Curator Curtis Newman and Historian Bonnie C. Kane of the Ridge Route
Communities Museum & Historical Society in Frazier Park show the Ramona Cradle as they
transfer it to the Santa Clarita Valley Historical Society on Jan. 27, 2001.
The "Ramona Cradle," as Robert E. Callahan called it, was donated in 1963 by
Mary Berger, owner of Rancho Camulos, to Callahan's Mission Village in Culver City.
The name derives from "Ramona," the 1884 novel by Helen Hunt Jackson that was
loosely based on Jackson's visit two years earlier with the Del Valle family at Rancho Camulos
in the western Santa Clarita Valley (near Piru). Callahan, an actor, author and pseudo-historian
with an interest in Native Americans, moved his Mission Village tourist attraction in 1963 to Sierra Highway
in Saugus-Agua Dulce, where he called it Callahan's Old West Trading Post. (The Mission Village
property was needed for the Santa Monica Freeway.) Following Callahan's death, his widow,
Marion (Kitty Kelley), donated the cradle — along with the Ramona Chapel,
Red Schoolhouse and other items from Callahan's Old West — to the SCV Historical Society
in 1987. After the death of the Society's first curator, Jerry Reynolds, in 1996, the cradle
was missing — until January 2001, when historian Bonnie C. Kane of the Ridge
Route Communities Museum & Historical Society realized it had found its way to Frazier Park, with
certain other items. The Ridge Route museum's log book confirmed the cradle's identity as
the one "from Rancho Camulos;" it and the other missing items were repatriated with
the SCV Historical Society.
Restored by Ridge Route Communities Museum curator Curtis Newman, the cradle is fabricated
with square nails, placing its origin in the 19th Century. Descendants of
Ygnacio del Valle owned Rancho Camulos until the 1920s, so the cradle probably belonged
to the Del Valle family.
Santa Clarita Valley Historical Society collection, courtesy of Marion Callahan —
and the Ridge Route Communities Museum & Historical Society.
Photo by Leon Worden.
