “clean, honest living.”

The persona melded with the man; Hart is remembered as a philanthropic gentleman, a proponent of clean living. But a tale from Prohibition-era Victorville hidden within the pages of his memoir, “My Life East and West,” humorously challenges that notion.

In the winter of 1920, the 56-year-old Hart spent a day in an icy Sacramento River filming scenes for “White Oak,” released the following year by Paramount Pictures. The nearly frozen river proved costly.

“I should have gone to bed; instead of that we went to Victorville for our desert scenes,” Hart wrote. “The river scenes were only the start of the story, but they came mighty near finishing it, for at Victorville my sister Mary made me smoke that little glass cigarette and it registered one hundred and three.”

Poor Hart was laid up in the Stewart Hotel on D Street for three days with pneumonia. He received care from Harris Garcelon — the region’s only doctor — who introduced the actor to the Victor Valley years before, according to historian Dr. Edward Leo Lyman.

Meanwhile, Hart’s “company could not work” without their star, so they bummed around the city, loitering in Forrest Park.

This idleness led to an unexpected discovery of what Hart described as “ninety-seven million gallons of the finest Mexican wine” stowed in one of the rail cars of a stopped Santa Fe freight train.

“Where was it going, I don’t know,” Hart wrote. “I only know it never arrived there, and that through the medium of several short pieces of garden hose, enough wine was siphoned out of that oil car to irrigate the Mojave Desert.”

Alcohol was illegal and all, but illegalizing anything rarely gives pause to those in want. Hart’s boys scrambled for buckets, milk pans, garbage pails and washtubs, brimmed their receptacles and went on a two-day bender, transforming city streets into a “public dance-hall.”

“The more timid citizens telephoned to San Bernardino, forty miles away, for help,” Hart wrote. “The sheriff and twenty deputies, all armed to the teeth, arrived on a special train. They did not need guns. They needed many husky men and many stretchers.

“The merrymaking had ended. Every foot of available space outside or inside at Victorville was occupied by a sleeping cowboy. The courthouse was full — the jail was full. Nothing was sacred to those Bacchanalian inebriates.”

Hart wasn’t guiltless, though. He too partook and did so in front of Walter A. Shay, who served as San Bernardino County’s sheriff from 1918 to 1931.

“The sheriff was a real sheriff; no one had been harmed, no damage had been done,” Hart wrote. “He returned with his deputies to San Bernardino.”

I’ve been told of contraband liquor in Victorville. Of sweat-browed men pushing barreled booze through underground tunnels as unwitting citizens walked the streets above.

On Richard Thompson’s Mojave History website, I’ve read about Guy Wadsworth, a notorious Oro Grande bootlegger, who peddled “turtle juice” and “would rather make one dollar illegally than two legally.”

I’ve seen the Mohahve Historical Society’s photograph of deputies confiscating crates of rotgut.

But the revelry of Hart’s crew forced the issue into broad daylight, proving powers that be don’t always believe in whatever asinine law they’re sworn to uphold.

Dr. Lyman called the moment “the most hilarious and unbelievable ... episode of the town’s history.”

I call it one hell of a good time.

The 1930s California Dude Ranch That Broke Racial Barriers

The empty lot where Murray's Ranch once stood. (Hadley Meares)

by Hadley Meares
Curbed Los Angeles

In 1937, press from all over the country descended on Victorville, CA, at the edge of the Mojave Desert, to cover the town's star-studded annual rodeo. The rapid growth of Los Angeles in the 1920s and '30s meant that millions of city slickers found themselves itching to escape to a simpler, more rustic time. A precursor to today's "experience-based tourism," the working dude ranch was enormously popular. Only 90 or so miles away from Los Angeles, these ranches—with names like the Lazy W, Yucca Loma Ranch, C Bar G Ranch, and Three Sage Hens—were centered primarily around Victorville and neighboring Apple Valley. While LIFE magazine photographers had originally been sent to these ranches in '37 to cover rodeo-going stars like Clara Bow and Tex Ritter, they quickly honed in on a more interesting story. Heavyweight boxing champion and Wild West enthusiast Joe Louis was in town, and he was spending a lot of time at a place called Murray's Dude Ranch. Besides the fact that Louis was one of the most idolized men in the world, this visit was of particular interest to the white mainstream media for two reasons: Joe Louis was black, and Murray's Ranch was billed as "the only Negro Dude Ranch in the world."

