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,
Cross S Ranch Headquarters in the 1970s, and the headquarters building is all that remains of the original property. The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places on March 8, 2006. Cross S Ranch Headquarters The Cross S Ranch Headquarters is a historic building located in farmland south of Olustee, Oklahoma. The two-story stone building served as the headquarters of the Cross S Ranch, a cattle ranch founded in 1891. As a major cattle trail passed through the area, the ranch took advantage of the open land to raise free-range cattle. By 1902, the ranch had decreased in size due to