San Marino's Past: The Pony Express Museum

Few people have heard of the Pony Express Museum in San Marino.  It was in an old adobe house down on either Kewen Drive or Encino Drive in what I always called, “The Gulch.”  When I was between the ages of 8 and 16 (1930-1938), I had the run of San Marino and anywhere I could go by bicycle.  I was interested in everything, particularly junk, so the Pony Express Museum intrigued me, especially because of all the pictures, posters, and guns that were left hanging around there.

The proprietor was Parker Lyon, founder of Lyon Van and Storage.  He was a sociable person and loved to talk about the old west and all the “bad men” of the past.  He liked telling those stories so much that I figured he was probably making it all up.  He’d probably never seen a horse or visited anywhere in the west and since I’d never seen another soul visit the “museum,” Mr. Lyon was probably just a self-proclaimed authority on all this stuff.  Still, it was interesting.  The place was more of a glorified collection of junk than a museum, but one thing was clear.  It was Mr. Lyon’s own personal fiefdom. He was quite proud of every piece he had collected.

Mr. Lyon had a nice collection of rusty old Winchester rifles, rusty old six shooters, swords, gold mining shovels, flumes, and gold scales, much of it relics from California’s Gold Rush days. He hung all this stuff up on the walls. That was his method of display.  No lighted glass cases here.  His other decorating ideas included: old letters, comic signs, horse collars, saddles, and horse drawn carriages.  It was really great!

There was a stuffed figure and many large pictures of Lily Langtry (1853-1929) a British music hall singer and actress. She was famous for many stage productions including “As You Like It” and “The Lady from Lyons.”  Come to think of it, I wonder if the name of that play and Mr. Lyon were connected in any way.  Langtry was a favorite with the nobility of the time, including the Prince of Wales before he was king. I would guess that Parker Lyon was an admirer, too.

Lily Langtry comes into this story because she was amply featured in the “museum” and, in 1888, she purchased a winery in Lake County, California. Bearing the Langtry Name, the winery and vineyard are still in operation today in Middletown, California.

Back in the Pony Express Museum were several pictures of Judge Roy Bean (1825-1903) famous for his “Law West of the Pecos.” In 1852 in San Diego, the judge was jailed for being in a duel.  He escaped to San Gabriel and became a bartender of his brother’s saloon.  He later went to Texas and ended up in a town named Eagles Nest. He renamed the town Langtry (Texas), after Lily Langtry. He named his new saloon The Jersey Lily, even though he never actually met his idol, Lily.  The story goes that Lily finally did visit the town, but only after the judge’s death.

In the back of Lyon’s “museum” was a six shooter nailed to the wall with a big sign that read: “Judge Bean killed 6 bad men with this revolver.”  You bet I was quite impressed with that!

There was a 3-foot square box made entirely of glass. It was filled with smoked cigar butts. The label there read, “General U.S. Grant smoked these on his stay in Carson City, Nevada in 1880.”

In the grounds outside the museum were carriages, ploughs, and an outhouse with a moon cut in the door. And there was a horse trough with a sign that read: “No Swimming.”

The museum even had an old time bar with hundreds of bottles with different colored whiskeys. The sign there read:  “Drunks will be shot.” Nearby, was a roulette wheel carpeted in green felt.

Outside, as you entered, there was a life-sized poster of a “bad man” with a bandana over his face pointing a double barrel gun straight at you. The caption read: “You can’t get away, no matter where you stand.”  Well that was exactly right.  That’s an image that stayed with me because no matter where I stood, that gun was always pointing right at me and the “bad man” was looking right at me. He was quite a “welcome” to the “museum” for someone like me.

I heard that Mr. Lyon moved the whole thing across the street from the Santa Anita race track sometime in the 1940s.  Perhaps he cleaned it up, charged admission and made it more legitimate.  I’ll never know because, of course, the next time I checked, it had disappeared.