The history of African-Americans in Apple Valley begins long before Joe Louis's highly touted visit in 1937. As early as 1903, a Los Angeles civic club called The Forum encouraged working class blacks to become landowners. Since most of Los Angeles was reserved for whites only, often through racially restrictive real estate covenants, The Forum focused on an area in Apple Valley surrounding picturesque Bell Mountain. In 1914, several black families began homesteading in the unforgiving desert of Apple Valley.

One of the most prominent men in the community was Arthur Cook. Like many people in Bell Mountain, he retained strong ties to Los Angeles. Two of his good friends in LA were a respected couple named Lela and Nolie Murray. Nolie was a strapping six feet, with a larger-than-life personality. He ran Murray's Pocket Billiard Emporium and Cigar Store on East Ninth Street, and was praised for his "honest and just methods of dealing with patrons," which had earned him a "large following of friends." Lela, a registered nurse, was less than five feet tall, with a sweet disposition and tireless drive to help the less fortunate. By the early 1920s, Lela's frequent colds and lung ailments were making life in Los Angeles difficult for the Murrays. Arthur Cook, always on the lookout for potential quality neighbors, offered them 40 acres of Apple Valley land for free. But Lela worried about the legality of such a gift. "I wanted the land to be a legal deal," she said, "so I insisted on paying Mr. Cook $100 in cash and having it recorded as a bona fide sale. That was in 1922, and I moved up shortly afterward."

The Murrays dreamed of making the ranch a haven for troubled and underprivileged children and began building the infrastructure to support this mission. While Lela homesteaded at the ranch, Nolie commuted back and forth to their business interests in LA. Slowly, the ranch took shape—there were bungalows for the children, a deep fresh water well, stables, chicken coops, and a windmill. Nolie moved to the ranch full-time, and the Murrays began accepting children of all races, who were sent to them by the courts. At any given time there were around a dozen children at the ranch, some who stayed for up to seven years. A story in the LA Times illustrated the guidance Lela and Nolie offered:

Clyde, a young black boy, was always picking fights with white children. One day Lela sat him down and said: "You like flowers, don't you?"
He nodded.
"You don't like just pink roses? You like white, yellow and red roses because they are all beautiful, right?"
Again, Clyde nodded.
"Why then should you like only Negro children?" Lela asked. "People are people, just as flowers are flowers, whether they are white, yellow or black."

Despite their tireless work ethic, in the mid-1930s the Murrays found themselves in financial trouble. Though they received a little money from the state for the children's care, the Depression and the cost of running the ranch had wiped out their savings. Inspired by the increasing number of dude ranches springing up all around them, they began to convert their property into a Class-A guest ranch.

The Murrays were financially on their last leg when Joe Louis appeared, bringing a string of LIFE photographers with him. Thousands of tourists swarmed the ranch, hoping to catch a glimpse of their hero. After a six-picture spread of Louis at the ranch ran in November 1937, the Murrays' theoretical guest ranch was now a fact. The county and other ranchers supported the creation of a "Negros only" dude ranch. (Explicit segregation was not the law of the land in California, and customers could theoretically patronize whatever business allowed them in. But communities often self-segregated through local ordinances, real estate covenants, and societal pressure.) The Murrays began promoting the ranch, and the county widened the road leading into the ranch. The property soon included more than 20 buildings and amenities including tennis courts, stables, a dining hall, a baseball field, and a swimming pool.

Celebrities and prominent members of LA's African-American community flocked to the ranch.
Legendary architect Paul Williams and his family stayed there frequently while he was working on designs for the nearby Arrowhead Springs Hotel. Joe Louis, always "happy as a kid" at the ranch, returned to train for upcoming matches. Other famous fighters soon followed suit. In 1938, Herb Jeffries, "the black singing cowboy," filmed two movies—The Bronze Buckaroo and Harlem Rides the Range—at the ranch. Thanks to The Bronze Buckaroo, clear images of the property's main house and windmill, and views of Bell Mountain, are preserved for posterity. Lena Horne, Hattie McDaniel, Louise Beavers, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, and Nina Mae McKinney were also frequent guests. Here, they enjoyed a "most beautiful and restful desert oasis," where they could lounge on screened-in porches or take evening horseback rides in the moonlight, far away from Hollywood.

