M. V. Hartranft

Who is M. V. Hartranft?

Marshall Valentine Hartranft, known as M. V. Hartranft, was an agriculturalist, a land developer and the president of the Glendale-Eagle Rock Railway in Los Angeles County, California. He was known as the "Socrates" of the Verdugo Hills north of Glendale and the "father" of Tujunga, California.

Before Hartranft came to California in 1890 he had been a gardener, unsuccessfully attempting to set up a vegetable market. He was afterward known to recite the jingle

To grow crops to sell is to speculate like hell, but to grow crops to eat keeps you standing on both feet.

In his new home he established a newspaper, The Los Angeles Daily Fruit World, and in 1900 began a "magazine-type newspaper" called The Western Empire, which he used as an instrument to sell agricultural land.

Hartranft's first real estate development was in 1892, in Glendale and Montrose, California. Shortly after 1897, he secured a tract of land from the Kern County Land Company for resale to more than 300 families in what is today Wasco, California. He called this effort the "Fourth Home Extension Colony."

In 1907 he helped establish the "Little Landers" colony of Tujunga, which was based on the principle that everything a family could need might be gained through farming the property that they owned and that "land had value only if people lived on it." He donated a parcel of land for the construction of Bolton Hall, which was used as a community center, a city hall and, finally, a historical museum.