A little over a century ago, William Ellsworth Smythe, a journalist and founder of the Little Landers, a social movement that espoused the principle of self-sufficiency through farming, teamed up with Glendale real estate developer Marshall Hartranft to establish a Little Landers colony at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains in Tujunga. However, as Hadley Meares chronicled in a 2013 feature for KCET, the cooperative agrarian society Smythe envisioned failed to materialize, in no small part because Tujunga’s soil turned out to yield more rocks than crops.
Although the Little Landers’ utopian experiment didn’t pan out, remnants of the settlement live on in the numerous structures sprinkled throughout Tujunga built with the aforementioned field stones, including this rocky residence at 10226 Marcus Avenue now on the market.
Known as the Hardin House, it was erected circa 1920 by Floyd Barnes Hardin, a Methodist preacher, and, per its entry in the Los Angeles Historic Resources Inventory, may have been one of the first schoolhouses in the area.
While the 1,734-square-foot home’s arroyo-stone exterior looks as old as the surrounding hills, its insides are a different story, with a stone fireplace in the living room seemingly the only original element extant. Along with three bedrooms and two bathrooms, it’s got a detached two-car carport and sits on an 8,392-square-foot lot. Last sold in 2008 for $376,000, the property is listed with Mike Babakhanyan and Martin Lazarian of JohnHart Real Estate at an asking price of $629,000.
