Virginia Watson first traveled to Chatsworth as a teenager, making the drive with friends and family nearly 70 years ago from her home in Highland Park to a cabin in what was then a far-flung community of ranches and orange groves.
Sixty-eight years later, Watson is so closely identified with the community she adopted as her own that locals view her as its matriarch -- and head historian.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Tuesday, October 09, 2007 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 2 inches; 69 words Type of Material: Correction
Chatsworth museum: An article in Monday's California section on the renaming of the Chatsworth Museum as the Virginia Watson Chatsworth Museum said Virginia Watson "read a column in the local newspaper mentioning her family as the first English-speaking settlers in Chatsworth in 1874." In fact, Watson read a column written by Katherine Johnson, who wrote about her own family -- the Johnson family -- as the first English-speaking settlers.
"She is Ms. Chatsworth," said Andre van der Valk, a co-president of the Chatsworth Historical Society. "She represents Chatsworth, and if there's anything going on in Chatsworth, past, present and future, she knows about it."
On Sunday, Watson was honored by neighbors, members of the historical society she helped start, and city officials at the community's Pioneer Day festival.
As cameras flashed, she turned around to view the unveiled sign renaming the Chatsworth Museum the Virginia Watson Chatsworth Museum, and she gasped in surprise.
"I don't really know what to say. I'm kind of overwhelmed," Watson said, tears welling in her eyes. "Thank you very much for thinking of me. . . . Nobody told me anything."
She first became intrigued with Chatsworth's history when after moving there in 1952 she read a column in the local newspaper mentioning her family as the first English-speaking settlers in Chatsworth in 1874.
A history buff and writer -- Watson later wrote a column called "Out Our Way" on Chatsworth for the Daily News -- she was hooked. She wanted to find out more.
"I started collecting things, anything about Chatsworth, and people still alive could remember [history], and I spoke with them. In the 1960s I started collecting pictures," Watson said.
Chatsworth, she learned, initially was inhabited by the Fernandeo tribe that had a village near what is now the intersection of Canoga Avenue and Rinaldi Street.
In the late 1850s, a stagecoach route came through from Los Encinos State Historic Park, across the Valley, through the Santa Susana Pass and up the coast. Residents voted to become part of Los Angeles in 1913 in order to get water from the Owens River.
Still rural by the 1930s, Chatsworth was the setting for movies and, later, television shows, including "The Fighting Seabees" with John Wayne, and the TV series "Bonanza."
Roy Rogers and Dale Evans had a ranch there, as did Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz.
In the 1970s and '80s, as the area's population grew, condominiums, mini malls and shopping centers began to replace many of the farms and groves.
