Girard Chimney

Look up to the very top of the south side of Limekiln Canyon, on the edge of the high tableland, and if the light is right you will see a stone chimney standing alone against the sky. Many a motorist has wondered how that tower came to be in so inaccessible a place. I wrote its story once, and here it is.

In nineteen twenty five Joe Barbree sold thirty five acres of that coast land to a promoter from Los Angeles named Victor Girard. He was the man who laid out the town of Girard in the San Fernando Valley, the place they call Woodland Hills now, and he had made a fortune at it, though not everyone who dealt with him came away fond of him. Like Mr.

Hearst down the coast, he was a successful businessman, and like Mr. Hearst he wanted a domain of his own on top of a hill, with the whole Pacific spread out below it. Hearst had his castle rising at San Simeon.

Girard would have his mountain above Limekiln, and nobody would tell him how it was to be done. So he built a mansion of redwood poles cut in the canyon, with furniture woven from saplings and cushioned in luxury, and cost was never considered. Everything came in by mule from The Corrals at the foot of the Nacimiento grade.

He hired packers from the Colorado mines. They packed a mile of two inch pipe from a mountain spring. They packed a plate glass window eight feet by fourteen on a sled with a man on either side, and it arrived whole, only to crack from the heat of the fireplace it was set beside.

That fireplace could roast a whole beef, and eighty tons of native stone went up the Limekiln trail on mules for it, and for the patios and walls. There was electric light, and a cold room where whole carcasses hung. Girard had no respect for game laws, and once, packing venison home out of season, he met the warden at The Corrals and denied it indignantly, until the warden's dog went sniffing at the packs and found two fine haunches.

He paid a stiff fine. He had a Model T made over into a horse drawn carriage for the river road, and a trick saddle with stirrups that let go if his horse stumbled, for he feared falling into the canyons. When he came, he came with a chauffeur and a secretary and a staff, and somehow everyone on the coast happened to ride by that day.

The caretakers lived in a smaller house nearby, first Jim Stanley, then the Sanses, and from nineteen thirty Morrall and Blanche, who loved the coast and were part of it. My grandson Bill knew them himself. Then one day in nineteen thirty three, while the caretaker was burning brush, a south wind carried the sparks to the big house, and it burned to the ground.

Less than a decade after it was begun, all that was left of one man's private empire was the chimney you can see from here.