Canyon Name Origins – Snover Canyon, Webber Canyon, Hall-Beckley Canyon

Snover Canyon – This small canyon is visible if one drives to the end of Canalda Drive off Ocean View. It’s an oak-wooded dry canyon with a tiny trail running a little way up it. It runs down the mountain from east to west but, just a few hundred feet from where it should flow into Pickens Canyon, it makes an abrupt 90-degree left turn, and heads for Hall-Beckley Canyon instead. This canyon is named for John Fremont Snover, a nephew of Amoretta Lanterman. He came to the valley in 1879 from Michigan as a very young man, just 22, and bought land in the canyon that now bears his name.

Webber Canyon – The next canyon heading east is Webber. Sadly, we don’t know who Webber was. The small canyon can be seen from Castle Knoll Road, coming off Los Amigos. The castle in Castle Knoll is the Strong Castle, which sits to one side of Webber Canyon and is visible from the end of Castle Knoll. The grey medieval-style castle was built in 1911 for California Lt. Gov. Wallace. For many decades it was painted pink and was known locally as the Pink Castle.

Hall-Beckley Canyon – Hall-Beckley is a huge canyon, deep, well watered and forested. It offers some great hiking too, not just in the canyon itself, but also as the entry point to the Earl Canyon fire road that takes hikers into the San Gabriel Mountains. Fortunately, a purchase of land by the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy has assured public access to Hall-Beckley. The canyon can be accessed off Jessen Drive, near Solliden Lane.

The double name “Hall-Beckley” is due to the fact that two owners shared adjacent plots of land at the base of the canyon. Henry Beckley was first on the scene arriving from Indiana in 1872. This was three years before the Lantermans and Williams bought the whole valley, just one year after Pickens settled in his canyon farther west. Beckley settled on land at the mouth of Hall-Beckley, building a barn, chicken house, bee houses and planting 300 peach trees.

Thomas Spencer Hall came to the valley about 1874, applying to buy federal land next to Henry Beckley at the mouth of the canyon. Tom Hall was an accomplished man. Unlike “General” Shields and “Colonel” Pickens I previously wrote about, Hall was an actual colonel, having served under General McClellen. Hall was a captain, then colonel in a regiment of the New York Volunteers, and fought in several battles. Besides his war-hero status, he also attended Yale, not graduating, but finishing enough courses to practice law. Just like Benjamin Briggs, he came to California first as a ’49er, and like Briggs he soon returned east.

He brought his family back to California in 1873. He held various office jobs in Los Angeles, such as bookkeeping, IRS agent and customs broker. But while he was doing 9-to-5 on his “day job” to pay the bills, every weekend he was developing his ranch above La Cañada. In 1889, he retired and moved with his two grown sons to his ranch full-time. He acquired more land, eventually amassing 1,000 acres, planted orchards and vineyards, created a winery, harvested timber, and created a water company to sell the water coming out of Hall-Beckley to the ranches below.  (As a matter of fact, even today Descanso Gardens gets most of its water from Hall-Beckley.) When Hall died in 1898, the two sons inherited the operation, but only one stayed on the ranch, Tom Junior. Tom, having been named Thomas McClellen Hall after his dad’s commanding general, went by the name “T-Mac” in his early years. T-Mac was a dynamic man, who had lots of fun and lots of adventures, too many tales to relate here. See Jo Anne Sadler’s book “Crescenta Valley Pioneers” or John Newcombe’s DVD “Rancho La Cañada” for more on T-Mac.

Almost 70 acres of the original Hall Ranch, along with the 1890 winery barn, still exist a little to the east of the canyon. It’s a pleasant anachronism in a fully-developed community like La Cañada.  

  mike lawler