Everyday Americans also frequented the ranch, which boasted very reasonable rates. In 1940, a couple could stay at the ranch for only $5 a night, while a single person could stay for $3. The ranch often hosted around 100 guests a week from May to September, and became particularly popular with honeymooning couples (no doubt pleased with cottages that were "far removed from each other") and civic groups. It fulfilled a need for recreational activities for middle class African-Americans, who were barred from most vacation opportunities. Lela shared one letter she received that highlighted this problem:

I am a bachelor. I like to ride horseback very much. I have always wanted to spend a few weeks on a dude ranch. Being colored, I doubted that I would ever have the chance. I was happy to learn about your ranch. Please let me know the cost of a vacation with you.

While the ranch hosted guests from all over the country, its bread and butter continued to be visitors from Los Angeles. An ad from the 1940s appealed particularly to time-strapped Angelinos:

Leave your business Saturday afternoon. Take a two hour and twenty minute ride up through Cajon Pass on Highway 66 to Victorville. Get a nice large airy room with every modern comfort of home at Murray's Ranch. Have a cup of hot coffee or fruit juice served to you, early before arising for breakfast. Or you may ride early as you wish. Get your good country breakfast, including milk, butter, and eggs produced on the ranch. Swimming, golf, tennis, and other amusements as you wish. Have your Murray's famous chicken dinner about 2:30 or after. Return home late Sunday evening rested and fresh for the next week's business.

The Murrays continued to be remarkably colorblind when it came to staffing. One friend noted, "The ranch has its own fair employment practice policy and hires cooks, pantrymen, yardmen, stable attendants and maids for their ability, not their color. There are three white employees, four colored and one Japanese." White locals often came to the ranch's popular restaurant, which featured the comfort food of popular chef Malcolm Keys. Lela organized an Easter Sunrise service on nearby Catholic Hill that attracted thousands of SoCal worshipers for many years. Local children of all races often "snuck in" to use the ranch's heavily chlorinated pool, joking with Nolie, who was forever reaching for nuts stuffed in the pockets of his overalls to nibble on while he chastised the kids.

White guests did not spend the night until 1945, when a Workers Union newspaper in Southern California profiled the ranch. Soon many white people were writing to Lela, asking if they could come and stay. "I wrote back, telling them they had made a mistake, that the ranch was owned and operated by Negroes. But then the people wrote right back, saying that was fine with them, when could they come, what were the rates and questions like that," Lela said. And so the ranch became integrated, long before most of the country followed suit.

By the time Lela died in 1949, the Murrays were beloved members of the Victorville/Apple Valley community. Lela was a member of the Chamber of Commerce, and volunteered both her time and the ranch's facilities to such organizations as the Red Cross, the USO, and various children's charities. After Lela's death, Nolie remarried and continued to run the ranch, but the decline of the popularity of dude ranches, rising cost of living, and increasing recreational opportunities for SoCal African-Americans made the early '50s difficult. No doubt he was relieved when entertainment legend and noted humanitarian Pearl Bailey revisited the ranch with her husband, the drummer Louie Bellson, in 1955, looking for a respite from the fast life. "We fell in love with the place," Pearl recounted, "and this Murray fellow says, 'You want it?" Well, we bought 35 acres for $65,000. And we're still paying!" Nolie kept five acres and built the Desert Heart Motel on the property, which he ran until his death in 1958.

Pearl renamed the ranch "The Lazy B," a name born from her legendary wit. "I told Louie people would pass by and look at this huge ranch and say to themselves, "There are actors in there, leading a glamorous life. I wonder what those 'Lazy B's are doing there." In between gigs across the country, Pearl became a dedicated Apple Valley housewife, renovating the property's rundown buildings and inviting many Hollywood friends to stay on the ranch. Much like Lela before her, Pearl relished being an active citizen, joining the Chamber of Commerce, serving as a den mother for the local cub scouts, and doing all the chores life on a large ranch entailed, including chasing snakes and pulling weeds. "So much is there," she said. "The earth where food can be planted, the lovely sunsets, the air, and all that space to wander away and get with God."

