and Augusta Iverson homesteaded a family farm in the Simi Hills on Santa Susana Pass in what is now Chatsworth, eventually expanding their land holdings to about . It has been said that they allowed a movie to be shot on the property as early as 1912, with the silent movies Man's Genesis (1912), My Official Wife (1914), and The Squaw Man (1914) being some of the productions often cited as among the earliest films shot on the site. However, many of the earliest citations have turned out to be incorrect. For example, "The Squaw Man" is now known to have filmed a scene elsewhere in Chatsworth, a short distance southwest of the Iverson property, but did not film on the Iverson Ranch. By the late 1910s, what would become a long and fruitful association developed between Hollywood and the Iverson Movie Ranch, which became the go-to outdoor location for Westerns in particular and also appeared in many adventures, war movies, comedies, science-fiction films and other productions, standing in for Africa, the Middle East, the South Pacific and any number of exotic locations. Buster Keaton's Three Ages (1923), Herman Brix's Hawk of the Wilderness (1938), Laurel and Hardy's The Flying Deuces (1939), John Wayne's The Fighting Seabees (1944), and Richard Burton's The Robe (1953) are just a handful of the productions that were filmed at the ranch. The rocky terrain and narrow, winding roads frequently turned up in Republic serials of the 1940s and were prominently featured in chases and shootouts throughout the golden era of action B-Westerns in the 1930s and 1940s. For the 1945 Western comedy Along Came Jones, producer and star Gary Cooper had a Western town built at the ranch; this set was subsequently used in many other productions until the town was dismantled in 1957. Hollywood's focus began to shift to the medium of television beginning in the late 1940s, and Iverson became a mainstay of countless early television series, including The Lone Ranger, The Roy Rogers Show, The Gene Autry Show, The Cisco Kid, Buffalo Bill, Jr., Zorro, and Tombstone Territory. An estimated total of 3,500 or more productions, about evenly split between movies and television episodes, were filmed at the ranch during its peak years. The long-running TV western The Virginian filmed on location at Iverson in the ranch's later period, as did Bonanza and Gunsmoke. By the 1960s, the ownership of the