Paramount Ranch got its name in 1927, when Paramount Studios purchased the plot to use as a movie ranch. They began building sets on the land that year, connected by roads and dotted with permanent buildings.

In November of 2018, the Santa Monica mountains were ablaze. The Woolsey Fire, which began above the Simi Valley and blazed south across Southern California’s canyons and chaparral, moved ever closer to a 19th-century frontier town nestled in the hills. People watched anxiously from a safe distance, but in the end, there was no stopping the destructive wildfire, and the town burned. It was like something out of a movie.

In fact, it was exactly like something out of a movie. The “town” was actually a film set for Westerns, featured in shows like Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman and Westworld. That Western Town, as it was called, was part of the larger Paramount Ranch, a site on the National Register of Historic Places where filmmakers had made hundreds of movies since the 1920s. The fire wasn’t staged, though, and many of the set buildings were lost—for now.