Pearl's family lived at the ranch for nine years, until work obligations and "freeloading" permanent houseguests from Hollywood slowly pulled them away. The ranch was eventually sold, and by the late 1980s, the buildings were abandoned and supposedly infested with brown widow spiders. The buildings were burned in a training exercise conducted by the Apple Valley Fire department around 1988.

I recently visited the ranch, which is now nothing more than an empty desert lot, filled with scrubby trees, low foundations, and bits of rusted barbed wire fence. Bell Mountain loomed over the barren land, where the outlines of the ranch's trails and roads were faintly visible in the dust. I passed two men in overalls and cowboy hats, one black and one white, cutting across the lot to the gas station across the street. Further into the lot, all I found was a lizard, a colony of ants, and a feeling of peaceful solitude, far away from the pollution and prejudice of the city.

Historic Barrel House building hits century mark

The Barrel House Market in Victorville is one of the city's oldest buildings and is coming up on its 100th anniversary. (JAMES QUIGG, DAILY PRESS)

Rene De La Cruz
Victorville Daily Press

VICTORVILLE — Whether it was buying candy or cashing paychecks, one downtown liquor store still holds many cherished memories for longtime residents of the Victor Valley.

The historic Barrel House Market building celebrates its 100th anniversary this year. The Barrel House was built in 1914 on the corner of D and Fifth streets. Designated as a Historic Point of Interest by the city of Victorville, the cinderblock and cement building was used as a restaurant and jewelry store until 1933, when it became a market and liquor store.

Store owner Norm Danial, 69, said an old wooden sign that once hung outside of the building states that the store was erected in 1934, but the city and other experts said the building has been at the site since 1914.

“The sign hung over the door, which was in the shape of a huge barrel,” said Danial, who purchased the store 24 years ago. “In 1998, some crazy old guy backed into the building with his van and destroyed the barrel door after we closed.”

According to Gabino De La Cruz (who is the reporter’s father), Victorville civic leader Cory Moore and his wife, Violet, were the first owners of the Barrel House.

“It was an American-style restaurant, jewelry story and grocery store before it was the Barrel House,” said De La Cruz, who turned 90 in February. “... I remember my dad taking me there to buy groceries when I was 5 years old in 1929.”

A March 1950 edition of the San Bernardino County Sun reported that the $6.5 million Victor Housing Project at George Air Force Base had just broken ground with the 650-unit housing project named Cory Moore Village in honor of the community leader who died in an auto accident.

“The Moores were good people, very nice,” De La Cruz said. “They helped a lot of people in the community.”

Danial said since the store is located near the California Route 66 Museum, tourists from all over the country as well as Europe and Asia have stopped into the liquor store to ask questions and snap photos.

A chuckling Danial said he was told that a previous store owner would fill customers’ wine bottles from a barrel located at the back of the store.

Todd Gudal, who now lives in Wrightwood, said he lived nearby on Second Street growing up.

“When we were kids we would go to the Mojave River and find arrowheads and trade them for candy and toys,” he said. “Later on, when I worked at the cement plant, we would stand in line and cash our paychecks there.”

Gudal said he was one of many employees from Southwest Portland Cement Company who would visit the Barrel House to cash their checks, purchase snacks or pick up a six-pack of Lucky Lager beer.

Ruth Nolan, who graduated from Apple Valley High School in 1980, said her brother John used to work at the Barrel House while he was getting his teaching career started.

“I also used to shop there all the time and even had a line of credit with a longtime previous owner, Vi, an amazing woman,” said Nolan, a professor of writing and literature at College of the Desert.

Fern Rush said when she was a little girl, the Barrel House was always the last stop before her family headed out to Bell Mountain for a family adventure.

“I remember we used to get penny candy from there. We would save up one dollar’s worth of pennies and get 100 pieces of candy,” Rush said. “Summer time at D Street park was nothing if we couldn't get candy, pop or ice cream from the Barrel House.”

Debra Stone said she avoided the Barrel House because she “always saw it like a bar for drunks,” but Rani Walker said alcohol was not a part of her family’s Barrel House memory.

