“Owens” refers to the Owens River, 200 miles north of the San Fernando Valley. “Mouth” refers to the mouth of the river. “Owensmouth” was coined in 1911 as a nod to the William Mulholland-engineered Los Angeles Aqueduct, which would soon carry (read: steal) water down from the Owens Valley and thus symbolically move the mouth of the river to the SFV. It’s said that L.A. Times publisher Harrison Gray Otis, one of the Valley’s main developers/landowners at that time, came up with the name but it could have been any one of his powerful partners (Whitley, Sherman, Chandler, or Otto F. Brant, a man with no namesake street). Owensmouth was designed as a standalone town and kept its name even after the City of L.A. annexed the Valley in 1915. Residents, however, hated living in gross-sounding “Owen’s Mouth” – their official claim was that it was geographically misleading – and managed to get it changed to Canoga Park in 1931.
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