by Paul R. Spitzzeri
Well, it was initially thought that this would be the the second and concluding part of our post on a great ca. 1875 Henry T. Payne stereoscopic photograph looking east from “Franklin Street hill” from about Fort Street (renamed Broadway fifteen years later) between Temple and First streets, but there is so much interesting information about our focused portion of the image that we’re going to add a third and truly concluding part that will be added here tomorrow.
So, for this second segment, we turn our attention to the right side of the photo, specifically, taking a look at the Rocha Adobe, located at the northwest corner of Spring and Franklin and used for several years in the 1850s as city and county offices and the courthouse, while, in the expansive yard behind it, there was the two-story jail that served that function for some three decades.
The structure was built by José Antonio Rocha (1790-1837), who, according to biographers David E. Bartao and Eduardo M. Dias in a 1987 article in the California Historical Society journal, California History, was born in a small hamlet at the northern edge of Portugal near the border with the Spanish province of Galicia. The two note the lack of information on much of Rocha’s life, but suggested that upheaval due to Napoleon’s conquest may have led him to take to the sea by the end of 1813, this being common for young men in many parts of the world when they have no practical prospects in their homelands.
Whatever the motivation, Rocha wound up aboard an American-built schooner, the Columbia, owned by a Canadian fur trapping firm and headed for China when it anchored at Monterey, the capital of Alta California, then under Spanish rule, in November 1814. The life of a ship’s mate was rigorous, even in the best of circumstances and anything short of that could be brutal and dispiriting. So, it was no small wonder that, along with others from the craft, Rocha deserted.
He was allowed to stay, though Spanish policy was sedulously against extranjeros, or foreigners, having anything to do with Alta California and its people, but he was given a passport to go work as a weaver at Mission San Gabriel, with orders to stay in monthly contact with the commander of the presidio at Santa Barbara. On the journey south, however, Rocha stopped at Mission San Miguel, north of today’s Paso Robles, and ended up staying for a couple of years learning the carpentry trade while helping repair damage from an 1812 earthquake that ravaged many missions (including our local San Gabriel and San Juan Capistrano facilities.)
By 1818, Rocha was at Mission La Purisima, in modern Lompoc, and then ended up at Mission Santa Barbara the following year, though his trail goes cold until 1826 when he was at Mission San Luis Rey in what is now Oceanside in northern San Diego County and by which time Alta California was part of an independent Republic of México. Possibly as part of a decree releasing certain indigenous persons from mission control, Rocha then headed north and, on 5 November 1826, married 24-year old María Josefa Dolores Alvarado at Mission San Gabriel.
It appears his house on Spring Street, then known as Calle Primavera (there was no Franklin Street yet), was constructed very shortly afterward, because it is known that he made it available in 1827-1828 for an official government embezzlement investigation. At the end of 1828, it was also made available for the crew of a shipwrecked American vessel for their recovery. Beyond these incidents, nothing appears to be in existing records of the dwelling for the next quarter century.
In fact, its use by others seems to be a consequence of Rocha applying for a grant to one square league, or about 4,400 acres, of the Rancho La Brea, west of pueblo limits, and which was occupied by his brother-in-law, Juan Nepomuceno Alvarado. Being a foreigner, who was not naturalized as a Mexican citizen until 1831, Rocha may have partnered with Nemesio Dominguez in applying for the grant, which was approved in April 1828 by Los Angeles alcalde (mayor) José Antonio Carrillo, pending a formal approval by the governor.
Some four hundred cattle were stocked there and some sources suggest that an adobe house, now known as the Gilmore Adobe, was built that same year, while others indicate it was built by James Thompson, a future county sheriff, in 1852, or completed by the Gilmores in 1880. In any case, the tar pits on the rancho were kept under pueblo control, as residents used the material to coat the roofs of their houses for protection against rain damage.
It may well be that Rocha, residing full-time at La Brea and managing his herds, used the Los Angeles adobe dwelling as a “town house,” for use when visiting the pueblo for legal reasons, shopping or other purposes. In any case, his ownership and occupancy of La Brea was brief, under a decade, as he died in early 1837, shortly after his 47th birthday, leaving his widow and several children, including José Antonio Calixto (technically, José Antonio Rocha II, not José Antonio, Jr.).