“My husband's father had a radiator shop near the Barrel House so he made many trips there as a kid,” said Walker, an administrative assistant at VVHS. “He said that the thing he loved the most was that they kept the Ding Dongs in the freezer.”

Victorville museum recreates era of Route 66

Crystal Yulujia checks her cowboy hat as she visits the California Route 66 Museum.

By Sam McManis
Sacramento Bee

VICTORVILLE – They were in their early 20s, hip in that effortless European way. He wore cool shades and a three-day stubble; she bore piercings in all the right places – lip, eyebrow, helix of the ear lobe. They said they were from Pamplona, Spain, but rolled their eyes at mention of the running of the bulls.

Too touristy, the gesture meant.

Yet Borja Marcos and Oihane Almagro were standing in front of one of the West's monuments to touristic diversions – the curio-besotted California Route 66 museum – snapping photos of each other before a giant mural.

All of which perhaps proves the theory that sneering locals just fail to appreciate what visitors embrace as noteworthy, exotic even.

"Route 66 is known well in Spain," Marcos says. "We were in Los Angeles, and we're going to Las Vegas. We wanted to stop."

Well, of course they did.

As Sharon Foster, the marketing director of the California Route 66 Museum in this low-rise San Bernardino County town, happily points out, more than 10,000 visitors a year grace the two-room shrine to a more quaint era of pre-freeway transportation.

"That's a lot of people for little old Victorville," she says.

Foster leads you over to a map of the world, where museumgoers are encouraged to plant a pin in their country of origin. The map is peppered with pins, giant clumps from Great Britain and Eastern Europe. And who knew a two-lane road that reached peak popularity in the 1950s could draw such a contingent from Tanzania and Kenya?

Two tourists from Curidiba, Brazil, Rui Caramori and Palo Rodriguez, are taking smartphone photos of a big blue Pepsi vending machine (10 cents), circa 1940, and ogling roadside billboards from back in the day. They, too, are on their way from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. They, too, just had to stop.

"It's famous," Caramori says. "Much (Route 66) merchandizing in Brazil."

Much merchandizing is on display in the museum, too. You can buy T-shirts, mugs and reproduced road signs – the usual stuff – and even a cool neon wall clock. But it's what's not for sale, the memorabilia, that makes this a must-stop.

Schmaltzy as it may sound, Route 66 once was the heartland of America – or at least one of its major arteries – running through eight states and opening the world of the great Southwest to East Coast city slickers. John Steinbeck, in "The Grapes of Wrath," called it the "Mother Road," leading Dust Bowl refugees from Oklahoma to California.

The road's charms were burnished by Hollywood in the early 1960s with a TV show, "Route 66," in which Martin Milner and George Maharis cruised in their Corvette convertible.

By the late 1960s, however, the interstate highway system was such that Route 66 became something of a sad frontage road, dotted by water towers and motels with missing letters.

People still travel on it. Some make it an annual pilgrimage. Others, like most of the tourists haunting the museum on one recent afternoon, simply take a detour off Interstate 15 and have a look-see.

To Victorvilleans, the museum is a point of pride. Volunteer docents acknowledge there is another museum up the road, the Barstow Route 66 "Mother Road" Museum, but they boast that the Victorville shrine was there first.

"Even as broken as the road is, as bad as the road is, I think it's the mystery of the road that draws people," Foster says. "To visit 2,248 miles, you see it all. (People) go through the plain states, the mountains, the desert to the beach. It's more than a road; you get to see the people element as you go through.

"I've found most of our (international tourists) actually want to travel the road. But we've made it so that everyone can see the kind of stuff exactly as you would've found (it) as you traveled along the road."

Stuff like old gas pumps, a re-created soda fountain diner, a tricked out, hippie/ flower power VW bus, a 1949 five-cup milkshake machine from Sparky's Drive-In in Victorville, old telegraph machines, phonographs, an eight-track tape player with Barry White's "Greatest Hits" cued up, and remnants from what once was a major roadside attraction, Mahan's Half Acre, in Hesperia.

Mahan's was something you won't find off a freeway exit these days. It was a folk-art space doubling as the home of the eccentric Miles Mahan. It featured everything from painted signs of hula girls to bottle trees and a miniature golf course, but closed after Mahan's death in 1997. The Hula Girl and Giant Cowboy wooden cutouts now grace the back walls of the Victorville museum.

