Seven days a week, you can explore our campus of 8 historic buildings that have been “rescued” from various parts of Santa Clarita, as well as our locomotive and caboose. A walk through the Santa Clarita History Center is not only scenic, but it’s also a nice easy hike from our entrance gate to the campgrounds full of oak trees and picnic areas. The Saugus Train Station Museum is open Saturdays from 1PM-4PM and by appointment.
The Southern Pacific Railroad’s Los Angeles and San Joaquin lines came together at Saugus — near today’s Magic Mountain Parkway/Bouquet Canyon Road intersection — where this building opened June 21, 1888. The Saugus Cafe started out as the depot diner and hotel; overnight guests stayed in four upstairs bedrooms. The diner moved across the highway in 1916 when the railroad needed the space for expanded passenger service and signalization.
The 4,350-square-foot depot has been carefully restored to the most active period in its life, 1917 to 1958, when it was again remodeled as transcontinental air travel and federal highway improvements cut into rail passenger service, which ended altogether in 1971. The last freight train orders were issued out of Saugus in February 1980, by which time a massive community effort was already underway to save the building from the wrecking ball. In June 1980, the depot became the first of many historic buildings to be moved into Hart Park.
As of 2025, another fundraising effort is afoot to create a best-in-class railroad museum inside the building, with previously unseen artifacts and engaging displays to bring our community’s significant transportation history to life.
Southern Pacific Railroad (SP) Engine No. 1629 is a 75-ton Class M4 mogul steam engine built in November 1900 by Schenectady Locomotive Works of New York. “Mogul” is the name for locomotives with a 2-6-0 wheel configuration (two small leading wheels, six driving wheels, no trailing wheels).
SP placed this oil burner into service on its Coast Line for light freight service from Yuma, Arizona, to Portland, Oregon – running right past its current location in Hart Park until at least 1904 when the Coast Line bypassed the SCV. In the 1920s, No. 1629 operated out of Sparks (NV) and Sacramento on SP’s Overland Route, part of the Transcontinental Railroad.
No. 1629 was stationed at SP’s Bayshore Yard in the Bay Area during World War II. Then, for two months in 1946, it served SP’s subsidiary in Mexico. It spent the following decade in service on SP’s Tucson line. It was retired in May 1957 as the stream era ended.
Western actor Gene Autry purchased No. 1629 along with its cylindrical tender and moved them to his Melody Ranch movie studio in Placerita Canyon where he was collecting locomotives for a future Western museum. A 1962 wildfire dashed his plans. No. 1629 sat idle for two decades – until 1982 when Autry donated it to the SCV Historical Society. Today, tour guides escort kids young and old into the cab to ring the bell.
The latest LARGE addition to the Santa Clarita History Center is Southern Pacific Railroad Caboose No. 1119, seen here “flying in” to its new home behind our mogul locomotive. The 1942 steam-era cupola caboose was built at the SP’s Los Angeles shops and ran past Hart Park on the SP’s L.A.-Mojave run.
Unlike most cabooses (never cabeese!) that have been gutted and converted into construction trailers and tiny homes, No. 1119 retains its 1950s interior paint job and most of its original interior features, from its cast iron stove and ice compartment to its bench seats, handbrakes, and toilet facility.
A benefactor purchased the caboose for the Historical Society from the Fillmore & Western Railway and paid to move it to Hart Park in 2021. Incidentally, a train that consists of only a locomotive and caboose is called a “cab hop.”
Destined to become the Santa Clarita Valley’s general history museum, the Pardee House has served many purposes since the 19th Century. It was built about 1890 on Pine Street by local prohibitionist Henry Needham as a Good Templars lodge (an abstinence organization). Three years later, local police constable Ed Pardee moved it to what is now Veterans Historical Plaza for use as his home. In 1946, daughter Pearle Pardee Russell sold it to the Pacific Telephone Company, which hired switchboard operators to connect local callers.
When the phone company outgrew the building, it leased it first to the Newhall-Saugus Boys’ Club (now called SCV Boys & Girls Club) as a teen center, then to the Newhall-Saugus-Valencia (now SCV) Chamber of Commerce, which hosted the committee that fostered a new city. One could say the Pardee House was the City of Santa Clarita’s birthplace. In 1988, soon after local voters said “yes” to cityhood, both the Chamber and the City moved into the current City Hall building. The phone company donated the vacant Pardee House to the Historical Society, which trucked it down the street to Hart Park in 1992.
The two-story, 3,000-square foot, hip-roofed Newhall Ranch House didn’t start out that way. Tradition tells us that in 1865, when oilman and future U.S. Senator Thomas R. Bard purchased the 48,612-acre Rancho San Francisco — the western half of the Santa Clarita Valley — he built a small, wood-frame structure with a brick cellar at Castaic Junction, where Castaic Creek meets the Santa Clara River. It was a replacement for the 1804 adobe estancia, or ranch headquarters building, which was heavily damaged in the 8-magnitude 1857 Fort Tejon earthquake.
Henry Mayo Newhall purchased the rancho and other properties across California in the 1870s. After his death in 1882, his five sons formed The Newhall Land and Farming Company, the future developer of Valencia. In the 1890s, they expanded the house into its current Victorian form. It served as the family home for the ranch foreman and hosted visiting company officials until 1973.
