A miniature riverboat shares the lagoon with two ducks in this vintage postcard of Claretville Seminary in Calabasas. Behind it, a broad lawn rises toward the shaded arches of the former Gillette estate, now part of King Gillette Ranch.
SFV Blog previously featured a Claretville Seminary postcard on June 18, 2026, showing the same building and landscaped setting without the boat in the lagoon. That card, numbered H-5048, describes a partial view of the faculty building. This companion view brings the water into the foreground and adds a detail that gives the scene a very different personality.
A complete history of King Gillette Ranch can be found in our previously documented version of this postcard, published June 18, 2026.
The little vessel has two tiers of windows, a tall black smokestack and a prominent side paddlewheel. Against the white hull, the dark windows almost look like a row of cutouts. Its small scale becomes especially apparent beside the two ducks. The postcard does not explain whether it was a working model, a floating ornament or another kind of lagoon feature, so its purpose remains an intriguing unanswered question.
A postcard mailed in 1967
The printed caption identifies the institution as Claretville Seminary, operated by the Claretian Fathers, C.M.F., in Calabasas. It describes the faculty building as seen from the lagoon. Columbia Wholesale Supply of North Hollywood published and distributed the card, as it did the earlier postcard featured on the blog.
The Van Nuys postmark reads August 22, 1967. Two green one-cent Andrew Jackson stamps and a four-cent Abraham Lincoln stamp sit above a red, white and blue air-mail label. The mailing date establishes that the image was already in circulation by that summer; it does not tell us when the photograph was taken. The handwritten correspondence fills nearly every available space on the message side.
The handwritten message mixes travel news with an account of recovery. The writer calls a trip East “wonderful,” then describes an operation the previous week, sitting up in a chair to write, and trying to regain strength before leaving for a new appointment. Sierra Madre is mentioned farther down. Several names and passages remain difficult to decipher, but the readable lines give this scenic postcard a personal story beyond its campus view.
The mansion in the modern view
The modern photograph helps bring the building out from behind the postcard’s heavy tree cover. The arched terrace and adjoining white walls provide useful points of comparison, although this closer view does not include the lagoon.
The National Park Service’s King Gillette Ranch site bulletin identifies the mansion as Wallace Neff’s design for razor manufacturer King Camp Gillette. It also distinguishes the mansion from the separate seminary dormitory building constructed by the Claretians in 1955. That distinction helps clarify the earlier post’s tentative identification of the building.
As our earlier coverage recounts, the property passed from private estate to Claretian campus and later institutional uses before becoming public parkland. The site bulletin dates the Claretians’ purchase to 1952 and the public acquisition to 2005. It also explains that the pond was created by damming Stokes Creek as part of the original estate landscape.
Seen together, the two postcards and modern photograph preserve different details of the same setting: the shaded campus, the surviving mansion, and, in this card, a tiny riverboat giving the lagoon a touch of Mississippi scenery.
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