“A Veritable Paradise, Lavishly Favored by Nature”: Selling the Town of Temple, 1923-1924, Part One

by Paul R. Spitzzeri

The vagaries of the weather have manifested twice now during Temple City’s centennial celebration. A rare early fall storm dousing festivities at the city park at the end of last September, where the Homestead had a booth as well as offered short talks on the early history of the community. Then yesterday, a Temple City Day hosted by the Museum was largely showered with rain.

Despite the dour conditions, 55 visitors braved the weather to visit the Homestead, including self-guided tours of the Workman House, where an audio tour was offered, and La Casa Nueva, where Agnes Temple’s grandson, Mike Kalend, played guitar in the Music Room where she performed nearly a century ago, and heard presentations on family and Temple City history. Gary Temple, a descendant of John H. Temple, owner of the Homestead at the end of the 19th century, also welcomed guests to El Campo Santo Cemetery and shared some of his family history with them.

Continuing the commemoration of the centennial of Temple City, this post looks at promotional efforts to sell Walter P. Temple’s new town during its first couple of years, 1923 and 1924. As noted here previously, having accumulated significant wealth thanks to a stunning discovery of oil on his Montebello-area ranch, thanks to his nine-year-old son, Thomas, Temple embarked on a wide range of oil and real estate development work from the end of the Teens onward. This included commercial building projects in Alhambra, El Monte, Los Angeles and San Gabriel, much of which survives today.

The 11 May 1923 edition of the Pasadena Post announced that Temple and his associates, his attorney George H. Woodruff, his business manager Milton Kauffman, and his friend Sylvester Dupuy, purchased, for a half million dollars, 285 acres of land from the Burkhard Investment Company previously earmarked as part of an unrealized town called Sunny Slope Acres. It was expected that another $500,000 would be spent in developing a downtown core along with some residences and other elements of the nascent community as Temple built his town to honor his family and their near century of living in greater Los Angeles.

Hired as the exclusive sales agents for the project, managed by the newly formed Temple Townsite Company, were Byron R. Marsh (1875-1953) and Douglas D. Coughran (1888-1958), both of whom were experienced in the realty game. Marsh, a native of Kansas and raised in San Francisco, got his start in Los Angeles real estate about 1906, though after some difficulties involving the sale of a boarding house a few years later retreated to San Francisco for a brief period.

Marsh returned to the Angel City about 1911 and continued in real estate until, five years later, he was hired as the business manager of multi-millionaire Anita Baldwin, one of the two daughters of Elias J. “Lucky” Baldwin. “Lucky,” as has been oft-noted here, sought to expand his local real estate portfolio by loaning money in 1875 to the flailing Temple and Workman bank, which shortly afterward failed. Foreclosing on the loan, “Lucky” became the owner of tens of thousands of acres of land pledged as security and held much of it at his death in 1909.

In the settlement of the estate, one of the transactions was the sale of the 60 acres, formerly owned by F.P.F. Temple, to his son Walter Temple—this happened to be where the oil was found that restored the Temples to wealth. Anita and her sister Clara Stocker came into many millions, thanks in no small part to the exertions of executor Hiram A. Unruh. In 1916, Marsh was hired to be Anita Baldwin’s estate manager, a position he held for five years.

Among one of the more notable aspects of his work came in early 1917. A Los Angeles Times feature by Alma Whitaker concerned, as embodied in the headline, “FILTH, DISEASE AND POVERTY RAMPANT AT SAN GABRIEL,” the settlement work at the mission town among migrants driven from the violence and tumult of the Mexican Revolution (an enriched Walter Temple later provided land and funds for the San Gabriel Settlement House). The journalist wrote that “far out in picturesque San Gabriel gaunt and terror-stricken misery stalks in wretched hovels and human wretchedness thrives.”