Pueblo authorities, in 1840, sought to reassert control over La Brea, arguing that it had been abandoned, presumably since the elder Rocha’s death, but an official grant by Governor Juan Bautista Alvarado, a relative of Rocha’s widow, was secured that year. Señora Rocha died in February 1851 and the ranch appears to have been managed by a son José Jorge, while the Los Angeles dwelling was under the control of José Antonio II. Having determined to stay mainly at La Brea and operate the ranch, the latter, in turn, sold the town house to Jonathan Temple, owner of much property in the pueblo as well as the Rancho Los Cerritos in the Long Beach area.
Meanwhile, after the American seizure of Mexican Alta California and the formation of Los Angeles city and county in 1850, the immense challenges of maintaining even a modicum of the effective administration of law and criminal justice consumed a great deal of local government’s time and whatever paltry public funds were available. The county courthouse most recently had been in the El Palacio adobe, on the east side of Main Street where U.S. 101 runs through downtown today, of merchant Abel Stearns and then, with the creation of the county, the adobe hotel, the Bella Union, situated on the same side of the thoroughfare and further south, it being half-owned by the first County Clerk Benjamin D. Wilson. Notably, the agreement with Wilson was for three rooms and another with dirt floors, this latter used for jury deliberations.
At the start of 1852, the county reached an agreement with Benjamin I. Hayes, an attorney who became District Court judge later that year, to lease his house on the west side of Main Street near the Plaza for 18 months for a total of $650, said to be a considerable savings from the unstated terms with Wilson at the Bella Union. In 1853, the state legislature passed an act permitting the county to levy a tax of 50 cents for each $100 of taxable property “applied solely to the erection of a jail and Court House,” but this was not taken up by the newly established Board of Supervisors, among whom was F.P.F. Temple.
The Hayes building remained the courthouse until summer and fall 1853 when the supervisors reached a deal with Jonathan Temple to purchase the Rocha Adobe and lot for not far north of $3,000, with the city paying $1,500 for a quarter ownership, which included two rooms for its use at the northeast corner of the dwelling. In addition to have the courtroom, judges’ chamber, jury room and the quarters of the county clerk, keeper of the official records, including those of the court, it was decided to build a new jail at the site, as well.
The earliest known lockup, known as the cuartel, was at the southeastern corner of the original Plaza (not the one that exists now, but another nearby) and constructed in 1786. The adobe structure remained as the jail until 1841 (the year F.P.F. Temple and the Workman family moved to the region) when a new adobe edifice was built on the lower slopes of the hill behind the Plaza Church and which was used by conquering American soldiers as a station house on what was renamed Fort Moore Hill.
The single-roomed structure had no cells, but a massive pine log ran the length of the building and prisoners were shackled to iron staples driven into the wood. Moreover, according to educator and historian James M. Guinn, indigenous people and “half-breeds” of native and Mexican persons “were chained to logs outside, where unprotected by roof or wall, they were, through sunshine and storm, left to enjoy the glorious climate of California . . .”
From 1850 to 1853, there were several efforts by city and county (before the creation of the Board of Supervisors, management was by the three-judge Court of Sessions, precursor to the County Court) to have a better jail, but nothing was accomplished. When the grand jury visited the facility at the end of 1851, it reported,
they find the jail to be pestiferous dungeon hole, with but one filthy room . . . without a single opening through which to breathe the air of heaven . . . the public jail is in one word an unhealthy lazar house [a leper colony structure], in all respects unfit and insecure for the detention of prisoners, rendered still more offensive and disgusting for want of cleanly discipline . . . [we recommend a building that] has strong walls, more than the number of apartments [cells] required by law, [and] a well of water in a spacious yard walled in.
The report did mention a vent or sorts comprising a hole in the roof, which was, as was common, made of cane and pitch, or tar from La Brea, but was also highly susceptible from escape. A second space did exist there, but it contained a mentally-ill prisoner who, because of the dilapidated roof, was exposed to the elements.
Another attempt to find a better building for a jail was made the following year and a deal made with José Salazar to rent two rooms of his adobe structure for $15 per month, though it does not appear that the transaction with him was consummated and the jail remained at the For Moore Hill structure.
