John Shepherd's Ranch House 1865 - 1905 (site)

 ruins, ranch, farmhouse

John Shepherd homesteaded 160 acres here in 1864, at first housing his young family in a small adobe cabin he built on the land. By the late 1880s he owned some 1,700 acres.
Anong the first white settlers of this area, Shepherd employed Paiute men and women as field workers and as laborers on a toll road to the Panamint and Darwin mines east of the Owens Valley. He supplied the mining camps with beef, hay and grain and hauled ore to Southern California.
In 1873 Shepherd built a fancy nine-room house (complete with white gables) on this site. With running water in the kitchen, and with an ornate fountain in the yard, Shepard's farm house was called "the showplace of the Owens Valley." For years, the Shepherd home was the center of Owens Valley social life.
In 1873, Mr. and Mrs. Shephard's baby daughter died, and was buried on the property.
In 1905, George Chaffey, an agricultural developer from Southern California, purchased Shepherd's ranch and subdivided it, along with other adjacent ranches, and founded the town of Manzanar in 1910.
Shepherd's house became the headquarters for Chaffey's Owens Valley Improvement Company, which built an irrigation system and planted thousands of fruit trees, and by 1920 the town had more than two dozen homes, a two room school, a town hall, and a general store. Also at that time, nearly 5,000 acres of apple, pear, and peach trees were being grown, along with grapes, prunes, potatoes, corn, alfalfa and large vegetable and flower gardens.
In 1924 the City of Los Angeles purchaced the property.
With the area's water supply now being diverted to Los Angeles, the orchard community went into decline, and by 1935 the settlment of Manzanar had been abandoned.