per wikipedia:

 

 

Founding and growth

 

According to Bonnie Ketterl Kane of the Ridge Route Communities Museum and Historical Society, the community was founded in 1888 by Martin Scheideck of Germany, who traveled with a friend, Gebhardt Wegis, "to avoid mandatory enlistment in the army."

 

[T]he two adventurers . . . walked from San Luis Obispo to Upper Cuyama[,] where they felt they found an area that reminded them of southern Germany. Both claimed homesteads near the Reyes family[,] who had been grazing cattle in the mountain valleys since the 1850's. Gebhardt married one of the Reyes daughters, Rosa, establishing the Wegis name in that area.

 

According to Kane, Scheideck built an adobe house and store with a wine cellar "and was known to serve hard cider to postal customers and candy in a bucket for the children. He was said to have been called "Judge Scheideck" after an "itinerant lawyer" left him a set of lawbooks, which he studied and "put to use in settling disputes."

 

Reporter Charles Hillinger of the Los Angeles Times, however, reported that the settlement was founded in 1888 by Eugene Scheideck, a German immigrant, on 160 acres (0.65 km2). A two-story wooden building was erected around 1900 to establish the Ozena station of the U.S. Post Office. As time passed, Sheideck built a lodge and tiny cabins along the Ozena Creek. By 1975 there were 54 of the little houses, which were owned individually but were built on both sides of Reyes Creek on 11 acres (45,000 m2) of land leased from the property owners.

 

In 1975 there were only two couples living year around in the settlement, one of which was Barbara and Harold Brake, who owned the gas station, bar, store and dance hall.[5] By 1992 the permanent population had grown to nine residents, Bugs and Frances Lackey, Uncle Vane Fort. J.R. and Rose Putzier, Betsy Paine. John (The Painter) Hilton, Frances Hawkins. and Stephanie Rogers, according to a Los Angeles Times reporter, who called the settlement "a self-contained mountain colony" with no telephone service and only two mobile phones for communication outside the Ozena Valley.