Vail Ranch to open to public Saturday

By: NICOLE SACK - Staff Writer | Friday, June 8, 2007 12:16 AM PDT ∞

TEMECULA ---- The Vail Ranch once sprawled across 87,500 acres of Southwest County, but all that is left is 4.5 acres inside a Temecula shopping center. Kohl's department store and Famous Footwear act as bookends, but in between rests a swath of land that has remained mostly unchanged for a century.

Saturday will mark the first time the public has been invited to visit the Vail Ranch in about seven years as the fences around the rustic property will be opened for the 150th anniversary celebration of the U.S. Overland Mail Route, which will take place from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

The weekend event is meant to commemorate the historic mail route that linked San Antonio and San Diego, but there is a greater history for residents of Temecula to explore just by being on the remaining segment of the once massive ranch in the Redhawk Towne Center on Highway 79 South just east of Redhawk Parkway.

The little reminder of cowboy life remains in the safekeeping of the 10-member Vail Ranch Restoration Association, including Sandy and Rhine Helzer of Temecula, who worked to preserve, protect and renovate the site.

"Our goal is to make people aware that this is here," said Sandy Helzer as she walked the Vail Ranch property Thursday afternoon. "We are in the middle of a shopping center, but you feel like you're out in the country."

At the Saturday event, which is free, the public can meander around the six structures on the site that include a bunkhouse, the Wolf General Store adobe, the blacksmith barn, the water house and the cookhouse. Actual stagecoaches will be on display as well as exhibits, there will be a gunfight and Luiseno Indian displays.

"Hopefully, we will get the little ones out here so they might see how the cowboys lived," Rhine Helzer said. "It might give them a story to tell their kids ---- of a time they remembered something other than stores in Temecula. The ranch is just so full of history."

In 1904, Walter L. Vail, who came to the United States with his parents from Nova Scotia, migrated to the state and with various partners began buying vast acreages in Southern California. Vail was already a cattle rancher on a grand scale before he started buying ranch land in Southwest County in 1905, buying large tracts beginning with 38,000 acres. He was run over and killed by a streetcar in Los Angeles in 1906. His son, Mahlon Vail, took over the family ranch.

By 1947, the Vail Ranch measured more than 87,500 acres. Through the mid-1960s, the economy of the area centered around the 137-square-mile cattle ranch. The Vail Ranch was sold to Kaiser Development Co. on Dec. 4, 1964, and launched the transformation of the area.

Henry Miller, of the Temecula Valley Museum, said opening the ranch property to the community is "one of the biggest deals in the community."

"This is a great showcase for all the work being done at the Vail Ranch," Miller said. "The more people we can expose to the site, the more we can preserve and save our history. People might see that we need to save these things from development."

Contact staff writer Nicole Sack at (951) 676-4315, Ext. 2616 or nsack@californian.com.