Sharing the History of Forgotten City Maker F.P.F. Temple With the Los Angeles Corral of The Westerners

by Paul R. Spitzzeri

On Wednesday evening, I had the privilege of being able to share the history of F.P.F. Temple with the Los Angeles Corral (Chapter) of The Westerners, a group of which I’ve been a member for twenty-five years including serving as Sheriff, or president, in 2011. Though I haven’t been very active since, it’s always great to go back and be among those who love local and Western American history.

The talk was an overview of the remarkable story of “Templito,” the much-younger and shorter brother of Jonathan Temple (1796-1866), who, after leaving the family’s long-time home in Reading, Massachusetts, spent several years as a merchant in Hawaii and then a short sojourn in San Diego before, in 1828, setting in the Mexican pueblo of Los Angeles, being the second American or European to do so, where opened its first store.

Born Pliny Fisk in 1822, the junior Temple completed his education and, just prior to his 19th birthday, embarked on the bark Tasso for the half-year sailing to Alta California, the Siberia of México after which he met Jonathan for the first time and, rather than return home as his family expected, stayed and worked as a clerk in the store.

One tidbit mentioned during the talk was that, when California’s first Gold Rush, albeit very modest compared to the massive one that came several years later, took place after the March 1842 discovery in the mountains east of modern Santa Clarita, Pliny was one of the first Angelenos to transmit gold dust to the East Coast. He did this through a brother, Abraham, who remained in reading, but took the gold to the national mint at Philadelphia and then purchased goods requested by his California siblings, including personal items and goods for the store.

At the end of September 1845, Pliny married Antonia Margarita Workman, daughter of Homestead founders William Workman and Nicolasa Urioste, who migrated from Nicolasa’s native Taos, New Mexico later in 1841, and settled on the Rancho La Puente, twenty miles east of the pueblo. Presumably, the couple met at the store and, when they married, Pliny became a Roman Catholic by baptism, taking the name Francisco—this rendered his name F.P.F. and he was commonly called Francis or Frank. The nuptial also was the first in the region in which the bride and groom had English-language surnames.

When the greater Gold Rush burst forth in 1848-1849, ranchers with larger herds of cattle (previously valuable for their hides and tallow for leather, soap and candle rendering) found wealth through taking their animals to the fields, rather than engage in the usually laborious search for the precious metal. F.P.F. did travel in 1849 to the southern mines of Tuolumne County to check out gold digging possibilities, but what he did that was distinctive from other greater Los Angeles ranchers was to go beyond selling cattle “on the hoof” to those wanting them for the fresh meat.

Temple purchased grazing lands for his herds, built or acquired slaughter houses and owned butcher shops, with the first at Springfield, which has largely vanished, while the others took place at Sonora, a fascinating Gold Rush town, and Columbia, which is now a state park and where at least two buildings owned by him still stand. By processing and selling beef, he took an integrated approach that probably was quite lucrative as long as the Rush lasted, though he retained interests in that area until 1875.

The talk mentioned his ranching and farming interests centered at the La Merced, situated at the heart of the Whittier Narrows and acquired by Workman through foreclosure in 1850 and then given to the Temples and Juan Matias Sánchez, Workman’s majordomo, or foreman, at La Puente. F.P.F. was known for the diversity of his agriculture, including experiments with tobacco and cotton, as well as raising cattle, horses and sheep, often in partnership with Workman.

He also had political interests in Los Angeles, serving as city treasurer in 1850-1852 and, likely because of his relocation to La Merced in spring of the latter year, was elected to represent that area in the first edition of the county Board of Supervisors when it was established in 1852. In 1863, during the Civil War, when pro-Confederate Democrats ruled the regional political roost, Temple tried to return to office as a supervisor under a “Union” party designation, but was defeated. Another attempt was made eight years later and was also unsuccessful.

By that time, 1871, a great deal had changed in the prior decade. Cattle ranching was devastated by the deadly duo of floods and drought that decimated the region from the end of 1861 through 1864. First, a “Noah’s Flood” during a 50-inch marathon of storms inundated the area and was followed by two successive years of bone-dry conditions, with estimates of a mere 4 inches per year each. Insect infestations, smallpox epidemics and an economic collapse were such that Jonathan Temple abandoned Los Angeles for San Francisco, where he died in spring 1866.

Jonathan’s widow, Rafaela Cota, sold off her husband’s significant real estate portfolio, often at bargain basement prices (Rancho Los Cerritos, in the modern Long Beach area, went for fifty cents an acre) and F.P.F. acquired, for $10,000, the downtown section that became known as the Temple Block, a key area of future development in the business core of the emerging city.

The post-Civil War era became Los Angeles’ first boom period and F.P.F. was front and center in the business community during the late 1860s through the mid-Seventies, with historian Remi Nadeau in his 1948 book, City-Makers, identifying Temple as one those figures. The sheer range of his activities was impressive, including real estate, mining, railroads, banking and much more, most of this undertaken over the relatively short period of about seven years as the region grew by leaps and bounds—at least, compared to its prior history.

