Corriganville Marks 50th Anniversary

There is little left now but battered concrete slabs, rusty toilet hookups and the burned-out husks of long-gone buildings.

But look closer and see the “hangin’ tree,” a titanic oak where scores of movie villains met their just ends, or the felled tree trunk by the lake where a white-hatted Gene Autry once plucked his guitar. Back when heroes were heroes and villains were villains--and each was as instantly recognizable as the color of his cowboy hat--Corriganville Park, on the east side of Simi Valley, was the place where movie dreams were made and fans were born.

The Ventura County Museum of History and Art attempts to revive those cowboy days today, if only for an afternoon, with a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the public opening of Ray “Crash” Corrigan’s western theme park.

Now a public park of hiking trails and shady groves, the site, in its heyday from the 1930s-’50s, was perhaps the busiest on-location shooting spot in the country, the setting for several thousand films and TV shows, from Hopalong Cassidy to “The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin.”

In 1949, Corrigan, a stuntman and B-movie cowboy star, opened his movie ranch to the public, with its simulated western towns and stagecoach rides, a theme-park precursor to Disneyland.

“At the beginning, we were bringing in more people than we could handle,” said Tom Corrigan, the film star’s son and owner of Corrigan’s restaurant in Thousand Oaks. “People had to stay overnight. They couldn’t get over Santa Susana Pass, and had to carry water bags on the sides of their cars.”

But the park worked out its kinks, eventually pulling in as many as 20,000 people a day to its fantasy of the Old West.

“He believed in the white hat and white horse,” Tom Corrigan said of his father, who died in 1976. “Times were tough then, and it was nice to see the good guy win and the bad guy lose. My dad was a real cowboy. I am, too. Still ropin’, still ridin.’ ”

After a bitter divorce, Ray Corrigan sold his movie ranch to Bob Hope, and the ranch eventually died, plagued by fire and neglect.

But, fans like Steve Gillum are still carrying the torch. Gillum who visited the place so often that Ray Corrigan himself asked the then 14-year-old to join the park’s stunt show, would like to see Corriganville rebuilt.

“It gave this very young, skinny kid an opportunity to do things a lot of people don’t get to do,” said Gillum, who now wrangles horses at Universal Studios for a Wild West show and heads the Corriganville Preservation Committee.

He fears an era has passed, having ridden off into the sunset with little fanfare. “You had so many good actors working for years and years and nobody ever honors them. It’s like they’re forgotten,” Gillum said. “The same goes for this piece of property.”

What fans seem to miss most about the ranch is its evocation of a mythical, simpler, less ambiguous time, when all you needed to know about a man was the color of his hat.

“When I went to Corriganville [as a child], I immediately recognized what I’d seen on screen, the fact that all these great stories had a counterpart in real life,” said Bill Ehrheart, author of a museum publication about the ranch. “I thought maybe if the scenery was real, the philosophy was real also.”

The celebration, scheduled from 1 to 5 p.m., will feature country music and dancing, food, Corrigan memorabilia, and a stunt show.

Tickets are $30 per person at the door and $10 for children younger than 12.