Greetings family friends and neighbors. Cut short by the 1929 stock market crash, Robert Callahan's planned expansive Southern California Native American History Center and tourist destination was trimmed back to a themed motel and trailer park. The classic Mission Village roadside attraction is the subject of today's Historic Snippet........Bill
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MISSION VILLAGE
Walter Knott completed his Berry Nursery, Berry Market and Tea Room on Grand Avenue in Buena Park, dubbed Knott’s Berry Place, in 1928, replacing the families original roadside fruit stand, and in the same year Mickey Mouse made his film debut in Steam Boat Willie. It would be more than a decade until Walter Knott started building his western Ghost Town roadside attraction, and two decades before Walt Disney began the creation of his family oriented theme park.
It was also in 1928 that author, advertising specialist, and tireless self promoter Robert E, Callahan was so moved by Helen Hunt Jackson’s popular best selling novel Ramona, about the abusive plight of America’s indigenous people, he envisioned a Native American themed Southern California history center and tourist destination. Callahan, one-sixth Iroquois, fluent in fourteen Native American dialects, avid collector of Indian and Western artifacts, and expert shooting performer in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show,
announced his plan for Ramona Village, a half million dollar, four acre immersive site dedicated to the American Indian. Original plans called for the construction of a Spanish style 2000 seat theatre where dramatizations of “Ramona” would be performed, trading post, workshops and studios featuring Indian craftsmen and artists creating beads, bracelets and rugs, an amphitheatre for Indian dances and pageants, an authentic Indian village, clusters of pueblos, gardens, a museum housing Callahan’s western collection, all surrounded by realistic towering mountain peaks.
Only the small sixteen person Ramona Wedding Chapel, had been completed when the 1929 stock market crash wiped our his fortune and delayed the construction of a scaled back version of Callahan’s grand plan until 1932. In the third year of the great depression his Mission Village and Motor Inn began providing affordable accommodations to the motoring public with a California Mission style motel and a one hundred and fifty space trailer park featuring a Fiesta Hall, Pueblo, Hang Town Museum Bar Trappers Hut, Kiva, Spirit Room, and a small portion of Callahan’s collection of Indian Relics. Mission Village survived for thirty years when it was replaced by an on-ramp to the 10 freeway, Bill 6/25
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