Imagine driving up a dirt road to your ranch. It’s the ranch your grandfather homesteaded more than 100 years ago, when he was working as a wrangler for Colonel Griffith J. Griffith, who donated what became Griffith Park. You live in a home you built with some old, unused railroad ties. When the weather’s nice, your horses wander up to the front door to say hi.
In LA County, it seems impossible. Or at least exceedingly rare.
Yet it’s long been the reality for Rose Wiley. At 92, she is one of the oldest residents of Topanga Canyon, having spent her whole life there.
She explains that her grandfather homesteaded the property in 1886. “And this is what's left of the 160 acres he homesteaded,” she says.
Now Wiley lives on the remaining 10 acres just off of Old Topanga Canyon Rd.
The gate to Wiley’s property bears the original brand of her grandfather’s ranch. Photo by Caleigh Wells.
She’s seen the San Fernando Valley change from an expanse of agricultural fields to a grid of boulevards and homes. She remembers when the center of Topanga was a post office, a general store, and three gas stations. Today the gas stations have made way for small shops like a candle store, a yoga studio, and several clothing boutiques.
But she’s neither bothered nor excited about the changes. “Ya know, ya just go with the flow.”
Wiley is unflappable in a crisis and unassuming in her lifestyle. She inherited the 10 acres, but between her husband’s work at an airplane production company and her work as a mother and part-time seamstress, she couldn’t afford to build her own house on it.
“After World War II, money was definitely tight,” she says. “So we bought a little house trailer and put the five kids in there somehow.”
The kids walked a mile up and down the mountain each day to catch the school bus. And for four years, Wiley and her husband saved what money they could.
“I read this little ad in Santa Monica Outlook. Somebody had some Redwood railroad ties that they were selling for 63 cents apiece. Well, hell, there's no way you could match that,” she says. “There was a contractor here in the canyon. … He had a month between jobs and gave us a price. We told him how much money we had. ‘Yeah, okay, I’ll do it.’ So for $1,000, he put it up for us.”
Wiley says her family of eight fit comfortably in her two-bedroom home because her kids spent most of their time outside on the property. Photo by Caleigh Wells.
The 600-square-foot property features two bedrooms. Today, she lives alone. The house is filled with loud floral furniture, and the walls are covered in plates and pictures of farms and horses. The patio is lined with moss-covered brick, dotted with overgrown potted plants and mismatched chairs. Rose Wiley and her husband raised six kids here. And with an unphased and unflappable demeanor, she survived multiple natural disasters that followed.
“New Year's Eve 1958-1959 was a major [fire] that started at Canoga and Mulholland, and blew through the canyon and all the way to the ocean and back again,” she says. “Didn’t bother me any, we were fine.”
She weathered the San Fernando earthquake in 1971, no problem.
The next major disaster didn’t strike until the flood of 1980. “It was the most dramatic because every road in the canyon washed out.”
The closest call yet was the Old Topanga Canyon Fire that arrived on November 3, 1993. It came down a hill roughly 100 feet from her home. She watched it burn from her backyard.
“It's very boring to watch a fire,” she says.
The bottom-right photo hanging on Wiley’s wall in her dining area depicts the middle of Topanga Canyon before the town center was built there. Photo by Caleigh Wells.
There have been more fires and floods and earthquakes, but to this day, Wiley is steadfast in staying put. “There's something going on everywhere in the world. Volcanoes erupting in Hawaii. I heard the morning news they expect another tornado from Louisiana to Ohio. And then heavy rain, blah, blah, blah. And they're getting 80-degree weather in Iowa.”
As LA County’s population grew, rural Topanga became more popular. The median home price now is just shy of $2 million. It’s a far cry from $1,000 she and her husband paid to turn some old railroad ties into a house 60 years ago.
“The canyon has gotten ridiculous in prices,” she says. “You have to have money to live here.”
Today, Wiley says she doesn’t have any neighbors left like her. But she does regularly see friends and family living nearby. What she shares with them is the come-what-may attitude that’s required to live in a place like Topanga.