page_title: Thousand Oaks, California
section_title: 20th century
hierarchical_section_title: Thousand Oaks, California / History / 20th century
caption_attribution_description: English: Historic wooden ranch house and building — at the Joel McCrea Ranch regional park in the Santa Monica Mountains. Located at 4500 N. Moorpark Road, in Thousand Oaks, Ventura County, Southern California. Part of the Conejo Recreation and Park District system, in the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area.
context_page_description: Thousand Oaks is the second-largest city in Ventura County, California, United States. It is in the northwestern part of Greater Los Angeles, approximately 40 miles from Downtown Los Angeles, and is less than 15 miles from the Los Angeles neighborhood of Woodland Hills. It is named after the many oak trees present in the area.
  The city forms the central populated core of the Conejo Valley. Thousand Oaks was incorporated in 1964, but has since expanded to the west and east. Two-thirds of neighboring Westlake Village and most of Newbury Park were annexed by the city during the late 1960s and 1970s. The Los Angeles County–Ventura County line crosses at the city's eastern border with Westlake Village. The population was estimated to be 126,813 in 2019, up from 126,683 at the 2010 census.
context_section_description: Newbury Park was a more established community than Thousand Oaks at the turn of the 20th century. A few lots existed early in the 1900s, wedged between Borchard land on the south and Friedrich land on the north. The Janss family, developers of Southern California subdivisions, purchased 10,000 acres (40 km²) in the early 20th century. They eventually created plans for a "total community", and the name remains prominently featured in the city. Despite early aspirations, no large subdivisions were developed until the 1920s. The development was slow and hampered even more under the Great Depression of the 1930s. Besides agriculture, the movie industry became an important industry in the 1920s and 1930s.
  Between 1950 and 1970, Conejo Valley experienced a population boom, and increased its population from 3,000 to 30,000 residents. From 3,500 residents in 1957, Thousand Oaks had over 103,000 inhabitants by 1989. While ranching and agriculture were the dominant industries until the 1950s, a number of new businesses appeared throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Particularly many high-tech firms moved to Thousand Oaks in the '60s and '70s. Packard Bell and Technology Instrument Company were two high-technology businesses that moved into the Newbury Park industrial park in the 1960s. Other companies that followed included Westinghouse Astroelectronics Laboratory, Semtech Corporation, Purolator Inc., and Westland Plastics.
  Jungleland USA put Thousand Oaks on the map in the 1920s and helped attract Hollywood producers to the city. Hundreds of movies have been filmed in Thousand Oaks. Some of the first films to be made here were The Birth of a Nation (1915) at Jungleland USA and Roaring Ranch (1930) at the Stagecoach Inn. Thousand Oaks Boulevard was featured in the "Walls of Jericho" scenes in the film It Happened One Night (1934). A western village was erected at California Lutheran University for the filming of Welcome to Hard Times (1967), while Elvis Presley and John Wayne starred in several westerns made in Wildwood Regional Park. A nearby road, Flaming Star Avenue, is named after the film Flaming Star (1960) starring Elvis Presley, which was filmed here. Other movies filmed in the valley included Lassie Come Home (1943), To the Shores of Iwo Jima (1945) and The Dukes of Hazzard (1979–85). Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis visited Thousand Oaks for the filming of Hollywood or Bust (1956), which included a scene filmed on Live Oak Street.
  Movie actor Joel McCrea, who had been advised by Will Rogers to buy land in the area, raised his family on a 3,000-acre (1,200 ha) ranch he had acquired in the early 1930s. Numerous celebrities later joined McCrea and relocated to the Conejo Valley, including Dean Martin, Bob Hope, Roy Rogers, Strother Martin, Virginia Mayo, Michael O'Shea, Ben Johnson, Slim Pickens, Ronald Colman, George Brent, Eve Arden, Alan Ladd, Richard Widmark, Charles Martin Smith, and Bing- and Kurt Russell.
  While the city was home to 1,700 businesses in 1970, Thousand Oaks had 11,000 businesses in town by 1988.
  The world's largest independent biotechnology company, Amgen, was established in Newbury Park in 1980.
caption: Various movies were filmed at Joel McCrea Ranch on N. Moorpark Road.
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