Harry Carey Sr., an early silent-screen actor who starred in more than 200 films, took over the homestead rights of a previous settler in 1916 and established a ranch of almost 2,000 acres in the Santa Clarita Valley, where he built the original wood-frame ranch house. He and his actress wife, Olive, raised two children there, Harry Carey Jr. (Dobe) and Ella Carey Taylor (Cappy), both born on the ranch in the 1920s. As the first of many film actors to settle in the valley, Carey Sr. helped establish Santa Clarita as a center of Western-genre filmmaking, and the ranch was used in many silent movies and Western serials. Oscar-winning director John Ford learned his trade on the Harry Carey Ranch, and distinguished visitors to Tesoro Adobe included William S. Hart, Charles Russell, Will Rogers, Tom Mix, and John Wayne. The ranch, the first tourist attraction in Santa Clarita, housed horses, cattle, hogs, goats, sheep, and every stray dog that Harry Carey found. More than 40 Navajo lived there, tending sheep, weaving blankets, making silver jewelry, and forming the community of the Harry Carey Trading Post. When the St. Francis Dam broke on March 12, 1928, floodwaters washed through the ranch; the Carey family was away, and the Navajo had returned to their Southwest homes a month earlier under the advisement of a medicine man who predicted that the dam would break. The Trading Post was destroyed, the caretakers Mr. and Mrs. Harter were killed, and more than 450 other people died as the flood devastated San Francisquito Canyon and followed the Santa Clara River to the Pacific Ocean. The Carey family sold the ranch in the mid 1940s, and in 1952 the Clougherty family, owners of Farmer John, bought the property to raise livestock. Their FJ cattle brand remains visible throughout the property. The Cloughertys kept the ranch until 2005, when Montalvo Properties, LLC donated it as Tesoro Adobe Historic Park to Los Angeles County, and the ranch was preserved through the Cloughertys' efforts as a reminder of Santa Clarita's western heritage.
