Long before conscious travel became an online trend, one American family was already thinking about how to protect a piece of California coastline in the long term. A quarter of the town of Avalon burned in a devastating fire in 1915, and in 1919 chewing gum magnate William Wrigley Jr. bought the Santa Catalina Island Company, according to the local history archive of the LA County Library. That purchase marked the beginning of 56 years of stewardship that ended in 1975, when the family turned over most of the island for permanent protection. If you have Catalina Island on your West Coast bucket list, this backstory explains why it still looks so wild in so many ways.
A gum tycoon buys an island
The Banning family, who had fallen on hard times after the 1915 fire, sold the Santa Catalina Island Company to Wrigley. His purchase set off decades of change, including animal population controls, protection of watersheds and reseeding of land overgrazed by sheep and cattle since the mid 1800s, according to the LA County Library. The family also built the Sugarloaf Casino and Bird Park, opened mines that produced lead, zinc, and silver, imported deer and wild boar for the hunters, hosted the Bobby Jones Amateur Golf Tournament and brought the Chicago Cubs to the island for spring training. But under the resort development, something quieter kept building. The family kept returning to conservation.
