LIVING MEMORIES

Moulton reflects on her life as a California rancher and artist in this memoir.

The author, writes art historian Jean Stern in the book’s foreword, was “one of the founders of the Southern California we know today.” Born in 1878 in Irving, Kansas, Moulton spent much of her childhood and young adult years in various locations across the American West, from traveling to California by horse and buggy as a 16-year-old to graduating as her high school valedictorian in Hebron, Nebraska, to working as a school teacher in Seattle at the turn of the century. She would eventually settle in Orange County, California, after marrying rancher Lewis Fenno Moulton, and she became an acclaimed artist later in her life. In 1970, two years before her death, she penned this memoir, which would be stored in the family’s archives until its publication in this well-edited, visually impressive edition. The memoir surveys the major events of Moulton’s life, often connecting her own story to contemporaneous national events. Discussing the “Gay Nineties,” the author argues that the decade was “gay only because the promise of freedoms of the sexes were simply an affectation and not a reality” (she laments, “I wish we had stayed that way”). Upon finally obtaining the right to vote, Moulton highlights her joy at casting her first ballot for the progressive Woodrow Wilson—though she did not support his decision to bring America into World War I. Part of California’s ‘en plein air’ art movement (an artist sets up an easel “in the wild and paints like mad while the light stays true”), the author would serve as a pioneering promoter as president of the Laguna Beach Art Association. Over the years, her work would be featured in solo exhibitions in venues including Soka University and San Clemente’s Casa Romantica.

Edited by Moulton’s great-grandson, Scott T. Barnes, the text is accompanied by editorial footnotes that contextualize, clarify, and provide additional commentary. The author of multiple books, Barnes writes with a passionate style, reveling in his great-grandmother’s many accomplishments from the learned perspective of a scholar of early 20th-century California history. While Moulton’s memoir is the book’s centerpiece, the volume is replete with extra essays and commentary, including lengthy endnotes that provide additional historical context for the major events of Moulton’s life, such as a multimillion-dollar real estate deal in the early 1960s that converted thousands of acres of the Moulton Ranch into one of the region’s largest retirement communities, known at the time as Leisure World Laguna Hills. The book also includes a reproduction of Moulton’s “Flight Journal,” a handwritten travelogue of her many trips across the world. (While not as polished as her typed memoir, these reflections offer a treasure trove of historical commentary.) A visual delight, the work also features photographs of Moulton’s artwork, as well as an ample assortment of family photographs and historic ephemera. (It even includes a QR code that takes readers to a documentary produced by the Moulton Museum.) At less than 170 total pages, this is an accessible and polished volume.

An important contribution to the history of Southern California, as told by one of the region’s leading artists.