Morongo Basin Historical Society Museum: More Fun Than a 7.3 Shaker

Where did your intrepid Desert Way wanderers go today? Landers, California, of course. Why? Well, we were 31 years too late for the big earthquake, so we headed on over to the Morongo Basin Historical Society Museum’s Grand Opening instead. The Morongo Basin Historical Society was founded in 1999 but the museum itself did not have a permanent home until 2008. The re-grand opening follows an intensive six-month beautification project. Volunteers did an outstanding job reimagining the museum; there are so many interesting new exhibits to explore! We met many nice folks and learned so much. Be sure to check out their mercantile, post office, assay office and George Van Tassel Room. The museum, located at 632 Landers Lane, is actually the former home of pioneers Newlin and Vernette Landers.

A highlight of the museum’s grand opening was meeting docent Valarie Carlomagno, the Great-Great-Granddaughter of Mark “Chuck” Warren, an early settler of Warren’s Well fame. Warren drove freight wagons through the valley and settled here about 1880. In 1881 he hand-dug the well and later built a windmill, water trough, barn and a small cabin. Warren’s Well became a stage stop, a watering hole for cattle ranchers, and the center of social life for early settlers. According to the Morongo Basin Historical Society and Twentynine Palms Historical Society commemorative magazine titled 100 Year Project, because of its location to the entrance of Morongo Basin, the ranch became a favorite stopping place for travelers to and from mines and ranches throughout the area. They were served meals by the Warren family and had their stock fed and watered too. The Warrens had eleven children. In 1912, after 30 years in the Morongo Basin, the Warrens left permanently for San Bernardino but left a lasting impact. Part of their ranch became present day Covington Park and Big Morongo Canyon Preserve. In 1916, William Covington acquired Warren’s Ranch in Morongo Valley. Chuck Warren died 5 years after moving away in what may have been his first automobile ride.

Charles Reche was the first person to homestead in the Landers area near the site of what is now called The Intergratron. Reche, who was an alfalfa farmer, teamster, gold miner, deputy sheriff and businessman, in 1887 filed on a homestead northeast of Morongo Valley which was identified on some maps as Reche’s Well. Reche was married to Francis Eleanor Warren, oldest daughter of Mark “Chuck” Warren and his wife Sylvia Paine Warren. In 1909, while working as a foreman at the Desert Queen Mine, Reche heard about the manhunt for accused murderer and kidnapper, Willie Boy, and volunteered to join the posse. The posse eventually trapped Willie Boy in the vicinity of Ruby Mountain, and during an exchange of gunfire, was wounded in the leg. He walked with a limp for the rest of his life. In 1914, Reche became the first to mine for gold on Goat Mountain. He worked the mine for the next 18 years, extracting approximately $6,000 dollars in gold. His handmade dry washer was donated to the museum by his grandson, Morgan Reche.

According to the Fall 2019 issue of The Morongo Basin Historical Society newsletter, Newlin Landers started flying to the desert after World War II. He first learned about the Landers area when he read a news story about the mysterious death of Frank Critzer, an eccentric prospector and rumored German spy, who had built a home under a huge boulder called Giant Rock. Landers flew to the area along with his father and brother, for the first time in 1947, landing at the Giant Rock airstrip. At the time, the Landers area was sparsely settled. Besides Charlie Reche’s homestead, at the present day Intergratron, and son Walter Reche’s nearby adobe house, where Gubler’s Orchids are located now, there were few other dwellings.

After several more visits, he met George Van Tassel, who had leased Critzer’s claim following his death. Van Tassel was living there with his family, had a government permit to operate the Giant Rock airstrip and built a small cafe called Come On Inn. Landers was drawn to the desert and as an entrepreneur recognized its recreational potential. Newlin Landers and seven other flying acquaintances from the Los Angeles area banded together to acquire eight adjacent five-acre recreational properties. In 1950, they went to the Bureau of Land Management in Los Angeles as a group and at the same hour on the same day and filed their claims. They arranged their adjoining tracts so they could carve out a half mile long airstrip right in the center of their properties, dividing them in half, four on each side of the airstrip. The original name of Yucca Flats to Landers was changed in 1950. We found the museum’s George Van Tassel Room and exhibits about Giant Rock Space Conventions and the Intergratron captivating.

The name “Moharve Mercantile,” derives from a playful combination of names from founders Harvey and Monika Legrone with a lighthearted nod to the desert, and is a re-creation of a well-preserved and stocked general store circa 1940-1950. It was relocated from Pioneertown to the Morongo Basin Historical Society Museum in 2021.  Seventeen men and women volunteers from the Single Marine Program at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms worked alongside MBHS members. And following the move, the volunteers pitched in with landscaping at the museum campus. 

Mercantile shelves are lined with old timey groceries and products fitting to the era it depicts. You will find vintage food products, flour, sugar, lard, dry goods, vegetables and fruit, coffee, penny candy, tooth powder, perfumes, apothecaries, a butcher shop, and all manner of goods popular at the time. Remember, these items are for display only and not for purchase.

It is fun to wander around the mercantile and see the neatly organized goods on display that volunteers have painstakingly recreated. The detail does not go unappreciated by the eye.

