(Silent)

In this home movie, Clarence Cullimore Sr. (1885-1963), author of "Old Adobes of Forgotten Fort Tejon" (1941), takes his 1938-1938 Kern County Union High School (Bakersfield) class on a field trip to the historic fort, probably in 1939. The fort was not yet a state park; in fact, Cullimore was an important advocate for state ownership. In 1939 the property was owned by the Tejon Ranch Co. In 1940 the company donated seven acres of land to the state for the establishment of the park, and over the next 15 years, it would donate 199 acres more.

Cullimore was a prominent Bakersfield architect who specialized in adobe buildings and homes that were both artistic and designed to withstand earthquakes. A Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, Cullimore taught architecture at Kern County Union High School and Bakersfield College. In "Old Adobes of Forgotten Fort Tejon," he not only provides the history and construction details of the fort buildings, which at the time of this writing no longer stood; he also covers a century's worth of history, from the elusive Peter Lebeck to Gen. E.F. Beale's ill-fated U.S. Camel Corps to the establishment and abandonment of the fort and the Indian reservation it was intended to oversee.

Original source of film: Clarence Cullimore Architectural Archives, Walter W. Stiern Library, California State University, Bakersfield.