She added descriptions of one-room dwellings housing up to ten persons, who were ill and underfed and this was “the epitome of human misery and degradation.” It was asserted that sick immigrants were caddies at the Midwick and San Gabriel country clubs, and cooked in the homes of the well-to-do, as well as rode on public transit, went to see movies and attended church services—the insinuation was the disease-ridden Mexicans were a public health threat, a claim made throughout the subsequent decade and this, inadvertent or not, labeled Latinos, especially as Whitaker claimed the conditions were worse than in the slums of London or New York City.

The writer observed that many families lived “on a monthly income that would not pay the gasoline bills of a Ford,” these cars actually being among the most fuel-efficient of the era, but did not, otherwise, discuss the socio-economic conditions into which Mexican migrants were thrust nor analyzed what could be done to address those vastly substandard incomes. Instead, Whitaker cataloged with great detail the terrible living environments of those she encountered, including a woman, said to be 104, who, it was claimed, “wants to die” as she “regrets that the Lord should let her go on living to take food from the babies” in her extended family.

Whitaker did offer some praise to a grandson, “a ‘dago’ if you will” who was “trying to do his duty with uncanny perseverance” in seeking labor, while “a white American in a like situation would curse his god and demand of the authorities the right to a decent living.” She added that “these people never beg; charity must seek them out.” An accompanying article, with the headline “Model Village for Mexicans,” noted that Los Angeles County Health Commissioner John L. Pomeroy established “plans for what is said to be the first model village for Mexicans solely . . . following the decision of Byron R. Marsh, business manager for Anita M. Baldwin, to lease forty acres of the Baldwin ranch at El Monte.”

After it was said that Pomeroy allowed that “the fault does like wholly with the Mexicans” for the environment in which they were living, as owners of the property in which they were then residing “have heretofore shown no disposition to better the houses,” it was reported that “after several conferences with Mr. Marsh,” Pomeroy arranged with him the lease, with a local El Monte contractor to build “sanitary cottages” along with streets, a plaza with a meeting house and other elements, as well as collect rent.

The baths and toilets, “of the simplest character,” were to be “hygienic and safe” and residents required to sign contracts to maintain standards, while also being “taught how to care for themselves.” The aim, said Pomeroy, was that more such communities would be created in Los Angeles County for migrant workers and their families so that “the Mexicans may live in cleanliness and decency where filth and death now reign.”

Marsh continued his work for Baldwin for another four years and then went back into the real estate business, as well as with mortgages. In July 1922, however, as reported in the Los Angeles Times in its edition of the 14th, Marsh was secretary of the United Realty and Mortgage Company, which was ordered by the state corporation commissioner to suspend operations due to the questionable nature of low-interest loans that were “carefully designed by their promoters to evade the State supervision” put in place to regulate the practices of lenders. I under a year, though, Marsh teamed up with Coughran, their paths almost certainly having crossed because of the former’s work for Anita Baldwin.

Born in Bakersfield, Coughran spent much of his youth in Long Beach, where his father Charles was a rancher who dabbled in real estate. A star athlete in baseball and football at Long Beach High School, where a teammate and fellow 1909 graduate was Clyde Doyle (who became a long-serving member of Congress and chair of the House Un-American Committee), Coughran went to the University of California, Berkeley and returned to Long Beach to became a real estate agent and broker.

After marrying at the end of 1915, Coughran relocated briefly to Los Angeles and then moved to “South Santa Anita,” a community with no official organization that was considered something of an adjunct of Arcadia. He opened a realty office there in 1918 while maintaining a main office in the Van Nuys Building in downtown Los Angeles, though increasingly his business concerned selling real estate in the Arcadia/Pasadena/San Gabriel area as the Roaring Twenties dawned. One of his earliest projects, as advertised by him in the Long Beach Telegram of 10 December 1917, was for “part of ‘Lucky’ Baldwin’s Famous Rancho just being subdivided along Huntington Drive near Monrovia, while he also was an agent for the nearby Chapman Acres.