John met docent Tom, a font of knowledge about all things desert. Our pal John Grasson, of the San Gorgonio Pass Historical Society, loved this museum as much as us. My husband John wore an embroidered Dezert boonie hat emblazoned with a Kokopelli muse that local Lost Ship of the Desert expert and quarterly online magazine Dezert editor John Grasson had given him years ago before his untimely death. Legend detective Grasson appeared on many television documentaries about the Lost Ship of the Desert. Show producers promised his research will go on. John Grasson’s knowledge, heart of gold and keen wit remains with us after all.

Morongo Basin Historical Society has a replica assay office on site. Assay offices are institutions set up to assay (test the purity of) precious metals. This is often done to protect consumers from buying fake items.

In the 1800s, the functions of assay offices in the U.S. included receiving bullion deposits from the public and from mining prospectors in the various American territories. 

Gold is a reasonably soft and malleable in its pure state, too soft for many of its practical uses. It is therefore alloyed with other metals such as a copper and silver altering is hardness, color and other properties. The proportion of gold contained in this alloy – its carat – is expressed in parts of 24, with pure gold being 24 carat.

One of the more common methods employed today – acid testing – has its basics in a process that was carried out 2500 years ago called touching, which involves scratching or rubbing the suspected gold item onto the surface of a slightly abrasive black ‘touchstone’ to produce a thin streak. Nowadays, assay offices test most of their gold using X-Ray fluorescence machines.

In addition to a well-stocked assay office, you will find an authentic living area, clothing reminiscent of the era and on the opposite wall (not shown) shelves loaded with a huge collection of antique bottles.

In Fall 2011, The Morongo Basin Historical Society Quarterly Newsletter announced that more than half a century after its construction and 13 years after it was disassembled, moved, reassembled, and mothballed, Lander’s original little Post Office awakened like a Sleeping Beauty. But it wasn’t a miracle that resurrected the one time civic, social and cultural seat of this remote community. It was the energy, ingenuity and generosity of many individuals working together to see the Post Office Utility Project through completion.

Built as a recreational cabin in 1958 under the Homestead Act, Vernette Landers purchased the cabin for the purpose of providing mail service. It was the first post office to be approved in the area of government recreational tracts and was dedicated as a rural contract postal station on May 2, 1962. The approximately 400 square foot wood cabin was divided into two tiny interior parts with slightly over half allotted for postal work, with the balance dedicated for public access to mailboxes and other services.

Locals liked to visit one another under the shade of the trees there or under the cottonwoods across the road where they would socialize and fill their jugs from the faucets there. Often this is where plans were made to meet again for Friday Night “Cook Your Own Steak” and dancing at the Longhorn or for Belfield Hall’s Sunday morning breakfast.

On May 2, 1998, several yards west of the original, a new Post Office opened with great fanfare. The original building was returned to Mrs. Landers. She was to move it from 890 Landers Lane to 632 N. Landers Lane where it now stands. Prohibited from moving the building intact, stepson Mark Landers dismantled and moved the small structure piece by piece, then reassembled it on the southwest corner of the property where Mrs. Landers lived much of her life.

Most rural communities have seen the original post offices razed or left to ruin. Vernette Landers understood the little building’s importance as a repository of local history. Mrs. Landers passed away in 2005. She bequeathed her property to the Morongo Basin Historical Society, including the original Post Office, now designated a California Historical Resource. On March 10, 2019, the Morongo Basin Historical Society held its first annual Newlin and Vernette Landers Founder’s Day.

Thanks to Mrs. Landers’ vision of providing a permanent Basin-wide repository to ensure the preservation of her vast archive of local history and her small private Post Office museum, new and older generations alike enjoyed the museum’s Grand Opening 2023 for peeks into the past with authentic displays, nostalgic collections, and uniformed mannequins giving one an old timey immersion into an important part of Lander’s history.

The 2019 Spring edition of the Morongo Basin Historical Society Newsletter talked about Impy, the famous bobcat of Landers. In 1966, a friend gave Vernette Landers a male bobcat named Impy. A year later someone gave her a female bobcat named Libra. At first, Vernette and her husband Newlin kept Impy in the main house but although he was loving and tame, he tore up so many books, upholstery and other items that they moved him next to Libra in the bobcat house, just off the porch at the back of the house. The famous Linn twins, Carroll and Traverse, constructed the bobcat house using rocks from their mines. Impy and Libra went on to produce nine litters, but only one of their offspring, Sissy, a female, born in 1974, survived.

The Landers also kept chickens, mallard ducks, rabbits, 30 domestic and cross-bred cats, a kit fox and tortoises. Impy was her first book Vernette wrote, published in 1974. She also befriended a raven, she called “Squawkie,” then later another one she called “Talkie,” which she later wrote a children’s book about in 1975.

Impy’s Children (1975), Nineteen O Four (1976), Little Brown Bat (1976), Slo-go (1976), Sandy the Cowdog (1979) and The Kit Fox and the Walking Stick (1980) followed. After 1992, it became illegal to raise bobcats and other wild animals in California for private purposes. By then, Vernette had lost her last bobcat and was no longer raising them. Impy is buried in a desert grave decorated with colorful glass bottles next to the museum.

The MBHS Museum – Open Tuesdays, Fridays and Saturdays from 11 a.m.-3 p.m. Nearby places you may want to visit while you’re in the area: Giant Rock, the Intergratron and Gubler’s Orchids.

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