page_title: Hueneme, Malibu and Port Los Angeles Railway
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: Hueneme, Malibu and Port Los Angeles Railway / Background
caption_attribution_description: English: Page 41 of the book, showing the residence of Mrs. Frederick Rindge. This edition is 340 pages. This is an image of a place or building that is listed on the National Register of Historic Places in the United States of America. Its reference number is 86000105 More images
context_page_description: The Hueneme, Malibu & Port Los Angeles Railway was a standard-gauge, 15-mile railroad in Malibu, California. It was founded by Frederick Hastings Rindge and operated on his 13,000-acre ranch along the coast, which encompassed most of what is today Malibu. He struggled for years to keep trespassers off of his land, and feared that the Southern Pacific Company would use the power of eminent domain to build a railroad through his property. This threat animated Rindge to plan his own railroad to thwart the efforts of the Southern Pacific. This was part of his overall effort to keep outsiders off of his ranch and spoil what he considered to be paradise.
context_section_description: Frederick Rindge could trace his ancestry back to Daniel Rindge in Puritan Massachusetts in the 17th century.  The Rindge family had done well, and when Frederick's father died in 1883 and his mother two years later, Frederick was the sole heir to a Boston textile manufacturing and real estate fortune variously estimated at $140–700 million in today's dollars (2018).  He was a millionaire in an age when there were fewer than 4,000 millionaires in the United States.
  Frederick Rindge and his wife, Rhoda May Knight (1864–1941), came to Los Angeles in 1887, when it was still a frontier.  There he was successful in various business ventures, including founding the Conservative Life Insurance Company and the Los Angeles Edison Electric Company.  Rindge became one of the wealthiest men in the state.  In 1892, the Rindges purchased the 13,000-acre Rancho Topanga Malibu Sequit from Henry Keller.  The price was about $10 an acre for the Malibu ranch which was a little over a mile wide and extended along the coast for about 20 miles from Las Flores Canyon westward to the Ventura County Line.
  Rindge was a very religious man and saw God's hand in the wild beauty of his ranch.  Rindge wrote about his attachment to the land in his book Happy Days in Southern California: “I have grown to love this land.  When we moved from the city to the country, it seemed like returning from folly to truth.”
  The ranch produced barley and beans on the few relatively level areas of the mountainous property, and cattle and sheep were grazed in the canyons.  Rindge had ongoing problems with trespassers.  He put up locked gates, but the locks were repeatedly cut and the gates destroyed.  He also wound up in court, fighting claims from those who had been trespassing for years and claimed the right to continue to do so.
  In 1903, a brush fire burned to the ground the large Victorian mansion in Malibu Canyon that the Rindges had built.  The wildfire consumed their collection of antiques and family photographs, as well as other valuables.  May Rindge felt that the brush fire had been caused by trespassers and their campfires. Frederick feared losing his paradise.
caption: Unlike their mansion in Malibu, the Rindge family home in Los Angeles still stands.  Located at 2263 South Harvard Boulevard, the stately house has been used in a number of movies.
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