Cynthia Wood, Owned the Taylor Ranch

Cynthia Wood, owner of the 30,000-acre Taylor Ranch west of Ventura, arts patron and breeder of champion horses, has died at age 55.

Ms. Wood died of brain cancer Jan. 23 in Santa Barbara, friends said Saturday.

Ms. Wood, a somewhat reclusive heiress who lived in Santa Barbara, was in the public eye in the late 1980s when Taylor Ranch came under consideration as a site for a Ventura County campus of Cal State University. University officials said the ranch, overlooking the Pacific Ocean just west of the Ventura River, could provide a site for the most scenic campus in the Cal State system.

But Ms. Wood, who owned the ranch, and her mother, who owned the underground mineral rights, decided not to sell a 550-acre parcel to the university, fearing the sale would interfere with oil leases sold to Shell Oil Co. more than 75 years earlier.

Officials later considered obtaining the land by condemnation, but Ventura city officials and environmentalists worried that a Taylor Ranch campus would cause unacceptable traffic and smog problems. The university is now working to obtain a site between Camarillo and Oxnard.

Ms. Wood inherited the ranch from her stepfather, cattleman and philanthropist Adrian G. (Buddy) Wood, who died in 1971. Buddy Wood had inherited it from his previous wife, Emma, who was the third generation of the Taylor family to own the ranch.

As a young woman, Ms. Wood studied music in Italy and worked backstage at Milan’s famed La Scala opera house. Her lifelong love of horses led her in 1965 to build a 25-acre stable in Santa Barbara, the centerpiece of which was a 350-foot-long barn designed to house 50 horses. Her American Saddlebreds won blue ribbons for nearly two decades at the annual Santa Barbara National Horse Show.

She sold the stables in 1983 and began spending more time in New York. When in Santa Barbara, she lived at a secluded Mediterranean-style estate.

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