There were a couple dozen polo fields in and around Los Angeles, but this was my favorite, at Clay’s showplace ranch in the Valley. Clay was my best friend, and the place was like a second home to me. Its ranch was cozy in the winter and cool in the summer, its riding trails familiar as the back of my hand, its memories of summers and holidays precious. I even kept my own horse here in the lavish stable he had built last year, which I called his horse palace.
– Starcrossed, work-in-progress, by Deb McCaskey
2025 Deb McCaskey
The barn at Will Rogers State Historic Park, from a visit in 2022.
As I write, wildfires are raging in Los Angeles County, with fire crews just starting to get them contained. Whole neighborhoods have been leveled, the destruction described as looking like a bomb had hit. More than 100,000 residents are under evacuation orders, and at least 11 people so far are known to have died. The last estimate placed damages at as much as $150 billion. Both of those numbers will, we know, go up.
Meanwhile, opportunistic and shameless politicians and supposed “leaders” have been flinging around unfounded accusations about what caused the fires or made them harder to fight – but since this site and blog are not for political purposes, that’s as much as I’ll say about that.
Here in northern California, and around the world, people are worried for their families and friends who live in the southern part of the state. Los Angeles has residents who originally came from – well, everywhere. And no matter where you live, you’ve seen many Los Angeles locations in hundreds of movies and TV shows. So I think these fires feel somehow personal to many of us, no matter where we are.
I’m finding it hard to comprehend the magnitude of what’s happening. We drove through LA just last month, on our way to San Diego. In 2022 and 2023 we went on research trips there, our schedule packed with visits to museums, historic buildings, and neighborhoods I’m using in my novels.
My stories – one published, one being written – take place in the 1930s. One entertaining challenge in research has been to find places from that era that haven’t been torn down in a city that took a long time to appreciate its own history. Many of those sites are in downtown Los Angeles, which hasn’t been in the fires’ paths.
But many historic buildings have been destroyed. My favorite, of all the sites we have visited, was among them. The house and stables at Will Rogers State Historic Park have been lost.
A couple of posts ag0 (scroll down), I wrote about our visit there, where the guide was happy to answer our every question and seemed surprised and delighted that we knew so much about a celebrity cowboy who had died so long ago. It was wonderful to know that Will Rogers’ widow had donated it to the state park system so that later generations could step back in time and see how he had lived.
When I heard the fires had reached the park, I hoped it was just the hills and brush nearby. When I heard the fire had destroyed the house, I hoped the stables had survived. But they too burned.
As I mentioned in the earlier post, I modeled the ranch of my heroine’s singing-cowboy friend on the Rogers place: the cozy ranch house, the view of the polo field from the front porch, the stable with its covered circular ring. The main difference was that Clay West’s imaginary ranch is in the San Fernando Valley, and the real-life Rogers ranch is in Pacific Palisades.
In this post I wanted to share some photos of the “horse palace,” one of the nicest old stables I’ve ever seen. Wings of stalls extended from a rotunda where horses could be saddled and groomed and even ridden indoors in bad weather. It was airy and open and welcoming.
2024 Deb McCaskey
Above, clockwise from top left: stable aisle with a glimpse of the circular ring; the rotunda ceiling and skylight; more stalls; a view of the barn on the road up from the ranch house.
The stables and house captured the imaginations and affection of many lovers of horses and history. I’m glad I have the memories from our visit, and that so many photos, taken by so many photographers over many years, still exist. They’re all we have left. It’s much too early for any thoughts of possible restoration.
Architectural plans and some great photos from Rogers’ time are on the state parks page about the stable, along with a quote from his son, Will Rogers, Jr.:
“This was the horse center of our ranch – this was the reason that Dad bought the ranch, and the large price so that he could have horses, so he could have polo, so he could have his roping, so he could have his relaxation. And if you do not see the stables, you really have not seen one of the major purposes of my father’s purchasing this place…you can only get an impression of this place if you go up and visit the stables, because that was the center of activity when my father was here.”
Deb McCaskey 