KVIG Informative

A ranch at the base of the Spring Mountains survived a diamond heist, Howard Hughes’s brief ownership and a developer’s plan to fill it with 2,000 residents before Nevada folded it into its state park system in 1973. Two miles away, on another piece of the same mountain range bordering Red Rock Canyon, a different developer’s plan for thousands of homes cleared a county vote in 2024 — proof that the fight over this exact stretch of land never really ended.

James Wilson and George Anderson filed on the property in 1876, and Wilson later deeded it to his adopted sons, Jim Jr. and Tweed, in 1902, according to the Nevada Division of State Parks’ own history of the site. The family mortgaged the ranch after World War I, and a California furrier, William George, paid off the debt in 1929 in exchange for ranch rights. George leased the property in 1944 to Chester Lauck, one half of the radio comedy duo Lum and Abner, who bought it outright in 1948 and renamed it the Bar Nothing Ranch.

The Laucks sold the ranch in 1955 to Vera Krupp, a German-born actress who renamed it Spring Mountain Ranch and set out to raise white-faced Hereford and Brahma cattle, the state park history says. On April 10, 1959, three men forced their way into the ranch house while Krupp and an employee, Harold Brotherson, were eating dinner, and stole a 33.6-carat diamond that had become known as the Krupp Diamond; authorities recovered it about six weeks later in New Jersey. Krupp left the ranch for Bel Air in 1964 because of poor health.

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Krupp sold the ranch in 1967 to Howard Hughes, who was already buying up Las Vegas Strip properties that year. Hughes paid a reputed $625,000 for it, according to the state park history, but he never actually stayed there himself; his employees used the property, chiefly Robert Maheu, who ran Hughes’s Nevada operations. Hughes sold the ranch in 1972 to Fletcher Jones and William Murphy for $1.5 million, a sale that fed reports at the time that Hughes was divesting his Las Vegas holdings amid difficulties with Nevada gaming regulators, the state park history says.

Jones and Murphy wanted to build an equestrian-oriented residential community for as many as 2,000 people on the land. The Clark County Planning Commission stalled their rezoning request after public opposition grew, according to the state park history. The Bureau of Land Management had already drawn fire from environmental groups over a separate 1968 master development plan for the surrounding area that called for a comparatively high level of recreational development.

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Nevada State Parks and the BLM developed a joint plan that superseded the 1968 proposal, and the ranch became a Nevada state park in 1973, ending the subdivision plan for good. The state park’s grounds were listed as a historic district on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976, according to the same state park history.

The fight over who gets to build on the edge of Red Rock Canyon didn’t end with Spring Mountain Ranch’s rescue. The Clark County Zoning Commission voted 6-0, with one commissioner abstaining, to approve a development agreement for roughly 3,500 homes on Blue Diamond Hill in 2024 — another mined hillside bordering the same canyon, less than two miles from the park gates. Fifty years after Nevada decided this corner of the Spring Mountains was worth protecting from a 2,000-person subdivision, the county is still deciding, parcel by parcel, how much of the land around it isn’t.