Henck family revisit the Skyforest community they built

By RHEA-FRANCES TETLEY

Staff Writer

Last weekend the Henck family gathered at their family cabin in Skyforest to memorialize their recently departed uncle, Ted Thomas, who was married to Kaki (Catherine) Henck Lovell. “He was the last of that generation of Hencks and will be sorely missed.

Of the 35 family members who came to share memories of Ted, there were three grandchildren of Mary Putnam Henck, who had grown up on the mountain, said the weekend’s organizer, Jason Murphy Thomas, Ted’s son. Other members of the family stayed at the Skyforest Inn, next door to the old Henck home on the rim to get a feeling of living in that older home, that is now under renovation.

Kaki Henck, Ted’s wife, had been an active skier as she grew up on the mountain, learning to ski at Snow Valley. She was on the state ski team in 1941, while enrolled at U.C. Berkeley, and became a California state champion skier in downhill racing. In 1942 while racing at Sun Valley, Idaho, she set a record on the Diamond Sun run that stood until 1962. Because of Kaki’s interest in skiing, Mary Putnam Henck, while on the Arrowhead school board, made sure skiing was part of its athletic program.

Part of the weekend on the mountain was spent at the Heaps Peak Arboretum which Mary Putnam Henck had originally created. The entire family walked the Sequoia Trail on Saturday at the Arboretum as they remembered how it was created and how involved the family had been, creating the arboretum, and impacting mountain history over the decades.

The Henck family (Joseph and Mary, with children J. Putnam, Ann, Catherine and Ethel) came to the mountain in 1923 and created the community of Skyforest, living in the Kuffel home on the Rim of the World Drive. This began several generations of Henck involvement in mountain and community development. When they moved to Skyforest, there was no electricity and only a few dirt roads. Joseph Henck began installing electric and telephone lines and putting in water lines and running the Skyforest Water Company.

Joseph Henck also cut in the Skyforest subdivision, ran the Henck Mercantile store and was the area’s first fire chief. Mary Henck, for whom Mary Putnam Henck Intermediate School is named, was a former vice principal at Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles before coming to the mountain. She formed the Lake Arrowhead School District because there was no school for her son J. Putnam to attend when he turned school age in 1924.

A few years after the 1922 fire swept through the mountaintop area, the area which was to become the arboretum was replanted under the motivation of now school teacher Mary Henck with her children and other local school children, beginning on Arbor Day 1928 under the direction of USFS Ranger Buel. With the support of the Lake Arrowhead Women’s Club, of which Mary Henck was a founding member, this project continued into the mid-1930s.

During the Depression, the Civilian Conservation Corps continued the reforestation project. Joe Henck created some ponds on his property next to this reforested site which provided water for the plants and animals. The U.S. Forest Service suggested planting Gigantica Sequoia Redwoods in these mountains, so the Hencks planted many near the ponds after World War II, which has resulted in probably the largest sequoia grove in Southern California.

The trees are named the Ann Henck Stewart Sequoia Grove, which is near Joe’s Creek named for Joseph Henck. This recognition was very impressive to the younger Henck family members during their walk along the Sequoia Trail last week.

Later on, in 1947, J. Putnam, then grown, was appointed to the Lake Arrowhead School District board, following in his mother’s footsteps. He was instrumental in securing a new location for Lake Arrowhead Elementary School on Rim of the World Highway and then helped to unify the three mountain school districts, establishing the K-12 Rim of the World Unified School District. This led to the creation of Rim High School at that location in 1956. Year later J. Putnam encouraged the new intermediate school to be named in honor of his mother, Mary Putnam Henck, for starting the school district.

Ann Henck Stewart, Mary’s daughter, and her husband ran the Timberline Journal newspaper from their office in Skyforest for many years, documenting the activities of the growing communities on the mountain, living in the Henck home on the rim. This important collection of writings documented the weekly activities, creating the history of the communities over several decades. Many people worked for the newspaper and their office businesses over the years.

J. Putnam retired from his construction company, moved back to Skyforest and began managing Santa’s Village in 1978. He had helped build the storybook-style buildings at the theme park that opened on the family’s property on Memorial Day weekend, 1955. He, his wife Pamela and kids continued running Santa’s Village until it closed in 1999.

In 1983, local forest ranger and schoolteacher George Hesemann envisioned a public arboretum, choosing the land the Hencks had reforested, next to Santa’s Village along Highway 18, partially because of the Sequoias. Those reforestation projects had been so successful that Hesemann had to clear the thick vegetation just to create the original trail, along which he identified the plants and flowers, with the support of the Henck family.

The Hesemann Trail was rerouted after the 2003 Old Fire burned through the Arboretum, collapsing the trail. The new Sequoia Trail is 0.7-mile long, which is the trail the Henck family took during this memory walk for all the generations. The Heaps Peak Arboretum continues to be maintained by volunteers of ROWIA, the Rim of the World Interpretive Association, started by Hesemann.

Ted Thomas had been a world traveler through his work and business, so the family was spreading his ashes not only at the Henck family cabin, on the mountaintop in Skyforest above Cedar Ridge, but will be doing so in other places around the world where he had lived.

The Henck family is legitimately proud of the many positive changes the family made in the mountain communities over the three generations they lived here. For years the Skyforest post office was located over the Hencks’ garage, with a walking bridge directly from the roadway, since Mary was the Skyforest postmaster.

After Mary began the Lake Arrowhead School District in 1924, she then got a school bond passed which built the first school house for grades first through eighth. That building now houses County Fire Station 91 at the entrance to Lake Arrowhead Village.

Over the decades the Henck family has contributed greatly to the community. J. Putnam was honored as Lake Arrowhead’s Citizen of the Year in 2001 for his decades of contributions to making the community a better place to live, employing thousands of residents and authoring three books on his life in the mountain.