A Little Land and a Living
Bolton Hall, originally uploaded by lavocado@sbcglobal.net.
There's nothing like visiting historical sites when you are having a bad day. This is Bolton Hall, Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Landmark #2. It is in the northeastern San Fernando Valley neighborhood of Tujunga.
Bolton Hall is not a hall named after someone named Bolton. It is named after Bolton Hall, author of the books Three Acres and Liberty, A Little Land and a Living, and Things As They Are, written in the first decade of the twentieth century. The settlers in the area were inspired by his idea that you could live on a small amount of land in a refined version of subsistence farming. This idea was taken up by Californian Marshall V. Hartfranft, who started a cooperative colony of "Little Landers" who each cultivated one and a half acre plots of land. "Bring a shovel and a sack of cement, building materials are on site. Plant mushrooms in your basement and by the time the roof is on the house, there will be food for the table," he wrote. The building materials were rocks and boulders which were used so beautifully to construct Bolton Hall in 1913, but farmers found that under the rocks, there were more rocks. The colony lasted until 1920. Tujunga was annexed to the City of Los Angeles in 1932, when Hartfranft ran for congress on the Liberty Party.