Another scathing grand jury report came in October 1852, with that body bluntly stating,
The general treatment of the prisoners confined to jail is a disgrace to humanity. It has come to the knowledge of the grand jury that they are badly fed and brutally treated; and, moreover, they witnesses, in irons and strongly bound to a log of wood, a prisoner against whom no crime could be produced, although suffering confinement two months, whilst a second, accused of murder, remains inhumanly chained by the legs and the neck. We present the jail, and all connected with it, as a public nuisance. The moral feeling of the community demands immediate reform.
It was added that Francisco Alvarado, who owned the building, was to be paid $50 monthly, but that funds were being remitted to some other unnamed person and the jury concluded that the facility was a nuisance “which should be abated forthwith.” Early in 1853, the Supervisors came to an agreement with Jesse D. Hunter, who came to Los Angeles early in 1847 with the Mormon Battalion shortly after the Mexican-American War ended with the taking of the town and who was the first brick maker in the Angel City.
The deal was for Hunter to construct a two-story jail, 15 by 30 feet, with the ground floor to be of stone and the upper level, including the jailer’s apartment, to be made of adobe, for $7,000, with 45% paid up front and Hunter given nine months to complete the work. Some unknown “act of Providence” intervened and the the contract was rescinded, while the unstated site was deemed questionable and not conformable to law and it was reminded that the city was $50,000 in debt. The Supervisors also passed a motion to petition the legislature to establish a law allowing the county to tax property owners up to a dollar for each $100 of property for a jail.
Once, however, the deal with Temple was struck to buy the Rocha Adobe with its large open area behind it to the west, an arrangement was made with Supervisor Stephen C. Foster, a former Common (City) Council member and future mayor, to build a jail and Foster and Supervisor William T.B. Sanford were appointed a committee to contract for the materials and work. The cost was to be no more than $6,000 and the City paid $1,500 for its quarter share with the jail redesigned so that the first floor, for city prisoners, be built of adobe and the second, housing county inmates, constructed of brick.
As for José Antonio Rocha II, he and his family submitted the required claim for La Brea with a land commission that met briefly in Los Angeles in fall 1852, but otherwise sat at San Francisco. To prosecute the claim, they hired attorney and surveyor Henry Hancock, whose methods and motivations have been alleged to have been less-than-aboveboard. However he may have treated the Rochas, the lengthy proceedings, involving substantial costs with legal representation, procuring surveys and map and so on, including during a time that the boon of the Gold Rush economy subsided and hard times followed, took their toll.
Many ranchers lost their property, often through borrowing to pay for claims costs and/or operations of their ranch during the difficult financial circumstances and then losing the land to foreclosure; because ranches were often divided amongst the heirs of a deceased grantee, which made the smaller tracts harder to manage with economic efficiency; or because selling the tracts was the only way to fend off financial trouble or outright ruin. Spanish-speakers, moreover, were usually unfamiliar with American legal proceedings and subject to fraud or manipulation.
In the case of the Rochas, they sold La Brea to Hancock in 1860, with one source suggesting the price was $20,000 while another records $2.50 an acre, which could be about half. In any case, José Antonio II ended up, with his wife Ventura López and their children, on the nearby Rancho Rincon de los Bueyes, of more than 3,100 acres and largely owned by José Arnaz, formerly of Ventura (one of his sons married F.P.F. Temple’s daughter, Lucinda, and then abandoned her forcing her to file for divorce). One source states that Rocha bought 100 acres from Francisco Higuera, son of one of the original grantees, in late 1872 and built an adobe house shortly afterward, though others suggest the house was built in 1865.
In any case, the residence still stands north of Interstate 10 not far east of Robertson Boulevards at the north end of the Reynier Village neighborhood. Rocha was Los Angeles City Assessor in the late 1860s, a justice of the peace for the Ballona Township (including Rincon de los Bueyes) in the mid-Seventies, and an official interpreter in the Angel City, as well as a farmer. He died in November 1908 at the home of daughter Concepción Higuera in what was then called Palms and it was stated in an obituary that he “had been a resident of the Ballona country for more than thirty years,” suggestive of the 1872 date. The Rocha Adobe in that area remained in the family’s possession until well into the 20th century and it was restored in the late 1970s.
Join us for the concluding part three tomorrow.