Lenwood is a small town on Route 66 just west of Barstow, California, that began  in 1923 Frank and Nancy Ellen Woods decided to subdivide some 1540 acres they owned. Through the company Lenwood Estates they established a new town which, according to adverts by the firm was akin to paradise on earth – ideal for health, perfect for chicken farms, orchard tracts and businesses of all kinds. One William Barnard was appointed to manage Lenwood Estates and an office was opened in Los Angeles.

There was just one problem. It was a scam.

An advert announcing the new town of Lenwood on the ‘Ocean-to-ocean’ Highway in 1924.

Of course, no-one knew that when lots came to be sold – as many as 50 in just thirty days according to Barnard, who was actually a bankrupt, something of which the Woods were aware before they hired him. The first signs of disquiet came at the end of 1924 when WB Sifton, who had purchased land in order to build a hotel, filed a suit against Lenwood Estates to collect a salary of $175 for a four-month contract from the company. Two years later the Hayward Lumber Company sought to foreclose on the town and eventually it emerged that Barnard had set up the fictitious Arizona-California Land Company to sell lots to gullible investors during the 1920s real estate bubble.

‘Any system of raising poultry you want’!

In court in 1927 it emerged that the defendants – Barnard and the Woods – had intended ‘to create a false and fictitious value therefor and to thereby cheat and defraud the public in the sale and disposition of these lands in small tracts, a scheme or joint venture of all defendants was planned whereby they were to receive all the proceeds from such venture and yet not be responsible for any of the losses or liabilities that would surely occur on the eventual dissipation of the real estate bubble’. Woods and Barnard had also entered into a trust agreement whereupon they could deed the land to the Bank of America, leaving the Woods free from liability of any kind in connection with the scheme. It seems that the Woods escaped their liabilities by dying not long afterwards – they were both almost 70 at the time of the court case.

However, Lenwood survived and the fact that it was situated on the National Old Trails Road encouraged business. In 1923 Christian Randolph Duin and his wife Cecilia turned up in Lenwood and opened the Radio Auto Camp, starting with just three cabins and neatly combining two of the technological advances of the age in one name. Duin appears to be a man addicted to romance and marriage.

In October 1896, at the age of 20, he married 19-year-old Alice Smith in Los Angeles. It was to be a short marriage for Alice died of tuberculosis on September 10, 1901. Duin remarried in October 1907 to 27-year-old Russian emigrant Rose W Zarsky. One morning in March 1908 Christian Duin put on his best clothes and left their home in Oakland, California, telling Rose he was going to buy some tools in San Francisco for his employer, the Eagle Box factory. She never saw him again.

The Eagle Box and Manufacturing Co’s factory from which Christian Duin disappeared one morning in 1908.

In June 1909 Rose, having ascertained that her husband was alive and well and hadn’t met with some misfortune, petitioned the courts to have the marriage dissolved on the ground of desertion, which it was. However, by then Christian Duin had already married again – bigamously, of course.

On July 6, 1908 he was wed to Laura May and the marriage consummated in Denver, Colorado. In June 1911 Laura filed for an annulment of the marriage, having discovered that there was a second Mrs Duin still living. In fact, there was actually a fourth Mrs Duin by now as Duin had married Maude M Cook in Oregon on November 9, 1909…

This photo shows the garage, campground office and gas station.

I could find no record of what happened to Maude, although they were still living together in Los Angeles in 1918. It’s not known when he married Cecilia – or if he even did – but they made a success of the fledgling Radio Auto Camp, helped in no small part by Duin’s trade as a carpenter. However, the Woods’ claims of Lenwood being a healthy, dry place to live did Christian Duin no good, nor did he live to take advantage of the increased traffic when the road on which the camp stood was designated Route 66, for he died on September 1, 1926, of tuberculosis, the same disease that had taken his first wife twenty-five years before. We will probably never know whether there were other marriages and other wives than the five I have found.

Captured by Frashers Fotos, this photo shows that the Radio Auto Camp not only had cabins and a cafe, but a restaurant and beer garden.

In November 1927 Cecilia Duin remarried, this time to Moses Tufts, and they carried on operating the Radio Camp; by 1933 it boasted 11 cabins. In 1934 Mrs Tufts leased the place to AO Flowers and his uncle Fred Ridernoor but this appears to have been a business arrangement and would occur several times again.

Moses died in 1945 and Cecilia sold Radio Auto Camp that year to John and Inez O’Leary who then sold it to Homer Luring in April 1948. Two months later, in June 1948, O’Leary renamed the place the Lenwood Inn and the Radio Auto Camp was a thing of the past. I had previously believed that one building still existed, but I no longer think that is the case. Where the Radio Auto Camp/Lenwood Inn was is now a vacant lot, although some trees remain. Cecilia Duin outlived both her husbands and finally passed away in 1986 at the age of 97. She had outlived the Lothario of Lenwood by more than half a century.

Christian Duin, the man who wooed and wed at least five women.