Chatsworth Park South
22360 Devonshire St, Chatsworth, CA 91311, USA

Minnie Palmer Hill House (Homestead Acre) - National Register of Historic Places

Statement of Significance

The Minnie Hill Palmer Homestead Acre is the only pioneer cottage with surrounding garden and fruit trees left in the West San Fernando Valley. It is important to local history because it is the kind of cottage and surrounding garden aid fruit trees that sustained the many early settlers who migrated to the area and settled in the vast San Fernando Valley. Today, the Valley is a major suburban area of the City of Los Angeles.

At one time there were many such cottages and gardens in the San Fernando Valley, but the Minnie Hill Palmer Cottage and surrounding homestead acre is the only one known to Valley historians that is still intact on the same land and virtually unchanged since it was built in 1911. The land has remained in the same family from the time Rhoda Jane Enlow Hill and her Civil War veteran husband James David Hill took up squatter's rights on the 110 acres in the spring of 1886. Later they bought an adjoining 120 acres.

The Hills were one of the early families in the West San Fernando Valley, probably the fourth to homestead in the area of Chatsworth before it had a name.

Mr. Hill was a peddlar who sold fruit to the workers who built the Chatsworth tunnels and drove the wagon that delivered the dynamite for blasting. Tie dynamite shed is still standing in Chatsworth Park South nearby (but not on the nominated acre). Mrs. Hill and her daughters did the washing and ironing for the men who built the Chatsworth tunnels.

Lovell Hill (son of Rhoda Jane and James) was one of the early postmasters and co-owner of the Graves & Hill General Store, a significant factor in the growth of the area. He was active in promoting the town of Chatsworth after it received its name in 1888.

His sister, Minnie Hill Palmer, was born on the land in the fall of 1886 after her parents had arrived in the spring and lived on the homestead almost all of her life, leaving for only a few short years. She lived a pioneer existence on the one remaining acre of the one-time 230 acre homestead in the midst of the growing San Fernando Valley. While the Valley grew into a modern metropolis, she continued her pioneer existence, growing her own food in the garden, canning and preserving her own fruits and vegetables until she moved to a retirement residence in January, 1977.

An early house was built on the land; a second house was erected on the same site. The family lived in a tent while the house was under construction.
At the time the 1911 house was built, Chatsworth Park was one of tbe Valley's growing agricultural communities--a separate town with its own identity, a Post Office, a railroad station, telegraph office and the already mentioned Graves 6e Hill General Store.

The Minnie Hill Palmer Cottage with its surrounding garden and fruit trees which the ,Chatsworth Historical Society chooses to call ""The Homestead Acre"", the Old Stage Coach >Road and the Pioneer Church built in 1903, are all that is left of the ""old days"" when the family farm was the way of life.