Sleepy Hollow Seventy Years Ago

This photograph of a Sleepy Hollow cabin appeared in the November 1939 issue of Pacific Electric Magazine, the company publication of the Pacific Electric Railway Company, operator of over 1,200 miles of track with 6,000 trains on 150 routes carrying 110 million passengers each year by the middle 1920s (yes, the Los Angeles region had one of the largest rapid transit systems in the world!)

The image was in a section devoted to news about employees and came with this caption:

C. J. Williams' (Central Timekeeping Bureau) cabin in Sleepy Hollow (Carbon Canyon) known as "Oak Way Lodge". With over 250 cabins located in his area, quite a community is growing. Natives living there permanently claim that the future holds much and perhaps it will be as well-known as Gilman and Murrieta Hot Springs some day.

The photo is, of course, taken from a printed item, so the quality is not particularly good. Additionally, the two-story wood-framed cabin is partially hidden by oak trees, but the name "Oak Way Lodge" obviously would indicate that it was on Oak Way Lane on the north end of Sleepy Hollow. It would be interesting to know if the building is still there, perhaps a little walk through that area would provide an answer.

As to the statement that there were 250 cabins in Sleepy Hollow seventy years back, that seems a little more than improbable, given that there are about 110 residences now, but that figure might have included Mountain View Estates (Canon Lane south of Carbon Canyon Road) and other areas within the Canyon. A reading of the 1930 census (the subject of another post one day) would indicate that there were far fewer dwellings in Sleepy Hollow than the caption suggests.

At any rate, this is a rare glimpse back to the early days of the neighborhood.