MILEPOSTS #1007

By Bill Pumford, Image from the Bill Pumford Collection

TITLE: CLOUDLAND – THE DREAM DEVELOPMENT: This week’s image is a 1920 conceptual drawing of the Great Hall of the Cloudland Resort. Cloudland was the name of an extremely ambitious development project for a series of resorts in Southern California. The plan was to create a megaresort at three different locations: Laguna Beach, the San Bernardino Mountains and a third undetermined location. For the San Bernardino Mountains the location was to be on a bluff on the old Fred Brush ranch. This ranch was about a mile or so west of Arrowhead Springs resort and below Marshall Peak. The promoter of these resorts was Myron Carr and his architect was William Harry Hillier, an Australian. The resort in the San Bernardino Mountains, called Cloudland, was intended to be the first one built. Cloudland was to have a hotel, clubhouse, open air theater, and a convention center. Carr’s idea was to sell 5,000 memberships at $1,000 per membership that could then be used for construction. During the majority of 1920 he promoted the resort ceaselessly in Southern California at chambers of commerce, civic organizations like women’s clubs, and newspapers. The people of San Bernardino were lukewarm on the idea despite Carr’s insistence that the community would benefit greatly from the project. Some of the initial funding went to acquiring property, constructing a road, clearing brush, and trimming up the trees in the area. During the winter of 1920 and spring of 1921 little was heard from Myron Carr or his staff. In August of 1921 Carr was in Detroit seeking more funding when he was involved in an automobile accident. A month later he died of his injuries and with his death so died the Cloudland Resort. A fire in 1924 destroyed the former ranch home of Fred Brush and the only remaining sign of Cloudland is a road winding through the mountain.

Share this: