Joel McCrea Ranch
human settlement in Thousand Oaks, California, United States of America
The Joel McCrea Ranch in Thousand Oaks, California is also known as the August DuMortier Ranch. The ranch is a rare surviving example of the large cattle ranches and fields of grain which once dotted the Santa Rosa and Conejo valleys in eastern Ventura County.
Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1997, the site includes eight contributing buildings and four contributing structures on over 220 acres (89 ha). One surviving building dates from 1890 from August DuMortier's ranch; the main house, an avocado-shaped pool, and a cabana/poolhouse were built in 1933; a maid's residence and various other contributing and non-contributing buildings date from later.
History
The ranch is historically significant for its association with actor Joel McCrea, a major star in the movie industry. The main house and some other buildings are also significant works of architect John Byers; according to the NRHP nomination:Byers was a prominent regional architect, best known for his adobe and Spanish Colonial Revival designs. The Joel McCrea ranch house is a rare and very successful departure from Byers' usual period revivalism into the realm of the informal California Ranch style, just emerging in Southern California.
The ranch is at the bottom of the Norwegian Grade, a road built by settlers around 1900. The Norwegian Colony, at the north end of the Conejo Valley, needed a safe route to transport bales of hay and sacks of wheat and barley to the Oxnard Plain. This road allowed grain bound for San Francisco and England pass down the Santa Rosa Valley to the Hueneme Wharf.
The public source identifies “Joel McCrea Ranch” as human settlement in Thousand Oaks, California, United States of America. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Joel, McCrea and Ranch.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q16997787. Authority coordinates are 34.244, -118.853. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1997, 1890, 1933 and 1900.
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This entry incorporates text from “Joel McCrea Ranch” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.