2019-02-08 Messenger Mountain News - “W. W. Coolbaugh and Jack Rabbit Lodge” by Pablo Capra

“W. W. Coolbaugh and Jack Rabbit Lodge”

by Pablo Capra

A painting of Jack Rabbit Lodge, early 1900s, artist unknown, photo by Alli Acker from her collection

Colonel William Wills Coolbaugh (1839-1912) was 70 years old in 1909 when he bought the only cabin at Topanga Beach from a fisherman named Harry Johnson.

For years, this hermit house had been used exclusively by fishermen, and Johnson was the last of that finny fraternity who could call the beach his own. According to a Santa Monica Hotel register, “Harry Johnson and nurse” may have come from Evansville, IN in 1876 when he was still a baby. In adulthood, Johnson fathered two children that died in infancy, the last in 1902, which is the same year that he moved to Topanga Beach. No other details about his life could be found.

W. W. Coolbaugh (as he preferred to be called), was an optimist who jumped at new opportunities. He had moved to Topanga Beach because he believed that the seven-acre property surrounding his cabin was “formed by tidal action” and therefore had never been surveyed by the government. He intended to claim this land as a homesteader and began to cultivate it, naming his cabin Jack Rabbit Lodge.

Life at the beach suited him, and his presence there soon seemed like a natural part of the landscape.

The old delta philosopher… finds “books in the running brook / Sermons in stone, and good in everything.…” Here he is monarch of all he surveys. He enjoys all the rights of a squatter, and is patiently awaiting the coming of the government surveyors and the day for making his final proof.

—“Will They Be Interpreted?” Los Angeles Times, 1911-02-05

Arch Rock, 1880, c/o Title Insurance and Trust, and C.C. Pierce Photography Collection, USC Libraries

The year 1906 had seen the collapse of Arch Rock—a picturesque impediment that once stood where Mastro’s Ocean Club is today—allowing better roads and cars to access Topanga Beach. Since Malibu was private and Topanga was primitive, Jack Rabbit Lodge became the popular stopping place, relieving Coolbaugh’s isolation with frequent visitors. “There he entertained his friends and served coffee or lunch from his private stores to weary or belated travelers.”

In 1910, Coolbaugh’s tall tales about the Native American burial mound discovered on his property brought more attention to Topanga Beach. His own past was similarly shaped by flights of fancy.

W. W. Coolbaugh, 1911-02-05, "Among the Prehistoric Dead of Topango," Los Angeles Times

Born on October 19, 1839, in Stroudsburg, PA, Coolbaugh was widely known for having been a Civil War colonel and “for having superintended the construction of several important buildings and stretches of railway in the east and south”—in particular, the Chicago Alley Elevated Railroad, or The “L,” which opened in 1892.

In 1866, he married Anna (1848-1913), and they had four children. They headed west around 1900, moving to Colorado, New Mexico, and finally California.

In 1904, they bought a 1.5-acre tract in the Strawberry Park neighborhood of Gardena. In 1905, they began selling off portions of their property, likely because of a divorce. In 1906, Coolbaugh appeared to be living alone in the Ocean Park neighborhood of Santa Monica.

Coolbaugh was interested in inventions. In 1893, he was awarded for his design of a bathtub seat by the Chicago Department of Plumbing and Sanitary Materials. In 1905, he submitted a machine for incinerating garbage to Los Angeles City Hall.

He was also interested in mining. In 1906, following a tip from a dying man, he went in search of a lost gold mine in the Santa Monica Mountains. (Gold mines were reported in Tuna Canyon in 1895, so his plan didn’t seem that far-fetched.) When he returned weeks later, announcing that he’d actually found the mine, newspapers began to speculate about a second California Gold Rush. However, the gold never appeared, and Coolbaugh was soon back in the mountains chasing new leads.

This pattern of big announcements without results kept repeating. In an attempt to lure investors, he banded together with other miners to form the Ocean Park Prospecting and Developing Company in 1908, telling the press…

…sufficient minerals can be found to keep 1,000 men employed for years to come, and when the area is thoroughly developed it will surprise the country….

It is my prediction that within the next ten years the Santa Monica range will resound with the noise of oil derricks and mining machinery of almost every kind. The canyons will be thickly inhabited and the at present primitive roadways will have been improved until almost every nook and corner of that inaccessible country will be opened up….

