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Postcard: Thacher School Administration Building


Thacher School Administration Building. Several original Thacher School structures were destroyed in a 1910 fire. Sherman Thacher asked Arthur B. Benton, who was designing the first Nordhoff High School campus, to design the new Thacher administration building and dormitory. Arthur Benton, best known for Riverside’s Mission Inn, was one of the first proponents of Mission Revival architecture. Completed six years before Libbey’s transformation of downtown Ojai, the Thacher Schoolhouse is probably Ojai’s first Mission Revival building. Among those who once boarded here were author Thornton Wilder and businessman Howard Hughes.

The above is an excerpt from Ojai: A Postcard History, by Richard Hoye, Tom Moore, Craig Walker, and available at Ojai Valley Museum or at Amazon.com.

 

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Postcard: Nordhoff High School (1910)



Nordhoff Union High School. In 1910, Norman F. Marsh designed this bungalow style building (above) to house the new Nordhoff High School. Marsh designed it so that, “every window will extend to the floor and will swing open their entire length. The pupils will in ordinary weather practically work out of doors.” At the time, this was a revolutionary concept in school architecture. Charles M. Pratt, a wealthy Eastern oil tycoon who owned a home in Ojai, hired Marsh to design a separate manual training and domestic arts building at the school. Marsh was a successful Los Angeles architect who also designed Venice Beach, the University of Redlands, and the Parkhurst Building in Santa Monica. The new Nordhoff High School campus opened in October of 1911 with forty students.

The above is an excerpt from Ojai: A Postcard History, by Richard Hoye, Tom Moore, Craig Walker, and available at Ojai Valley Museum or at Amazon.com.