MILEPOSTS #1076

By Bill Pumford, Image from Russ Keller Collection

TITLE: CAMP ANGELUS: This week’s image is of a postcard showing the Lodge at Camp Angelus. The postcard was mailed in 1943 and if you look closely, you can see the black “X” on the cabin where the postcard writing visitor stayed. These days Camp Angelus is known as Angelus Oaks which can be found by taking Highway 38 from Redlands up towards Big Bear. In the late 1800s and early 1900s to get to Big Bear you took a dirt trail that passed through Camp Angelus on the way to Seven Oaks and Clark’s Grade. At this time Camp Angelus had three cabins and was referred to as Glen Martin Subdivision Number 1. The Lodge you see in the photo was originally used as a stagecoach stop and served passengers sandwiches and had a grocery store. A new road was built in 1913 into the area and the mountains and resorts could now be comfortably reached by automobile in a much shorter amount of time. Camp Angelus benefitted greatly because the resort was much closer to the bigger cities like Redlands and San Bernardino. In 1919 Edward Bard Mohr and his younger brother Adam Bard Mohr firmly established Camp Angelus by building cabins that sold a few years later for $400. Rooms at the Lodge could be acquired for $20 per week. Camp Angelus also provided a stop for autos to replenish radiator water. Edward Mohr died in 1945 and the resort went into other hands. In the 1970s the Postal Service decided to combine the two small post offices at Seven Oaks and Camp Angelus and renamed it Angelus Oaks. In the meantime the original Lodge had fallen into disrepair but was completely refurbished in the late 1980s along with many of the surrounding cabins. Twenty years later the Lodge and cabins were again completely refurbished.

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