—“Santa Monica Range Abounds in Wealth” Los Angeles Herald, 1908-06-19

Fortunately for the beautiful Santa Monica Mountains, Coolbaugh again couldn’t back up his claims. Yet no matter how many times he failed (sometimes risking his life, like when he barely outran a brush fire in Las Flores Canyon), he always believed that success was just within reach.

The discovery of the Native American burial mound must have been deeply satisfying for him after years of trying to impress people with important finds. Although not what he’d been searching for, the mound was still a kind of treasure, and he immediately saw the opportunity in it. He sold some of the artifacts, left others on display for visitors, and enjoyed building himself up as a local celebrity—while also surely thinking that the attention would help establish his homestead. However, it had the opposite effect. The city was expanding rapidly, Topanga Beach didn’t seem so distant anymore, and Coolbaugh’s claim on the land was aggressive compared to when it had just been a wild place used by fishermen. 

Jack Rabbit Lodge, circa 1910, c/o Topanga Historical Society

Neighboring landowners began to contest his right to live there, and on March 22, 1911, the Los Angeles Title Insurance and Trust Company, who’d claimed the land since about 1899, sent attorney Mell Frasier and a deputy sheriff to evict Coolbaugh. The two men piled his belongings in the road, then set Jack Rabbit Lodge on fire, burning down two outbuildings in the process.

The questionable legality of this eviction appeared even more so when Coolbaugh revealed that he had recently sold Jack Rabbit Lodge to a Santa Monica company with plans to turn it into a private clubhouse. He threatened to sue but never went to court, perhaps because the new owner was his own Ocean Park Company.

Dispirited, Coolbaugh returned to Ocean Park, floating between hotels and private residences. There were also hospital stays as his health began to mysteriously decline. His last residence was in Echo Park, where he died at age 73 on March 21, 1912. The fact that he died one day before the anniversary of his Topanga Beach eviction and his poor mental state seem to indicate a suicide.

After his eviction he seemed to lose interest in things of [this] earth and his death was a natural dissolution rather than the result of [a] mortal disease.

—“Eccentric Character,” Los Angeles Times, 1912-03-22

Coolbaugh’s one-paragraph obituary, ungraciously titled “Eccentric Character,” said only of his past that he was a Civil War veteran and a pioneer of Southern California. It didn’t mention that he had built the Chicago Alley Elevated Railroad. The only evidence I could find that he did is the hearsay printed in California newspapers, and a census record showing that he had once been a “Railroad Agent.”

A Civil War website confirms that Coolbaugh was wounded at the Battle of Chancellorsville in Virginia while fighting for the North on May 3, 1863, but it also says that he was promoted from a private to a commissary-sergeant. If he ever became a colonel, it would have had to be through military service after the war.

Further research shows that there was a Colonel Coolbaugh in the Civil War who was Superintendent of Military Railroads, a known conman who was always looking for investors and claiming to have access to gold mines. His name was George Coolbaugh (b.1834), and he was the brother of prominent Chicago banker William Findlay Coolbaugh (1821-1877). What became of him later in life is uncertain.

George was born one county away from W. W. Coolbaugh, but I haven’t been able to establish a connection between them. For now, their commonalities are just a curious coincidence.

***

This is an excerpt from the book Topanga Beach: A History, 1820s-1920s. Author Pablo Capra is a former Lower Topanga resident, and continues to preserve the history of that neighborhood on his website, www.brasstackspress.com, and as a board member of the Topanga Historical Society, www.topangahistoricalsociety.org.

On Wednesday, February 13, 2019, he will present the Topanga Historical Society Quarterly Event “Native Americans of Topanga Beach,” sharing his research about the forgotten Native American burial mound that was discovered in 1910 and paved over by PCH in 1923. All are invited to come hear what Topanga was like 1,000 years ago: a mysterious world of men with horns, dwarfs, giants, Aztec invasions, and smoking mountains. There will also be stories about the burial mound’s original discoverers: a class of Stanford students, a Wisconsin artifact-collector, the Civil War Colonel W. W. Coolbaugh, and a family of squirrels. Potluck at 7 p.m., Presentation at 8 p.m., at the Topanga Community House, 1440 N. Topanga Canyon Blvd, Topanga, CA 90290.