Before the coast highway was built, Malibu was owned for several decades by a wealthy and reclusive Rindge family and it was almost entirely off limits to the world. This was a mysterious and nearly legendary place that invited rampant speculation from journalists and the unquenchable curiosity of the public. What did the fabulously wealthy Frederick Hastings Rindge and his family do there? What was life like behind the gates of this private paradise?
Now, thanks to a trove of recently digitized Rindge and Adamson family photographs in the collection of Pepperdine University, we have a much fuller picture of life on the ranch, and it is surprising.
These aren’t stiff professional portraits of ladies with folded hands and fancy hats, and gentlemen with pocket watches and somber expressions. These are candid family photos that offer a vibrant look at life. It’s a fascinating window into a vanished time. This is an extraordinary collection of local history. Most of the images that were recently scanned are new to even those who have studied the previously available materials in depth.
“The Rindge and Adamson Family Papers tell a remarkable story of the people who shaped Malibu and safeguarded its coastline, and digitizing these materials allows that history to be explored by a far broader audience than ever before,” Mark Roosa, Pepperdine’s dean of libraries, told Topanga New Times.
When wealthy East Coast business magnate Frederick Hastings Rindge and his wife, Rhoda “May” Knight Rindge, acquired the Malibu Rancho in 1892, they planned to develop at least part of the 13,300-acre former Spanish land grant property as a kind of “American Riviera” beach resort. Instead, they built a relatively modest farm house to use for weekends and holidays. Frederick and May never lived full time on the ranch. It was too remote, especially in the early years, before that wonderful new invention the automobile became popular. Instead, they took up residence in Santa Monica, close enough to Malibu for weekend visits, but far more convenient for a Los Angeles business mogul and his family. Frederick also built a mansion on land he subdivided in the West Adams district of LA that would become the family’s primary residence, but on weekends and when the weather was nice, the family would trek out to their personal paradise up the coast for a lazy day at the beach or a weekend of riding across the mesas, or exploring the canyons.
Frederick Rindge’s plans for an American Riviera in Malibu never materialized, possibly because he had fallen in love with the land. His internal debate over the desire to build a new city there and his love for its beauty is evident in his 1898 book Happy Days in Southern California.
In it he wrote, “I have grown to love this land. When we returned to the country from the city it seemed like returning from folly to truth,” and “Here in these almost holy hills, in this calm and sweet retreat, protected from the wearing haste of city life, here time flies: but only as the farm bird flits from tree to tree, not as the lark speeds pursued by the hawk.”
Frederick didn’t have much time to enjoy life in the place he described as “very near terrestrial paradise.” He died in 1905. He was only 47. His widow, May, devoted the rest of her life to keeping the world out of this private kingdom by the sea.
The Malibu estate had grown to more than 17,000 acres and 27 miles of coastline at the time of Frederick’s death. May was now one of the wealthiest women in the country and a source of endless curiosity, speculation, and sometimes outright fabrication.
There are snatches of news from Malibu in the years that May owned it, but most of it pertains to her successful fight to keep out Southern Pacific Railroad and her unsuccessful effort to prevent the construction of the coast highway. Very little concrete information on the day-to-day life on the ranch made the news, and when it did, it was usually about wildfires, wrangles with the neighbors over right-of-way, and the purported activities of smugglers and cattle rustlers.
May was an intensely private person, but because of her great wealth, she occasionally popped up in the society columns. She’s described in a 1912 gossip column in the Los Angeles Morning Tribute as “a very gentle little woman not given to social gayety nor yet to going to clubs.”
May was tall, not small. She was strong and tough and there was nothing soft or gentle about her, except perhaps her love for her family and the family’s animals. She grew up on a Michigan sheep farm, one of 12 children. It wasn’t an easy life. She was 22 and teaching mathematics at the local school when she met and married Frederick Hastings Rindge in a whirlwind romance.
In 1912, she was one of the country’s only female railroad presidents. Her railroad was built to prevent other railroads from gaining the right-of-way across the Malibu Ranch. The track was only 15 miles long, but it was an effective strategy. She also managed an impressive portfolio of real estate in Los Angeles, where she and her daughter Rhoda lived at the family’s West Adams mansion.
Most of the previously available photos of her are somber to the point of grim. Thanks to the newly scanned photos, we now know she was not in the least opposed to fun, although it’s true that she did not visit clubs—May belonged to a deeply religious Methodist sect that did not approve of drinking, dancing, or riotous living.
The Rindge family rarely hosted big parties or galas on the ranch. This was their retreat, where they rode horses, picnicked, hiked, and fished, and spent lazy afternoons at the beach. Sometimes they fired up the two diesel-powered railroad flatcars that were the only “engines” to ever traverse May’s privately owned Hueneme, Malibu, Port Los Angeles Railroad. Lucky guests might be taken for rides on the 15 miles of track, but it is clear from the photos that riding the flatcars were a source of delight for the family.
The newly released trove of photos include pastoral views of range riders and cattle, peaceful fields full of crops, or cropped by sheep, a reminder that the property remained a working ranch throughout the decades when it was owned by the Rindge family. The family didn’t live on the ranch, but their ranch hands did. Crops like barley and lima beans were grown in what is now the Civic Center area. Cowhands managed the ranch’s livestock, including cattle and sheep, and the ranch’s Zuma “home farm” (located in what is now the National Park Service’s Zuma Canyon Park) included stables, barns, corrals, a bunk house, and a ranch house.
When Frederick died he left three children. His oldest, Samuel Knight Rindge, was 17; Fred Jr. was 15; and Rhoda was only 12. The boys were sent East for their education, but Rhoda remained home (she spent one year at Wellesley, but was too homesick and miserable to continue her studies there).
The photos suggest that the period between Frederick’s death in 1905 and the marriage of both of May’s sons in 1911 was a surprisingly halcyon time for the family. There are informal photographs of the Rindges motoring, climbing Mount Rubidoux in Riverside County, riding horses on the Malibu ranch, playing at the beach, spending time with favorite pets, and laughing at family jokes.
It is largely thanks to Rhoda, Frederick and May’s youngest child, shown in the photos from this time period as an adventurous child with a love of animals and the outdoors, that so many of the family documents and photos reside at Pepperdine. She loved Malibu and went on to marry the ranch manager, Merritt Adamson, in 1915. Together, they established Adohr Farms Dairy (Rhoda spelled backwards).
Rhoda spent the last decades of her life living full time at the Malibu beach house her mother built for her and her husband. It’s now the Adamson House Museum, owned and operated by California State Parks. Rhoda and Merritt’s three children formed the Adamson Land Company after Rhoda’s death in 1962, and donated 138 acres for Pepperdine University’s Malibu campus in 1968.
The Rindge and Adamson Papers Collection also came to Pepperdine through members of the family. The photos featured here are drawn from the Rindge family’s early years in Malibu, but they represent only a small selection of the newly released material, and there is much more to come: correspondence, business papers, financial records, newspaper clippings, maps, and other materials from 1891 to 1967 are still waiting to be scanned.
“Photographs were digitized first because they offer a unique look into the Rindge and Adamson families and early Malibu history,” special collection librarians Bailey Berry and Chris Meihl explained. “The photographs that were selected offer a glimpse into the ways the Rindge family lived, worked, and forever shaped the history of Malibu.”
Digitizing archival resources like these is expensive and extremely labor intensive. Many of the photos shown here were glued into heavy albums. Some were damaged, many are brittle with age.
The librarians describe how they used a specialized camera called a Phase One that takes highly accurate, high resolution images. From a researcher’s perspective, the digitized photos can be a more helpful resource than the originals, giving the viewer the ability to zoom in and closely examine details.
Scanning the images is only one part of the process. Identifying people, places, and dates requires extensive research. That data becomes the metadata published along with the photographs to help researchers find what they are searching for and understand the context for the materials. It’s finicky work, but piecing together a lost chapter of local history is, in its own way, as exciting as a treasure hunt for those interested in the story revealed by the images.
The photos in this collection are an amazing resource for anyone interested in local history. Who knew that the formidable, indomitable May Knight Rindge, the woman who fought the unstoppable Southern Pacific Railroad and won, had a sense of humor and loved to laugh? History like this isn’t just interesting, it can be humanizing and humbling.
The full scope of the Rindge and Adamson Family Papers is listed in its Finding Aid: pepperdine.libraryhost.com/repositories/2/resources/34. Researchers who would like to view undigitized materials or see the materials in person can set up an appointment by contacting specialcollections@pepperdine.edu. The photos in this feature, and many more, can be accessed on the Pepperdine Digital Library website: library.pepperdine.edu/collections/digital-collections/.