The original location of the house is now a Magic Mountain parking lot. With grant funding from the newly formed City of Santa Clarita, the Historical Society moved it to Hart Park in 1990.
Texas Ranger-turned-California sheep herder Thomas F. Mitchell arrived in present-day Canyon Country in 1860. After marrying Catherine Taylor in 1865, the couple built an adobe home for a growing family that soon included six children. Catherine home-schooled her children and those of two newly arrived families in the 1870s. When they reached the requisite number of 9 pupils in 1879, they organized the Sulphur Springs School District.
The 1880s brought a proper schoolhouse and a two-story ranch house for the Mitchells. The adobe fell into ruin until 1919 when the original mud bricks were salvaged and fashioned into a new home for the ranch foreman. Facing a bulldozer in 1986, the Historical Society rescued walls and fabricated new bricks to fill gaps.
Today, some of the adobe materials in the recreated 1919 structure date to the 1860s and bore witness to our valley’s early education.
This home was built in 1878 for Henry M. Newhall’s cousin Joshua O. Newhall at the site of today’s Old Town Junction restaurant on Main Street. As such, it is the oldest surviving structure built for a resident of the “new” town of Newhall. (“Old” Newhall was in Saugus, but that’s another story.) J.O. Newhall ran the lavish Southern Hotel across the street. A subsequent occupant was Lyman Stewart, who went on to found the Union Oil Company. Auguste Ferrier, a real-estate investor from France, bought the house in 1911, moved it to today’s 24318 Walnut Street, and leased it to the local postmaster.
Charles and Ruth Kingsburry bought the Walnut Street property in 1945. Charles served in Cuba during the 1898 Spanish-American War and in Manila during the subsequent Philippine insurrection. He arrived in town in 1919 and helped build the two powerhouses in San Francisquito Canyon for the (now) LADWP. Charles and Ruth ran a grocery store in Newhall for many years. A business college graduate, Ruth later worked for Hillburn’s Funeral Chapel. Both were active in Masonic organizations. Charles died in 1963; Ruth lived in the house until shortly before her death at age 92 in 1982.
Preparing to redevelop the property into a modern dental office in 1987, Dr. Alan Fine and Realtor Jim Droz donated the house to the Historical Society. The three local Questers groups collaborated to restore the building and furnish it with antiques representative of its Colonial Revival-style origins.
The Edison House was one of nine identical prefabricated homes erected in October 1929 to replace employees’ cottages that were lost in the 1928 St. Francis Dam Disaster. The cottages stood on the grounds of Southern California Edison’s 1924 Saugus Substation at “Edison curve,” a half mile south of Interstate 5 along today’s Magic Mountain Parkway.
The roughly 900-square-foot, Bavarian-style cottage was likely manufactured by Pacific Ready-Cut Homes, then the West’s leading supplier of kit homes. (SoCal Edison was a Pacific Homes customer.) Edison called them “Type T” operators’ cottages and used them at certain other locations. The squarish, five-room house has two bedrooms and adjoining bathroom, a living room, dining room, and kitchen. It features clapboard siding, a medium-pitch cross hipped-gable roof, hardwood floors, and fixed and casement windows.
In 1972, Edison sold its excess property including the cottages (but not the substation) to Newhall Land. In 1989, all cottages save this one were destroyed in a Fire Department exercise. The SCV Historical Society paid to move the house and set it on a new foundation in Hart Park. In the early 2000s, members of the Oak of the Golden Dream Questers completed the restoration of the home, furnished it with period antiques, and opened it to visitors.
Located in Quester Court, the Little Red Schoolhouse imitates the type of school used in mining camps and frontier settlements in the late 1800s. The simple, 6×12-foot shiplap-sided structure was built about 1927 by Robert E. Callahan, a collector of Western memorabilia who operated the Mission Village auto park in Culver City.
The auto park shut down when construction of the Santa Monica Freeway was imminent. In 1963, Callahan moved his collection of buildings and relics to 13360 Sierra Highway in Mint Canyon. In 1987, his widow, Marion Callahan, donated the schoolhouse and many other belongings to the Historical Society. Displayed inside the buiding are antique school desks, a teacher’s lectern, cursive writing templates, and a restored Pearl Oil (Standard Oil Company) Perfection heating stove from the Blum Ranch in Acton.
As the Automobile Age opened the West to tourists, “themed” auto parks lured them with minor tourist attractions of their own. Western and Native American motifs were popular. Inspired by Helen Hunt Jackson’s epic 1884 novel, “Ramona,” and intended to mimic the real chapel at Rancho Camulos, this imitation was a fixture at Robert E. Callahan’s Mission Village auto park in Culver City beginning in 1926. Callahan credited the composer Carrie Jacobs Bond (“I Love You Truly,” “The End of a Perfect Day”) for its design. She also contributed an 1882 pump organ and a 48-cup brass candelabra that can be seen inside.
A collector of Western Americana, Callahan authored several books in Jackson’s footsteps including 1930’s “Daughter of Ramona.” After Mission Village closed in 1962, Callahan moved his collection to Mint Canyon where he opened Callahan’s Old West Trading Post. In 1987, his widow donated the chapel to the Historical Society. Standing behind its original 1940s ornamental steel fence, it caps Quester Court and serves as a popular wedding backdrop today.
