The Virgina Dare Winery on the northwest corner of Foothill Boulevard and Haven Avenue in Rancho Cucamonga, California, was built in 1908 by Chinese laborers who also built the aqueduct above Cal State San Bernardino, and several other projects…
“There ain’t no sin and there ain’t no virtue. There’s just stuff people do.”
—John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
Perhaps no dusty desert town from the 19th Century exemplified Steinbeck’s quote better than Daggett, California. Shootouts, saloons, hangings and frontier justice, the old town had it all, and so much more…
John Cushenbury aimed to hit it big, and looking back, he did. A prospector and miner in 1860, Cushenbury discovered silver in the limestone deposit where Mitsubishi Cement Plant is now situated. Hopefully the next silver baron in California, Cushenbury set up a mining camp at the springs below his deposit. When word got out about the discovery the local desert came alive with dreams of grandeur that prospecting brings. Little did he imagine that someday his strike would result in a mega-million dollar kingdom of cement…
Love him or hate him, one has to admit Pegleg’s story is intriguing. It is clear people knew different versions of the same man, as their stories vary wildly. According to On the Trail of Pegleg Smith’s Lost Gold: Legend and Fact Combined to Provide Fresh Clues to the Location of Pegleg Smith’s Famous Lost Mine, he…
Have you ever wondered if the vastly different cities of Big Bear City and La Quinta, California, could possibly have anything in common? One is high in the San Bernardino mountains , a few minutes from Big Bear Lake, and the other is near the Santa Rosa mountains in the low desert, approximately an hour’s…
Admit it. If you’ve traveled on the I-40 or Route 66, you’ve stopped for ice cream or gasoline. Maybe a corn dog.
The tiny ghost town of Ludlow, California is just off these long stretches of roads. You can’t miss it and if you do, you have miles to go before you can turn around.
We think Ludlow is the perfect little desert spot in the middle of nowhere. Ludlow is home to quite a few abandoned ramshackle houses and countless rusted cannibalized vintage cars. Ludlow even has its own pioneer cemetery. Like many ghost towns, what Ludlow has the most of is a wealth of history.
You could say Ludlow has it all…
The U.S. Army officer slowly banked his 1940 Stinson Voyager to the left and readied it for a rough landing on the dirt runway. The small 80 horsepower airplane always got a workout during the many flights made by this solder while he surveyed the land below him during a hot summer. A cavalry officer…
The movie Tarantula featuring the small desert town of Desert Rock, Arizona, and a giant tarantula was actually filmed in Apple Valley, California. Many of the scenes were shot at Dead Man’s Point. It was the fourth biggest film at the box office in December 1955. The movie’s tagline said, “More terrifying than any horror known to…
Cronese vs. Coronise Figuring out the origin of the Cronese Cat’s name has just about as many theories as a storybook feline has lives. It was believed the natural wonder is either named for early explorer and author Titus Fey Cronise or William H.V. Cronise. In 1870, both were officers of the Piute Mining Company….
Take a short walk on this quiet mountain trail, surrounded by pines and open spaces, and you see it up ahead. White crosses in a semi-circle, around the gnarled truck of a tree. So, what have you stumbled into here? Well, give us a minute or two and we’ll tell you about the mountain town that refused to live.
Here, just above the highway, are about 25 marked graves in the little cemetery that served the town mining town known as Doble…