An early project was with El Monte’s Fielding W. Gibson in acquiring a large tract at the northern edge of Rancho San Pedro, where a town was planned called Centerville (because it was roughly halfway between Los Angeles and the rudimentary port at San Pedro) or Gibsonville, while farm lots were also laid out. By 1870, the community became known for a major landowner in the Temple and Gibson Tract, George D. Compton.

F.P.F. was part of the creation of early water companies, one in 1858 that was taken down by the floods a few years later and another a decade later that supplied Los Angeles’ water for thirty years until the municipality took it over. He was a partner in establishing a woolen mill and a castor bean processing factory and helped locate a fruit drying plant in town and built sawmills above modern Claremont and out near Hemet in Riverside County. With mining, he had interests at Catalina Island, in the mountains northeast of Ventura and, most notably at Cerro Gordo in eastern California, while he was among early drillers of oil in the San Fernando field in what is today’s Santa Clarita.

Real estate projects of note, beyond Compton, included Centinela, an ambitious project with two ranches on the coast southwest of Los Angeles, where a town, farm lots, a railroad to the shore with a wharf where Marina del Rey is now all slated to be established. Temple was president of the endeavor during 1874-1875. He was also treasurer of the Lake Vineyard Land and Water Company, headed by Benjamin D. Wilson and his son-in-law, James de Barth Shorb, where the cities of San Marino and Alhambra are today.

Aside from heading the proposed Los Angeles and Pacific Railroad through the Centinela tract, which never got beyond the planning stages, Temple was treasurer of the Spring and Sixth Street Railway, the first streetcar system (system may be too grandiose a word for a single horse and single car traversing a part of the growing downtown) in the Angel City and which was led by lawyer, judge and real estate promoter Robert M. Widney.

The major transportation project led by Temple, however, was the Los Angeles and Independence Railroad, launched in spring 1874, and which was intended to transport silver ore from the burgeoning mines of Inyo County at Cerro Gordo and other boom towns, superseding the 40-mule teams led by Nadeau’s grandfather, the first Remi. The line was to run east through the San Gabriel Valley, up Cajon Pass and through the interior deserts to get to Independence, well more than 200 miles away.

The City of Angels inaugurated its railroad era with the Los Angeles and San Pedro, which ran to the port (and through Compton) before the Southern Pacific took it over as part of its emerging presence in the region as the giant company built a line to Arizona and came in from the north and then turned east through the San Gabriel Valley as well as building a branch to Anaheim from Florence (south Los Angeles.)

The L.A.&I. was also intended to provide some badly-needed competition to the SP, but it struggled to raise adequate funding until Nevada mining magnate and United States Senator John P. Jones took a controlling interest (relegating Temple from president to treasurer) and determined that a branch line would be built first to his new seaside town of Santa Monica. This was done late in 1875 with great hopes for the future of the line, including an aspiration to extend it from Independence all the way to Ogden, Utah and a connection with the transcontinental railroad.

Then, there was banking, which began with a partnership with the brilliant young Jewish merchant, Isaias W. Hellman. In fall 1868, following the first bank in Los Angeles, Hayward and Company, by several months, Hellman, Temple and Company (this last being silent partner William Workman) opened in a new commercial structure erected by former Governor Pío Pico on the east side of Main Street just north of the Temple Block.

The institution had every reason to be a success, with the substantial assets of Workman and Temple, who were at the top of the list of wealthiest Angelenos and the impeccable credentials and business acumen of Hellman, who went on to run Wells Fargo, the Bank of Nevada and the local Farmers’ and Merchants’ Bank while becoming one of the richest individuals in the western United States. Temple’s desire to have an active role, counter in philosophy, to that of Hellman, however, led to the latter dissolving the partnership early in 1871 and teaming with another ex-Governor, John Downey, to form Farmers’ and Merchants’.

Undaunted, Temple and Workman soon opened their own private bank, housed in the final addition to the Temple Block, in November 1871, in competition with Hellman and Downey. On the surface, Temple and Workman appeared quite successful, issuing a healthy amount of loans from what little we know directly of its operations as well as investing liberally in business endeavors, like those mentioned above and others. One customer, for example, was the company that launched the new towns of Artesia and Pomona.

Generally, F.P.F. Temple’s reputation among his contemporaries in the Angel City was, to use terms from the period, sterling and unblemished. He was widely known for his generosity, paying teachers’ salaries at local schools, helping individuals and families in need, contributing to organized charitable causes and lauded for his “public spirit” in his building and business projects. When he ran for county treasurer in 1873 and 1875, the encomiums were, naturally, raised to paeans of praise befitting an election campaign, but he was popular and esteemed.

