The Lost Ranch, a family story

My wife and I returned to Northern California from Redlands last night. We had visited a friend in hospice.  Redlands is in the Inland Empire, such a great name for fairly ordinary turf. I would have driven back in one long day, but Susan now insists on shorter days, We stopped at a motel in Paso Robles, which the locals call "Paso." I wanted another crack at looking at my grandfather's ranch nearby, near Pozo.

Many years ago I read a book titled FAMILY STORIES.  I recently tried to find it on the 'net and  on Amazon, but it seems to have vanished. This book was an examination of family stories, which ones were common and what purposes they served. "Grandfather's lost ranch" is a classic. It tells how the family once had some significant property, a ranch or a gold mine or a bank, so the family is really more fancy and unified than it now seems. Anyway, I had once found the ranch site, which is a bit beyond the southern end of Lake Margarita, and the foundation of my grandparents' small house. But I did not realize what it was that I had come across at the time. I last visited the complete house in (maybe) Dec of 1942, and at that time it had no electricity. Primitive. On this trip I wanted to see if I could find the small property again (now part of a county park, I think). Susan and I drove along an empty road (River Road) for some time. The road paralleled the Salinas River, which is no more than a small creek at that point. I did  manage to find the parking lot that had been fenced off on the property, and I marked it on my GPS. I then walked a lot but did not find the house foundation. Maybe it has been taken out as part of a general improvement of the wild scene there.

The story is that some fancy people in San Luis Obispo wanted permission to hunt deer on my grandparents' property. He told them to get lost, so they took the property from him, using eminent domain. The justification was that they needed his ranch to make Lake Margarita, but the lake never came near his small ranch, and his neighbors got to keep their land. Just a story, of course. Susan wants me to sue, but that was 75 years ago, the land is now part of the park around the lake, and hunting is explicitly forbidden. And nobody beats eminent domain. Having seen the land, Susan now thinks more highly of me.