A Place Dear to My Heart

Around 1910 cars were just making their way into Big Bear Valley, California, first coming from the north thru the desert, then east to cross near the dry bed of alkaline Baldwin Lake to the Big Bear Lake south-shore town of Pine Knot. From the south, it was an arduous trip up steep mountain roads such as Clark’s Grade, but people slowly started buying land to build cabins as summer retreats. In 1912, Jim and Fannie Barlow of Rivera had Bill Knickerbocker, keeper of the dam recently completed in 1911, and another man build them a log cabin on their new property south of Metcalf Bay of Big Bear Lake. It was named Home Cottage.

July 2012 my mother and extended family celebrated the 100th anniversary of this event. Fannie Barlow was my grandmother’s aunt. She had taken her namesake niece Fannie into her childless home as a companion and as a way to provide more opportunities for the young woman such as education at Pasadena Polytechnic College. I did not attend this celebration so far from my home in Indiana, but I have wonderful memories of summers spent in Big Bear from toddlerhood thru early teen years.
In 1914, the Barlows added across the way and facing their log cabin a rock and timber ediface which they called Owl’s Nest. This was meant to be a reading room/social room with a stone fireplace. People came to the mountains for the fresh air, and thus slept in canvas tents that sat on a wooden platform between the two buildings. This platform did not exist during my years at least not that I can remember. My grandparents lived in the Home Cottage for the summer, and my family lived in the Owl’s Nest which had been converted to a one-room abode with a stove and an icebox, a double bed, and bunk beds for sleeping. No plumbing. Outhouses and a hand pump on the flat meadowland below the cabins served those needs.
                                                                                                                   
I always just accepted things as they were, never questioning the history of these buildings. I don’t think I had a clue as to their age until a decade ago. I always thought it was “special” that they sat part-way up the mountainside rather than on the meadow like the  neighborhood cabins. Now I realize that to clear space for the Owl’s Nest meant blowing up rocks. We had huge slabs of sloping granite that came right down to the back edge of the cabin.
When my grandmother married and started bringing her children to Big Bear, the Barlows had a large two-story cabin built further up the mountain for her. It sat 60 feet up from the flatland. It was completed in 1922, more than a year before the baby of the family (my mother) was born. By 1925, the Rim of the World Highway that went thru Arrowhead and Running Springs was tied into a new road across the dam to the south shore of Big Bear Lake. One could make the trip up the San Bernardino Mountains in less time.
                                            
The first two cabins actually left the possession of my family in the late 1920s as the widowed Mrs. Barlow decided to give them to the Bible Institute of Los Angeles for use by missionaries on furlough, etc. With the Depression, my grandfather was able to buy them back from BIOLA as it no longer had the funds to maintain them and pay the property taxes. My mother sold her interest in the property in 1971 though our relatives have always generously allowed us to use them when available.
The 1950s and 1960s were times of summer stays. My aunt and cousins lived in the two-story. We had great Pit card games, popping corn in a metal basket in the fireplace, hiking to bamboo slide, mummy’s throne, crow’s nest, and places left unnamed but that grew familiar thru the years. My mom bought us a coloring book and a paper doll set at the beginning of our stay to entertain us. My dad who only came up on the weekends was the library book shuttle service. We sat on the porch of Owl’s Nest doing jigsaw puzzles gazing out to Big Bear Lake in the distance. It was a simpler way of life that gave appreciation for pioneers and homesteaders with outhouses, carrying pails of water, doing sitz baths in metal tubs filled with water heated on the stove, buying a block of ice periodically for the ice box. We walked to Boulder Bay store most evenings to buy an ice cream bar since we had no freezer.
This place, Big Bear, is tied to my fondest memories of childhood. A child should be so lucky.
  This site greeted us shortly after crossing the dam.