Added to the National Register of Historic Places on September 4, 1979

Architecturally speaking, there is nothing particularly noteworthy about the Minnie Hill Palmer House in Chatsworth. It’s a traditional cottage for 1911, not very à la mode, with a simple wood-frame construction and board-and-batten siding made of redwood. There’s no fireplace or chimney – it was heated with an old-fashioned wood-burning stove, and lit by kerosene lamps until just after WWII. The water flowing through the brook on the property had high levels of arsenic in it, so they had to take a wagon to an artesian well nearby to get water for cooking and drinking. That’s some real pioneer stuff right there. 

In the early 1900s, simple homes like this dotted the northwest San Fernando Valley, including many that housed the 45 homesteaders who settled in the area that would become Chatsworth. Each of them would have been surrounded by gardens and citrus trees, like this one is. But the Minnie Hill Palmer House is the only intact cottage left from the area’s pioneer days. The fact that it was occupied for 50+ years by a woman who was there for Chatsworth’s birth makes this home even more of a vital link to the region’s past. 

Since the 1960s, the “Homestead Acre” (as it’s now called) has occupied a 1.3 acre site in Chatsworth Park South. Back when it was constructed, it was part of a large ranch owned by an early Chatsworth settler named James David Hill and his wife Rhoda. James was a Civil War vet who fought for the Union as part of the Iowa infantry. Rhoda was an Arkansas gal from a plantation family; her brother was a Confederate soldier (must have made for some awkward family dinner conversations). The two married soon after the war ended, and when Rhoda’s family sold their plantation and took a wagon train to Visalia, CA, James and Rhoda followed. 

James moved south from Visalia in 1870 to look for work in Los Angeles, and Rhoda arrived the next year with her two young daughters. After 15 years in South LA, they packed up and moved to the Chatsworth area in 1886. The Hills first took up squatters’ rights, and later claimed 120 acres under the Homestead Act of 1862, which offered government land to anyone willing to live on it for five years, build a dwelling and grow crops. They were among the first families to homestead in the wedge of public land between the old Spanish land grant Rancho Simi (later Simi Valley) and the Rancho Ex-Mission San Fernando (encompassing most of the San Fernando Valley). 

For their first 25 years in Chatsworth, the Hills lived in an even simpler wood-frame house. They had six kids by the time they moved to the Chatsworth area, and two more were born soon after they arrived.

Through marriage and business, the Hills entrenched themselves into the local community. Their eldest daughters Ruth and Lizzie married men who lived on properties that bordered the Hill homestead. Their son Lovell started up a successful general store with another homesteader, Fred Graves, which operated from 1906 to 1915; Lovell was even the Chatsworth postmaster for a few years. 

When the Southern Pacific railroad came to town in the early 1900s, the Hills deeded 10 acres to the company so it could bore a path through the mountains to Simi Valley. James Hill sold fruit to the workers building the tunnels, and his wife and daughters washed and ironed their clothes. Minnie Hill, one of six daughters, used to sew homemade nametags onto the men’s clothing so they could tell one guy’s pants from the other guy’s.

The Homestead Acre was built in 1911, when James and Rhoda’s youngest child was already 19, with a baby of her own. Most of the siblings had already married and moved away (except for Lovell, who was a bachelor until he was 59). Still, the cottage was a perennial home base for the extended Hill family. It wasn’t uncommon for kids and grandkids to return and live there for a spell.

Nobody lived at the Homestead Acre longer than Minnie Hill, the first Hill child to be born in Chatsworth, in 1886. She got married to Alfred Palmer in 1909, two years before the cottage was built. Minnie and Alfred lived in LA at first and then moved to Montana to try their luck at farming. It didn’t work out, and the pair returned to Chatsworth around 1920 to care for Minnie’s ailing mother Rhoda. Minnie and Alfred’s kids, Edith and Leroy, slept in the main house with grandma Rhoda and uncle Lovell, while Minnie and Alfred stayed in an adjacent building/shed close by.

The 1920s was a momentous decade for the Hill family. The family patriarch James Hill died in 1923, and the Hills more than doubled their acreage by purchasing some adjoining land, including a quarry, in 1926. Lovell, Alfred Palmer and (later on) Leroy Palmer went into business together as agents for the Trojan Powder Co. Their job was to haul dynamite from a stone shed, right on their property, to parts all over California and Nevada – wherever an explosion was needed, they were there. Trojan Powder even had a brief brush with infamy, when Lovell sold 70 sticks of dynamite to a young couple who allegedly used it to blow up a yacht to cover up a murder!

Rhoda Hill died in 1935; that same year Lovell married and moved away to San Fernando, but Minnie and Alfred stayed at the Homestead Acre with their son Leroy and his new wife. Some improvements were made to the house in this era, including a new kitchen and a screened enclosure on the front porch. You can distinguish the newer buildings by the horizontal shiplap siding on it, compared to the vertical board and batten of the original house. Not long after WWII, Leroy Palmer and an associate finally wired Homestead Acre for electricity. 

Alfred Palmer died in 1946, followed by Lovell in 1952, at which point their part of the dynamite transportation business shut down. By this time, the fields lay fallow on the Hill property. Dynamite and granite hauling had become the family’s main source of income, so Minnie needed a new way to support herself.

