The hillsides were terraced with 3,000 nut, citrus, fruit and olive trees, and fitted with water pipes, sprinklers and an elaborate greenhouse. A high barbed-wire fence discouraged intruders.
Young's research led him to Will Rogers' archives, where he found a letter written by Rogers' attorney demanding that the couple stop building a series of dams and culverts to divert the creek. No other letters on the topic appear in the files.
In 1938, a Rustic Canyon resident, novelist Lewis Browne, an English-born Jew and outspoken critic of the Nazis, found that vandals had smeared a 4-foot white swastika on his door.
Browne said he had received several threatening letters and crank notes before the swastika appeared.
By 1941, plans were underway for a four-story, 22-bedroom mansion, with five libraries and several dining rooms, designed by architect Paul Williams.
But the blueprints never made it off the drawing board. "I think it's rather ironic that they went to a black architect," Young said. Williams was "only one of a few architects at the time who could design something on that grand of a scale," he said.
On Dec. 8, 1941, a day after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, law enforcement officials stormed the compound and made some arrests, according to the oral histories. But Young could find no other details about the event.
At the time, many German American detainees were taken to makeshift camps at Terminal Island and La Tuna Canyon in Sun Valley, where they were interrogated before being sent to out-of-state barracks-like facilities under military guard, according to a paper written by Lothrop titled "Southern California and the Rise of the New Germany."
In 1948 the couple sold the place to the Huntington Hartford Foundation, which combined it with adjacent property and formed an artists' colony. Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and scholar Mark Van Doren, artist Andrew Wyeth and writer Christopher Isherwood lived and worked there.
The city of Los Angeles bought the property in 1973.
Upper Rustic Canyon can be reached by a two-mile hike from Will Rogers State Park in Pacific Palisades or down Sullivan Fire Road off Casale Road.
