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Visible from most places on the state beach, but with entry only off the Pacific Coast Highway, a few hundred feet down coast in Malibu Lagoon State Beach is
the Adamson House. In 1892, Henry Keller sold the 13,000-acre Rancho Malibu to Frederick H. Rindge, for a price variously reported as $10-$22 per acre. Keller, it is said, had acquired it for 10 cents
an acre in 1854. Rindge, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, had recently inherited an estate of more than $2 million and moved to California, where he wrote a book called Happy Days in Southern California. Then he looked for "a farm near the ocean, and under the lee of the mountain, with a trout brook, wild trees, a lake, good soil, and excellent climate." He found his "farm" in Malibu Canyon. He described the Malibu coast as the "American Riviera." He built a ranch house there, which burned to the ground in 1903. There were no roads to Malibu at that time. Everyone and everything came in by horseback or boat, or by horse-drawn wagon, over packed sand, at low tide. In 1904, the Southern Pacific Railroad tried to change all that by building railroad tracks across the Malibu area, to link Santa Monica and Santa Barbara. Rindge wanted none of the Southern Pacific, and to thwart it, he incorporated his own railway line, the Hueneme, Malibu, and Port Los Angeles Railroad, to bring in supplies and ship out hides and grain.
Frederick Rindge died in 1905, and his wife, Rhoda May
Knight Rindge, carried out his plans for the ranch, despite having to pay a big inheritance tax and high interest bills. In little more than 20 years, it became, it is said, the most valuable single real estate holding in the United States. Rhoda May Rindge, often called "May. K. Rindge," tried to keep highways out of her property, but the county and state obtained a right-of-way, and the Roosevelt Highway was opened in 1926.
Merritt Huntley Adamson came late to the Malibu scene. He was descended from pioneers who came west in Conestoga wagons, to Oregon. The family moved
to the Arizona Territory, where his father, John Quincy Adamson, was elected to the Arizona Territorial Legislature. Merritt was born in 1888, in Los Angeles. As a young man, he took charge of the family sheep ranch
in Arizona, after his father died. There, he became a "blood brother" of the Havasupai tribe, and in college was nicknamed "Great Chief White Smoke," or simply "Smoke
Adamson." At the University of Southern California, he became captain of the last rugby football team, there. He graduated from USC Law School, passed the bar, and went to work as Superintendent of the Malibu Ranch. There he met and married Rhoda Agatha Rindge, May K. Rindge's daughter, in 1915. Merritt Adamson's forte was farming, and he established the Adohr ("Rhoda" spelled backward) Stock Farms, which became a very large milk producer--possibly the world's largest. Adamson achieved many business and civic honors--too many to relate. He died in 1949, whereupon Rhoda took over the stock farm, other family investments, and the Adamson House.
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The house, designed by a well-known architect, Stiles Clements, was constructed beginning in 1929, occupied by the
Adamsons during the summer, beginning in 1930, and lived in all year beginning in 1937. One special feature of the two-story house is the elevator, which was installed specifically for Mrs. Adamson in 1958. She died in 1962.
In
1968, the State purchased the property. In 1971, the president of Pepperdine University moved in, as part of an effort to maintain the house until it could be properly restored and shown to the public as an historic unit. The Malibu Lagoon Interpretive Association was formed in 1981, and they carefully planned for the opening of the house as a museum, in 1983.
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