One of the more interesting reflections of this was an incident that took place in fall 1874, involving the arrival in Los Angeles of a family from Oregon and their search for financial assistance. The Los Angeles Herald of 4 October quoted from the Wilmington Enterprise concerning a “New Style of Banking” which was “frequently indulged in by Mr. Temple” and leading the latter to remark:

A new style of banking has been inaugurated in Los Angeles. A poor immigrant from Oregon halted in front of Temple & Workman’s bank, in that city the other day and boldly solicited the loan of $150. Mr. Temple asked him for his “collateral,” when he pointed to and [sic] old dilapidated team, a wife and six children. This was considered good, and the money was loaned. That style of banking may not always add to the coffers here below, but if Mr. T. wishes to lay up his treasures above, out of the reach of moths and thieves, he is on the right track.

Taking this cue concerning the potential heavenly rewards awaiting Temple on his merits, including the loan to the poor immigrant from the north, the Los Angeles Star of the 13th offered a lengthy piece of verse from one “Hank Waggoner,” perhaps the nom-de-plume of that paper’s proprietor, Benjamin C. Truman, who wrote several books, including the 1874 work, Semi-Tropical California.

Obviously $150 was hardly a sum to, borrowing a time-worn phrase, “break the bank,” but it obviously struck observers in the Angel City as highly unusual for a banker like Temple to hand out a loan with no obvious or clear understanding as to how the money would be repaid. On the other hand, Temple’s well-known proclivity for charitable works led to the poem, the quality of which may be debated, though its reflection on the capitalist is obvious.

The Star‘s parenthetical introduction reported that “some time since a poor wayfaring man, with a large family, came to this city, utterly, and apparently, hopelessly impecunious.” On asking someone for help, the stranger “was jokingly referred to Mr. F.P.F. Temple of ‘The Bank.” As noted above, an interview was conducted and the loan made so that the immigrant could “commence the battle of life anew” while the paper added that “this graceful act of pure charity is handsomely and worthily commemorated” in the poem.

Penned in a voice purporting to be of a rustic, uneducated “feller,” the piece titled “God’s Temples,” began with a verse that told the reader that the poem was “’bout a man with a soft heart into him / That’s a big as a cart-wheel—by jings.” It continued that, with the narrator knowing the year, but not the month or date, “A old fel’ kem from up in the kentry, / Way up cross the Oregon line, / And was busted as flat as a founder, / Tellin’ facts now—he had’nt [sic] a dime.”

Once “the sorry old rig” drawn by a “old pair of hosses” and filled with three, “mebbe four” children, a wife and a pig, “had waded thro dust, and thro cactus,” entered the “town with an angelic name,” the piece recorded that “they paused in front of a buildin, / And a bank it was unto the same.” It was then that the narrator, bringing barley and eggs to sell in Los Angeles, happened to hear the immigrant relate his story, including how “he hadn’t no truck for to mortgage, / And not nary a cent could he show.”

Following this appeared Temple, who possessed “a white heart that’s as big as the biggest of stars” and who was “a great soul, one of God’s noblest Temples.” The bank president instructed an employee named “Joe,” though there was no one by that name at Temple and Workman, to bring some cigars and then stated “And you’r busted, you are my good fellow, / Well—do I look like an Amador [County] mine?”

The final three verses deserve to be quoted in full as they recount, how fictionally is not known, the gist of Temple’s act of charity:

Then he turned, with that good face of his’n,

To a feller whats countin a pile

Of gold notes, bout as high as a saw-horse,

And says he: “Jest hold there a while,

Draw a check for one hundred and fifty,

And charge to my private account,

Then pass the coin here to this weary

Good heart—I can spare that amount.”

Then I saw great big tears slowly startin,

Through the dust on that travel-stained face

And I saw up in Heaven the Angels

Fixin up for Temple a place,

Close to God where neer none but the brightest

And best of Samaritans stand

The rich whose good hearts ever tell them,

“To the poor always lend a strong hand.”

All praise to the noblest of Temples,

Whose towering example uprears

To all hearts that are open to teaching,

And should for the next thousand years.

T’was an act which a stranger here honors,

Best he can, in the poorest of rhyme,

For I don’t know that Temple, nor he me,

But I desperately hope to some time.

In my 2008 biography of the Workman and Temple family, I suggested that the poem was both a commendation of Temple’s charity and “a thinly veiled lampoon of his banking sense,” though, looking at the verses now, that view may have been offered because the sentiment of Temple’s “towering example” and the reference to a millenia for his charity to be a point of instruction seemed hyperbolic to have been totally laudatory.

In any case, under a year later, the Temple and Workman bank was in dire straits following an economic panic that led it to suspend business in the absence of enough cash reserves to meet the demands of desperate depositors seeking to withdraw funds and close accounts. A loan from Elias J. “Lucky” Baldwin, “on rather hard terms,” as Temple expressed it to Workman, did not restore community confidence and the institution failed in January 1876.

Temple’s business standing in the city in which he’d lived for 35 years was significantly reduced by revelations of the bank’s poor management, but his personal qualities were largely remembered as stellar for years afterward, though he died after a series of strokes just four years later. While he has been a “forgotten city-maker,” he deserves remembrance for the remarkable range of activities in which he was engaged as well as the personality and character that led him to a respected and popular figure in the Angel City.