Early Topanga Beach residents endured tense times during WW II but had a front row seat for the birth of California’s surf culture. Their experiences were a key chapter in Topanga’s creative…
Clayton and Ina Rust arrived in Lower Topanga Canyon in the 1920s, and helped transform what was still a corner of the wild west into a neighborhood of interconnected families and family…
In 1907, the newly widowed Keturah Catherine Spence (1857-1940) left Brantford, Canada to start over in Los Angeles. Catherine, as she called herself, risked her fortune on an avocado orchard, becoming one…
Landscape painter Laura Way Mathiesen brought an indomitable spirit, a formidable mind and boundless curiosity to Topanga in the 1920s. A woman with red hair and “dancing brown eyes,” Laura Way Mathiesen…
Around the same time that the Los Angeles Athletic Club (LAAC) bought Lower Topanga in 1924, its President, William May Garland (1866-1948), also managed to get Los Angeles selected as the host…
An unusual Topanga Beach sight in August 1924 would have been Sam Rizzio, 18, walking back and forth, repeating, “I am a dead man,” while a woman sprinkled a vial to wet…
While the Topanga Yacht Harbor never materialized, in 1975, the Topanga Woman’s Club formed the Topanga Creek Yacht Club, “in view of the importance of the creek to life in Topanga.” (See…
Although rodeo stunts were introduced to the Cooper brothers’ ranch by Helen Gibson in 1921, and the first official rodeo was thrown there in honor of Sheriff William Traeger in 1922, the…
The development of Topanga Beach happened quickly after a public campsite was created there in 1919 by two brothers, manager Miller Cooper and Deputy Sheriff Archie Cooper. Dancing was popular at Cooper’s…
Topanga Beach was also the setting for early movies, most notably a 15-minute, single-reel film, Crossing the American Prairies in the Early Fifties, that was directed through a megaphone by D. W.…