Newer items make the biggest splash with the under 4-foot demographic: a bevy of bigger-than-life-size models from the movie "Cars."

The popularity of the 2006 Disney-Pixar computer-animated blockbuster jump-started interest in Route 66, Foster says. In the film, the road is home to "Radiator Springs," which was sadly neglected after construction of Interstate 40.

"Thank goodness, 'Cars' was regarding 66, because that did bring the younger group into us," Foster says. "But I'm the last generation that really traveled the road when it was the primary route getting to California.

"We've lost a generation, some of the late baby boomers, but hopefully, we'll make up for it when the kids want to bring Dad and Mom in here."


CALIFORNIA ROUTE 66 MUSEUM
Location: 16825 D St., Victorville
Phone: (760) 951-0436
Web: califrt66museum.org
Hours: 10 AM-4 PM Monday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday; 11 AM-3 PM
Sunday, Tuesday and Wednesday by appointment.

New book, upcoming panel discussion highlight Mojave Desert

Beverly Dudley, 80, of Victorville, can still point out trees standing today that were part of the parks original design after her efforts in 1956 helped build Center Street Park in Victorville.

By LYNNEA LOMBARDO
Victorville Daily Press

VICTORVILLE • In a long plaid skirt and turtleneck sweater, Beverly Dudley dug a shovel into a dry field at the corner of Center and Verde streets.

It was 1956, and Dudley was heading up the effort to build Center Street Park — Victorville's first real park, complete with lit ball fields, brick barbecues and public restrooms.

Dudley, who just celebrated her 80th birthday, contributed a small memoir and several photographs from this time to the latest edition in a series of books written about local history, thoughtfully titled "Mohahve VI."

"When people see 'Mohahve' written that way, they think it's a mistake, like we misspelled it or something," Richard Thompson, past president of the Mohahve Historical Society, said with a chuckle.

The 'Mohahve' series is compiled and edited by members of the Mohahve Historical Society. Some of the local authors will be at their monthly meeting Thursday to promote the book and answer questions about their contributions. The public is encouraged to participate in the panel discussion, which will feature the authors and editors, some dressed in 1950s-style clothes, and music and refreshments.

The book is a collection of 19 essays, some of which are scholarly, professional and annotated, while others are stories of events told by "old-timers." Most of the stories are personal accounts supported with court documents and military or government records. Thompson contributed an essay about Max Strobel, the original founder of what is now Hesperia and parts of Victorville.

"It's important to know about your local history," Thompson said. "If you're living in any area, you should know a little something about it."

Thompson, who moved up to the High Desert from San Bernardino in 1990, is a retired public works engineer and a history buff. He was stunned when he moved up here and realized that very little local history had been recorded, and at once began his research in the fields of geography and history, recording what he learned along the way.

Fran Elgin, vice president of the society, is a major contributor and organizer for "Mohahve VI" and its predecessors, starting with the original "Mohahve I" which, in itself, has its own interesting record. According to Elgin and other members, the original "Mohahve" series idea started at Victor Valley College in the early 1960s with a group of students who had a penchant for local history. In 1963 the students formed the Mohahve Historical Society, which has published books, held meetings and kept history alive for almost 50 years now.

The original "Mohahve" book included stories from people who had lived in the High Desert around the turn of the century. Since its origin, students, society members and local citizens have all donated their time and material to keep the series going.

"Research for these books was like prospecting for facts, panning for gold," Thompson said. "The little nuggets of information you find along the way make my research so interesting."

"These books, this book … they are a true labor of love for us," said Elgin, who moved to the High Desert in the 1960s from St. Louis. Elgin is a retired librarian from Victor Valley College, where she worked for 25 years. She now volunteers Tuesday mornings in the library's Local History Room.

The society also published in 2010 Leo Lyman's "History of Victor Valley," which, according to Elgin, would have been more difficult to compile if it had not been for all the time, donations and hard work provided by so many people who care about the community and its rich history.

"Nobody was paid for their contributions," Elgin said. "We just love our town and we want everyone to come out and support their community. There are a lot of really nice people who have a lot to share."