There’s not much left of Keenbrook these days. A few scattered homes on either side of the wash, small remnants of a business center, and a couple of old structures near the railroad tracks, are the only traces of its heyday.
The Cajon Pass settlement played an important role for the Santa Fe Railroad. Before long a post office, a school, and eventually a business center for motorists traveling along Route 66 were built.
The events leading to the rise and fall of Keenbrook began with the arrival of the Glenn family.
Settling on 20 acres of land in the Cajon Pass sometime before 1865, their new home was called “Cajon Rancho.”
On one of his hunting trips Silas Glenn climbed over the ridge and looked down upon the green bench where the North Fork of Lytle Creek makes its first bend.
After purchasing a portion of the flat from W.W. Maxey, he moved his family over the ridge in 1865. Glenn held on to his Cajon Rancho for a few more years before transferring title in 1873 to his son-in-law and daughter, James and Ellen Applewhite
The Applewhite Place as it was now called, soon expanded to 160 acres and became a welcome rest stop for travelers along John Brown’s Toll Road, which connected the San Bernardino Valley with the Mojave Desert.
With the death of Silas Glenn in 1878, his aging wife, Mourning, found the job of taking care of their Lytle Creek ranch too difficult and turned the management over to the Applewhites.
On Jan. 23, 1883, James Applewhite sold his property to Granville H. Keen for $600. With change of title, the Applewhite Place became known as Keenbrook.
When the California Southern Railroad arrived in 1885, water stops were needed for trains to traverse the Cajon Pass and in 1891 a stop was established at Keenbrook.
Meanwhile, Glenn Ranch was turning into a popular summer mountain retreat. To accommodate the many visitors arriving by train, a road to the ranch needed to be established.
On April 1893, a stagecoach road was built at Keenbrook Station, which climbed up the Lytle Creek ridge and down into the Glenn Ranch. Before long, the resort business grew so much that to get the free stage ride over the Applewhite Road from Keenbrook, one had to send word two days in advance.
Gradually, the Opst, the Boartz, the Clock, and the Luna families decided to make their homes in Keenbrook. With these new arrivals — railroad workers, ranchers, and miners — the Keenbrook Post Office, in operation briefly in 1894, was reopened in 1910. During this time a petition was made to build a school and in December 1912, Keenbrook School opened its doors for the first time.
In a 1992 interview, Jim Payne, who was 86 at the time, recalled that when he first attended Keenbrook School during the school’s initial year, class was held inside one of the ranch houses of what was known until recently as the Gem Ranch. A year later, a second Keenbrook School was built just south of the ranch. This “one room shack” (as Payne remembered it) was more than sufficient for the dozen or so children in the area.
Payne recalled having to walk several miles along an oiled macadam road from his home at Cajon Station.
This road, known as the Santa Fe-Grand Canyon Needles Highway, closely approximating John Brown’s Toll Road built back in 1861 and known by the locals as the “Santa Fe Trail” took him through the Cozy Del Ranch before meandering through a tunnel and fording a stream at Blue Cut. It finally led him on to school, hopefully, before the teacher started ringing her bell for class to begin.
In 1917, several school districts in San Bernardino County participated in a contest that included a history of its school and surrounding community. Catharine Elizabeth Ver Bryck, a student at Keenbrook School, turned in an entry. Although there are discrepancies in the entry’s contents, as it was written by a young child, the article nevertheless gives an idea of what the area surrounding Keenbrook looked like.
In describing “modern day” Keenbrook in 1917, the young author wrote:
“Cajon Pass is a very rockey, and a very rough place. It has different canons branching off from it. These canons that branch off from it, have creeks in them coming down to one big river called the Cajon river. The mountains that are in the Cajon pass are full of lime. Over across the river, and across the railroad is a lime kill. Where by a man named Mr. Certous, and another man built to try some line, but now it is a old thing and is no good.
“Now, Cajon pass is improving. There are big lime mines, and buildings are going up here now.”
Indeed buildings were going up.
Unfortunately, they weren’t being built as rapidly as Catherine Ver Bryck or her neighbors may have hoped. By the early 1920s the Applewhite Road, a major contributor toward Keenbrook’s development, reverted to a seldom-used forest service road due to the vastly improved and much preferred Lytle Creek Road that transported rail passengers from Rialto to Glenn Ranch. Visitors no longer needed to stop at Keenbrook.
In 1921, the post office closed when mail was transferred to the post office at Cajon. Before long, the depot was shut down.
Soon Keenbrook School closed its doors, along with three other one-room schools when a petition was made to build the new two-room native rock constructed Cajon School in Devore, which opened in 1924.
Keenbrook received somewhat of a rebirth in 1926 with restaurants, service stations and motel accommodations thanks to the arrival of Route 66.
But when the freeway came through in the late 1960s, life took a detour. The Blue-Cut business district went downhill as automobiles rarely stopped and buses were not even allowed off the freeway.
Today, Keenbrook is little more than a ghost from another time.
Contact Nick Cataldo at Yankeenut15@gmail.com and read more of his local history articles at Facebook.com/BackRoadsPress.
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