Our Lady of the Valley
primary school
Our Lady of the Valley is a large Catholic church and school located in the Canoga Park section of Los Angeles, California. Founded in 1921 when the area was sparsely populated, and most of the 620 parishioners were involved in agriculture with livestock or walnut and orange groves. The shrine is dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary as Patroness of the San Fernando Valley.
At the time of its formation, the parish's boundaries covered 400 square miles (1,000 km2) from the Pacific Ocean to the south, the Ventura County line to the west, White Oak Avenue to the east, and the Santa Susana Mountains to the north. In the years after World War II, the San Fernando Valley shifted from agriculture to residential communities, and the Catholic population also swelled. The 400 square miles (1,000 km2) served by Our Lady of the Valley were carved up among nine sister parishes. Though its territory has been reduced to four square miles, the parish has grown from 620 parishioners to over 4100 families.
Monsignor John J. Hurley was pastor at Our Lady of the Valley from 1943 until 1975.
The church sustained $800,000 in damage in the 1994 Northridge earthquake. It was renovated and reopened in November 1995.
The public source identifies “Our Lady of the Valley” as primary school. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Lady, Valley and primary.
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Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q23302318. Authority coordinates are 34.199, -118.606. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1921, 1943, 1975 and 1994.
Official terminology may obscure informal participation, dissent or communities documented only indirectly. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Our Lady of the Valley” 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.