She found one in the 1950s, when the Aqua Sierra Sportsmans Club set up shop on the west edge of the Hills’ property. The Club started as a skeet and trap-shooting operation, but by 1955 it was running into some financial trouble. Along comes a rich German immigrant named Heinrich “Berky” Berkenkamp – one of the owners of Oroweat Bakery, and a big fan of hunting and shooting. Berkenkamp arranged to purchase nearly the entire 230-acre Hill homestead on behalf of Aqua Sierra, with the proviso that Minnie would be able to live, rent and tax-free, on a 1.3 acre plot that included the family cottage. Minnie also got new indoor plumbing and a brand new bathroom out of the deal. According to a spring 1956 story from The Chatsworth Grapevine, she had just returned from a Hawaiian vacation – presumably paid for by the proceeds from the lease (and later sale) of the homestead.

Around the same time, country-western star Roy Rogers moved to Chatsworth with his wife Dale Evans, bought another local homestead just southwest of the Hills’ and set up a sports center of his own, complete with golfing, skeet/trap-shooting stations, and a two-acre trout lake. By the late ‘50s, Rogers was saying in interviews that he also operated the Aqua Sierra Club. At some point, his name even ended up on signage for the sports center surrounding Homestead Acre.

All through this period, Minnie is living happily on the property that her family had homesteaded since 1886, in the house she had occupied since 1920. An electrified kitchen made cooking easier, and now she watched soap operas on TV instead of gluing her ears to the radio. But in many ways, Minnie’s life as an older woman was similar to how it was in the pioneer days. She still grew a farmer’s market’s worth of fruit and vegetables in her garden to preserve or bake into pies. Just that her gardening routine now involved collecting buckets of golf balls and bringing them back to the sports center, in exchange for a small finder’s fee that she usually donated to the Girl Scouts or the Junior Baseball League. 

Minnie Hill Palmer stayed at the Homestead Acre until 1976, when she moved to a retirement home. She passed away in 1981 at the age of 94. By that time the eastern part of the homestead had been acquired by the City of Los Angeles, who turned it into Chatsworth Park South; the western part was purchased by the State of California to create the Santa Susana Pass State Historic Park. 

These days the Homestead Acre is the headquarters of the Chatsworth Historical Society, the conservators of the property since 1978. The first Sunday of each month, you can take a tour of the cottage from one of their docents, dressed in period garb and ready to answer all of your nosey questions about turn-of-the-century life in Chatsworth. There’s a small museum on site, housed in the old pro shop back from the sports center days.

What amazes me is how wild and old Homestead Acre still feels, despite the massive changes that have swirled around it since it was built in 1911. Mid-century suburban tract homes are right around the corner. A soccer field and playground now sit where once there were endless rows of crops. A craggy mountain range lies just west, where horse-drawn wagons once pulled passengers and mail up into Simi Valley and onwards to San Francisco (more about that in visit #77). Trains still rumble through the Santa Susana tunnel just above the Homestead Acre, the famous Iverson Movie Ranch (and the infamous Spahn Ranch) is five minutes away, and there’s an abandoned anti-ballistic missile site just a few miles north, a vestige of the Cold War. Not much is as it was. And yet still this humble cottage stands at the center of a beautifully landscaped property, one of our last remaining physical connections to the pioneer days of the west San Fernando Valley. 

Huge thanks to Ray Vincent of the Chatsworth Historical Society for reviewing this post before publication, and to all of the Society’s docents for sharing their knowledge when I visited the Homestead Acre. Their website is a playground for San Fernando Valley history nuts. Dive in here. 

Sources & Recommended Reading

+ Altschul, Marty: “Minnie Palmer Plows Long, Colorful Row” (Los Angeles Times, August 24, 1969 – via ProQuest)

+ Cervin, Michael: “Love and Carnage in La Cañada” (Medium.com, October 1, 2014)

+ “Historical Notes” (The Chatsworth Grapevine, March 22, 1956 – downloadable PDF, via Chatsworth Historical Society)

+ Lerner, Patricia: “Getting Ready for Company: Chatsworth Celebrates Centennial with Salute to Palmer House, Community’s Oldest Homestead” (Los Angeles Times, March 10, 1988)

+ Lubas, Ken: “Homestead to Be Dedicated Today” (Los Angeles Times, May 4, 1980 – via ProQuest)

+ Vincent, Ann & Ray, Chatsworth Historical Society: “Aqua Sierra and the Roy Rogers Sports Center Shooting Range, Golf Courses and Fishing Lakes – 1951 to 1969” (ChatsworthHistory.com, revised January 2021) (also available as a PDF download)

+ Vincent, Ann & Ray, Chatsworth Historical Society: “Chatsworth Hills Homesteaders – Part 2” (ChatsworthHistory.com, revised March, 2022) (also available as a PDF download)

+ Vincent, Ann & Ray, Chatsworth Historical Society: “The Minnie Hill Palmer Story” (ChatsworthHistory.com, revised June, 2018) (also available as a PDF download)

+ Willman, Martha L.: “Mrs. Palmer, 94-Year Resident of Valley, Dies” (Los Angeles Times, March 8, 1981 – via ProQuest)

+ Wright, Sara, Office of the Chief Legislative Analyst: Homestead Acre’s NRHP nomination form