FOLKS SAW A PARADISE; SUN-BLESSED VALLEY PERFECT SPOT FOR FARMS AND DREAMS.

Byline: Gregory J. Wilcox Daily News Staff Writer

``Oh, I'm packin' my grip, and I'm leaving today

'Cause I'm taking a trip California way

I'm gonna settle down and never more roam

And make the San Fernando Valley my home''

-Lyrics from a song popularized by Bing Crosby

Her first look at the San Fernando Valley, shimmering with heat and caressed by a north wind, left Jessie Murphy smitten. It was 1910 and Murphy had come over from Whittier for a horse-and-buggy tour of the farmland being hawked by local real estate agents.

She never left. And her first impression of the fertile Valley, glowing golden in the sun, didn't fade over seven decades, either.

``It was just a stretch of this big beautiful valley. I don't know what we intended to make a living with. Come to think of it, it was crazy,'' she told a California State University, Northridge, interviewer in 1981 as part of the ``Oral History of the San Fernando Valley.''

To read the words of early settlers like Murphy and others is to see the Valley through their eyes. Turns out some of the things that concerned them then - schools, jobs, development and a fair shake from the city of Los Angeles - concern us still.

In the century's first two decades, the Valley was still a place of open spaces, 25 miles long east to west and 10 miles wide north to south, with crops and untended land spreading in every direction. It was considered the place to put down stakes and farming was the most popular occupation, according to ``The San Fernando Valley Then and Now: An Illustrated History'' by Charles A. Bearchell and Larry D. Fried, which was produced in conjunction with the United Chambers of Commerce.

By 1900, groves belonging to members of the Los Angeles Olive Growers Association covered nearly 4,000 acres of the low hills of Sylmar, thought by some to be the world's largest concentration of its kind at the time. Meanwhile, orange groves and wheat fields spread out across the Valley floor.

Communities became known by the crops they produced. Pacoima had vineyards, Sherman Oaks residents farmed dry wheat, those in Reseda raised lima beans, sugar beets and lettuce; Northridge cultivated wheat; and groves of peach trees identified Toluca Lake.

In 1912, the Bonner Fruit Company was the area's major employer, canning over a million tons of peaches, apricots and other fruits.

Collectively, these communities formed the Valley's first real economy with a national reach; by 1922, the area was an agricultural powerhouse that produced a marketbasket of crops valued at $22.5 million.

Although they didn't know it then, the Murphys and their neighbors were among the last pioneers who would come to the Valley just to work the land. Change was riding the wind and nothing - not fire, floods or eventually a sour economy - could stop it.

The seeds for the Valley as it exists today were actually sown in 1874 when Charles Maclay and George K. Porter bought the entire northern section of the area, 56,000 acres, from the heirs of Eulogio de Celis.

Maclay developed what is now the city of San Fernando as a railroad link with Los Angeles and encouraged that city's residents to ride excursion trains to townships springing up across the Valley. By 1900, the Toluca Flyer was a familiar site in the area and four years later the Southern Pacific Railroad punched a tunnel through the Santa Susana Mountains, establishing a coastal rail link to the north and opening new markets for the Valley's farmers.

The community was big enough, and enough was happening, to support a newspaper industry and several began publishing. Some, like the Burbank News, were short-lived operations. Others, like the Lankershim Laconic, founded by Chauncey Wilcox in 1908, survived as the Valley Times until 1968. And in 1911, E.R. Elkins established the Van Nuys Call, later the Valley News and Green Sheet and forerunner of today's Daily News.

But while agriculture would continue to flourish into the 1920s and '30s in some parts of the Valley, developers had already sensed that the land had more value as real estate. A brochure from the era titled ``Van Nuys (within Los Angeles) California, The Hub of the San Fernando Valley . . . The place where you should come to live'' was effusive in its praise of the area.

``It is with justice that Van Nuys can claim to be the hub of the San Fernando Valley as the town occupies the center of what may well be termed the fruit and vegetable basket of the City of Los Angeles. Van Nuys is a fast growing town, beautiful in location, homey in its atmosphere fascinating and attractive in every way.''

It noted that the city was surrounded by mountain passes with ``perfectly paved highways leading to the beaches . . . and playgrounds of Southern California.''

Water and electricity were one of the reasons why the Valley would prosper.

By 1900 planners and politicians realized that getting enough water to support Los Angeles' growing population would be a problem so in 1907 the city approved a $23 million bond issue to finance construction of the 250 mile-long aqueduct to bring water from the Owens Valley.

And it literally took an act of Congress to ensure that the Valley would eventually be annexed to the city. The bill deeding the land for the aqueduct stipulated that the water could only be used for irrigation within the city limits.

Thus the Valley's communities could only gain access to the water through political annexation to Los Angeles. On Nov. 5, 1913, more than 30,000 people gathered on the hillsides north of San Fernando to watch the first waters from the Sierra Nevada spill down the aqueduct channel into the Valley.

Even then, the Valley worried about unfair treatment by Los Angeles political bosses.

``The San Fernando Valley has been the stepchild of Los Angeles, the drudge that did the city's work and shared not the rewards thereof,'' lamented a 1914 article in ``Sunset Magazine.''

Electric lights arrived the same year the city got its water, both powerful lures for Valley residents looking for some luxury. So on Nov. 22, 1915, about 170 square miles of the Valley annexed itself to the city.

And the streets that were being built then reflect what is here now. The Valley was laid out with 13 of Los Angeles' longest streets, including the five longest. They are Sepulveda Boulevard, Mulholland Drive, Victory Boulevard, Vanowen Street and Roscoe Boulevard, ranging in length from 25.4 miles to 16.4 miles.

Hollywood discovered the Valley about this time, too.

Director D.W. Griffith used Sylmar as the backdrop for his epic, ``Birth of a Nation.''

In March 1914, Carl Laemmle decided that his entertainment production facility at Gower and Sunset boulevards in Hollywood was too small so he cast his eye upon the still wide-open spaces of the Valley and bought what was then known as the Taylor estate. A year later he opened Universal Studios.

To the west in Studio City, Mack Sennett, famed for his zany comedies, found a variety of locales for his two-reelers. Between 1913 and 1928 many of his ``Keystone Cops'' and ``Oh-You-Kid Bathing Beauty'' films were shot on Valley streets and residential lots. By 1928 he set up shop permanently, opening the Mack Sennett Studio at Laurel Canyon and Ventura boulevards.

Ironically, the film people did not give this community the name that endures today. ``Studio City'' came from the farmers who wanted to capitalize on the glamour developing around the film business.

CAPTION(S):

2 photos

PHOTO (1) The Weddington Brothers Pioneer Store, shown here in 1905, was in North Hollywood.

Photo courtesy of Fred Weddington

(2) These newly planted citrus trees were north of Devonshire Street. Farms had room to grow then.

Photo courtesy of Charles Janess and Reuben Ahlstrom