When the Town of Temple project was announced, Marsh and Coughran were named exclusive agents, with a principal office in the Union Bank Building in downtown Los Angeles, and it appears their partnership was established specifically for the project, as nothing was found of their working together prior to May 1923. An early advertisement in the Times of 4 August emphasized the extension of the Pacific Electric Railway streetcar line from Alhambra as important in that “it taps the heart of the richest part of the San Gabriel Valley” and “that’s where the Town of Temple is building.” Also promoted was that $350,000 in property sales were handled in the prior three weeks by Marsh and Coughran and the other official agents: Thomas Acton of Alhambra and Pasadena, the Garvey Realty Company, and Thomas Berry, whose office was in the Temple Building at San Gabriel.

A week later, the Post ran an ad that depicted coins raining from money bags as it was declared “Put Your Money in the Town of Temple” which was “destined to be the metropolis of the San Gabriel Valley.” Boosted were the soil, deemed as “rich as the ‘Valley of the Nile;'” the climate, asserted to be “as near perfect as can be found in California;” and such improvements as installed electricity, gas and water. Moreover, forty houses were reported to be under contract and potential buyers could choose from typical residential lots (usually 50’ width or so), “country home sites,” and half-acre and acre tracts.

At the end of August, a Business Men’s Carnival was held in Alhambra and a Town of Temple booth was staffed with a free lot, valued at $1,260 and located near the main intersection of Main (Las Tunas Drive) and Sunset (Temple City Boulevard) streets, to be given away. The 2 September issue of the Times discussed Walter Temple’s extensive local holdings and it was stated that, regarding the Town of Temple, “a little city is springing up as if by magic, opening a big territory heretofore neglected and which will mean hundreds of new homes.” Also highlighted was the $300,000 invested in the streetcar line extension including a freight and passenger station where the City Hall now stands.

The Monrovia News of 8 September reported that “a birdseye view of the new town of Temple . . . disclosed sixty houses under construction” and “the sounds of hammers and the hum of saws” was reminder of when construction of local army camps, such as the balloon school at Arcadia, took place during the late World War. At the end of the month, there was a flurry of publicity, including an ad in the Los Angeles Express of the 27th that called the fledgling burg “California’s Newest and Most Charming Home Community,” mentioning the climate, soil and the “beautiful view of [the] Sierra Madre mountains,” now denoted as the San Gabriel range. A typical homesite was priced at $1,250 and “half-acre garden plots” at $1,950, these including electricity, gas, paved and curbed streets and water.

The Times of the 30th noted that Marsh and Coughran stated more than 300 lots had been sold to date and twenty houses begun within the last couple of weeks. The $8,000 PE depot was to be built as soon as the car line was finished and the agents concluded that “plans have drawn and the contract let for the first business building to be erected on the northwest corner of Main and Sunset streets.” This edifice long housed a pharmacy and is still with us as are the structures on the other three corners of the core intersection, with the southeast one containing the offices of the Temple Townsite Company.

The phrase “See It Build” began to be used with a 4 October ad in the Express, which added that the town was “In the Heart of the Beautiful San Gabriel Valley,” while work “is proceeding rapidly according to the plans of its founder, Walter P. Temple.” Readers would “be amazed at the progress already made” with streets, houses and the PE line under development in what was deemed “a veritable paradise, lavishly favored by Nature” through the climate, soil, mountain views and “a bountiful supply of pure mountain water.” Lastly, those viewing the ad were advised that “Rising Values Insure Big Profits,” a nod to speculators.

A little more than a week later, the paper’s next ad exhorted readers that “never was opportunity more pronounced than it is here” in the community “growing by leaps and bounds. A new wrinkle concerned those “garden plots” on which “you can raise your own garden, fruit and chickens,” while a new motto was “Home, health and wealth awaits you” at a development in which “no expense is being spared to make this one of the most attractive and up-to-date home sections in Southern California.”