Ponderosa Ranch high in the Sierra Nevada, with a large ranch house in the center of it. Ben Cartwright was said to have built the original, smaller homestead after moving from New Orleans with his pregnant third wife Marie and his two sons, Adam and Hoss. The grown Adam, an architect/engineer, designed the later sprawling ranch house as depicted on TV ("Bonanza, The Philip Diedesheimer Story", Oct. 31, 1959, NBC-TV; "Bonanza: The Return", April 1993, NBC-TV). The fictional ranch was roughly a two-hour horse ride from Virginia City, Nevada. (Note: There are slight variations as to the origin of the Ponderosa Ranch,
U Lazy S Ranch 1966, the ranch spanned 90,000 acres. In October 1968, Lott and his wife hosted François Tombalbaye, the President of Chad, on his official visit to Texas. A year later, in 1969, they donated a carriage house from the ranch and US$10,000 to the National Ranching Heritage Center in Lubbock, Texas. In 1973, a fundraiser for the public library in Post, Texas was held on the ranch. U Lazy S Ranch The U Lazy S Ranch, formerly known as the Square and Compass Ranch, is a historic ranch in Garza County, Texas, USA. The ranch was established as the Square and