City’s rural past fades with ranch

By Jeremy Twitchell

Thursday, Aug. 13, 2009 | 2 a.m.

The excavator rolled to a halt as workers ambled behind it wielding fire hoses to force the dust to settle.

One hour was all it took to turn the Hilltop Ranch’s 46-year-old barn into piles of rubble.

The ranch site and its barn, at Greenway Road and Chaparral Drive, were some of the last vestiges of Henderson’s roots as a mostly rural upstart tucked away in the corner of the Las Vegas Valley. But what is left of the Hilltop takes up four acres, and even the recession couldn’t prevent that land from being turned into custom home sites.

Friday’s demolition was especially tough for Luke and Desiree Vincent. As children, the siblings’ home was down the street, and they grew up on the ranch. It belonged to Hershel Trumbo, their grandfather.

After Trumbo died in 1993, the Hilltop passed out of the family’s hands, and the barn and the rest of the site fell into disrepair. Investors wound up owning it — and erasing it.

“It’s sad. It’s very sad,” said Luke Vincent, as he walked his dogs near the razed remnants of the barn. Vincent, 38, still lives next door in the house his grandfather built.

“It was a landmark, and now it’s gone. That just seems to be the way it is in this town, though.”

As word of the barn’s impending demise spread, Desiree Vincent said she received phone calls from old friends she hasn’t heard from in years.

“Everybody I know who knows this place and knows what’s going on is just heartbroken,” the 35-year-old said. “This was just a really neat part of Henderson’s history.”

The Vincents’ grandfather came to Henderson from South Dakota in the 1940s to work at Basic Magnesium. Later he would help turn an abandoned switchboard at the plant into Henderson’s first telephone system and then become one of the founders of what has since become the Henderson Heritage Festival.

In 1963, when the town’s population was about 13,000, Trumbo turned his patch of desert into the Hilltop Ranch as a place to pursue his dream of raising race horses. In time he had more than 30 horses on the site, which he entered in races across the country and in Mexico.

When Trumbo created the ranch, it was so remote he had to grade his own road to the property. As the city filled in around it over the years, the barn became a landmark.

“People used it for directions,” Luke Vincent said. “Someone would ask where you lived, and you’d say, ‘Half a block down from the barn.’ ”

But the growth that rushed toward and surrounded the Hilltop finally swept over it. As land values and water rates climbed, the ranch became too expensive to maintain, Luke Vincent said.

And though the recession has stagnated growth throughout the valley, the Hilltop Ranch site is part of another, smaller economic trend.

Developers with just enough financing to prepare sites for construction are taking advantage of the lower costs, hoping the sites will be ready, more valuable and easier to sell when the economy improves.

On the Hilltop Ranch site, a sign hung on one corner advertises lots for custom homes.

Luke Vincent said he would have preferred to keep the land in the family and to have preserved it as a ranch.

“But I guess that wasn’t possible,” he said. “So if it needs to be developed, you just develop it and move forward. I’d rather have homes than a 7-Eleven.”

The site is rocky, dusty and weedy, and has accumulated a lot of trash over the years. Luke Vincent, however, remembers when it was covered with grass, with a quarter-mile racetrack, a duck pond, corrals, chicken coops and a caretaker’s home.

He remembers playing football there as a kid, then using it as a meeting place with his friends throughout junior high and high school.

“It was an oasis,” he said.

Desiree Vincent read aloud from old news articles about the ranch’s heyday. When she finished, she said she felt like she was at a funeral. But recounting the memories was cathartic, and she said she hopes that doing so will help preserve the Hilltop Ranch’s place in the story of Henderson.

“It was a landmark, and it deserves a worthy send-off,” she said. “You’ve got to make your history, or it’s just memories.”