by Paul R. Spitzzeri
Seven years ago, the Museum was fortunate, through the help of former La Puente resident Tim Wictor, to acquire 22 snapshot photographs of the Workman Homestead dating from 1912 when the 75-acre ranch was owned by Thurston H. Pratt and Eugene Bassett (no relation to Oscar T. Bassett, whose nearby community was the former ranch of Joseph M. Workman, son of William Workman and Nicolasa Urioste, founders of the Homestead). At the time of the acquisition, we highlighted some of the photos, but now is a good time to share another set of images showing portions of the ranch from well over a century ago.
First, let’s share a little about the owners. Eugene Bassett (1855-1944) was born in Indiana to a marble cutter and housewife, but spent most of his early years in Illinois, including Peoria, Lincoln (northeast of Springfield) and Bloomington. In the latter city, he became a printer, but it appears that the poor health of his first wife Mary led the family to migrate to Los Angeles, becoming one of the many who came as “health-seekers” during the late Nineteenth Century.
Their arrival occurred during 1887 when greater Los Angeles was in the full ferment of a major land boom and, with the massive growth in population during that period, when William H. Workman, nephew of Homestead founders William Workman and Nicolasa Urioste, was mayor of the Angel City, Bassett had no trouble finding work with the rapidly growing Los Angeles Times. Within a short time of settling here, however, Bassett lost his wife Mary, leaving him with a young daughter, Iva.
Notably, he became an officer of the Printers Protective Fraternity, which, though it styled itself as a union, was actually an antagonist of the powerful typographers’ union, which was one of the few labor organizations to gain a foothold in the “open shop” business world of Los Angeles. Bassett long held anti-union sentiments and this was supported by a young woman who worked with him, Mary Vivian, whom he married in 1896. Within a decade, however, she died, having been involved in some magazine editorial work in the Angel City.
In 1894, 18-year-old Iva Bassett married Thurston H. Pratt (1871-1954) in Kansas. Pratt was a native of Indiana but raised southwest of Topeka in the farming town of Dover. At the time of the wedding, he was employed as a bookkeeper in Joplin, Missouri, near the borders with Arkansas, Kansas and Oklahoma. The couple, however, soon moved to Temple, Texas (a bit of coincidence given later events), northeast of Austin, where their daughter Esther was born, though, by the end of century they were back in Kansas where Pratt farmed with his father and brother and where a son, Murry, was born.
The Pratts then moved to Los Angeles by 1905 to join her father and where they had their third child, Alfred. Pratt and Bassett established a partnership in real estate, including the construction of an apartment house in Pasadena, very close to where the 110 and 210 freeways meet where the Parsons company complex stands now.
The two men acquired the Workman Homestead in December 1907 by exchanging it with Lafayette F. Lewis of Anaheim for two lots in the Mosher Tract, situated in Pasadena, perhaps that being the apartment building. This was shortly after Lewis was successful sued by Walter P. Temple, then living at his family’s homestead in the Whittier Narrows, for desecrating El Campo Santo Cemetery and the deal with Pratt and Bassett enabled Lewis to avoid the court’s mandate to repair the damage he’d done.
In any case, Bassett and the Pratts moved to the ranch, as noted in a voter registration sheet for the Rowland Precinct in 1908, and settled in the Workman House. While Bassett briefly moved to Douglas, a town in Arizona south of Tucson and along the Mexican border where he engaged in printing work, before returning and living in Pasadena, the Pratts looked to have stayed at the Homestead for about five years.
There are some references to be found in local newspapers, principally the Covina Argus, from as early as 1909. The Argus of 12 June that year reported that
The historic Temple homestead, which is the home of Mr. and Mrs. P.H. [sic] Pratt, was the scene of a delightful old fashioned barn dance last Saturday evening, when Mr. and Mrs. Pratt entertained about thirty-five of their friends and neighbors.
The article noted that the Pratts were leaving soon for Pueblo, Colorado to spend the summer, suggesting that an employee remained to oversee operations or that there was a lease of the ranch’s farmland.
By late August, the family was back at the Homestead as the Argus of the 28th noted that there was a 17th birthday party for Esther and which included the fact that “about seventy-five guests spent the evening dancing on the moon-lit verandas,” these being the large porches on the north and south side of the Workman House “and court yard [to the south of the house] of this beautiful old fashioned Spanish home.” It was concluded that “at a late hour an elaborate collation [supper] was served.”
The Pratts, who were involved in the founding of the First Methodist Church at the nearby town of Puente (the church is now at the northeast corner of Glendora and Hill streets), hosted, for the second straight year, a Union Sunday School picnic “on the banks of San Jose Creek, near the home,” this being the southern boundary of the ranch. At the end of August, another Sunday School soiree was held at the Pratt’s “lovely home” with forty-five guests present.
The 8 July 1911 edition of the Covina paper observed that
The feature of Independence Day at this place [Puente] was the picnic and cafeteria dinner held at Pratt’s grove by the ladies of the aid society of the Methodist Church. About two hundred people, including many out of town friends attended. The sum of $85 was taken in for the benefit of the church.
The Argus of 12 August noted that another birthday party for Esther was held at the Pratt’s “beautiful home” with fifty young people celebrating, while a week later a whist card party for thirty took place at the Workman House. Soon after, however, the family moved to Los Angeles as was noted in a December article in the paper that briefly stated that the Pratts came to the Homestead from the Angel City to celebrate Christmas.
There were also a few references to the use of the Homestead for farming during these years. The 25 March 1911 issue of the Argus featured an advertisement from Pratt and Bassett for the sale of oat hay at $15 a ton, while the following February the same crop was being offered at $25 a ton, suggesting a greatly improved market for farmers. The 6 January 1912 edition of the paper briefly observed that the two men sold their olive crop to J.C. Grogan Company.
But, with Bassett in Pasadena and the Pratts in Los Angeles, it was decided to make a major change in spring 1913 with the South Pasadena Record of 13 April reporting,
A company has purchased the Pratt & Bassett ranch near Puente and east of El Monte and have concluded arrangements for establishing a pork packing plant on the property. They will make a specialty of old-fashioned country sausage and fine pork products . . .
An auxiliary equipment will also be installed for a canning factory, which will employ all kinds of help. The company owns 75 acres of land. The ranch buildings are being remodeled and will be ready about May 1.
The Puente Rancho Packing Company, as noted here previously, operated for a short time and, whatever arrangements for sale were made, there was obviously a provision to return ownership to Pratt and Bassett under certain conditions, as they did continue in that capacity for several more years.
The Homestead was under a lease to a Japanese farmer known only as “K. Yatsuda” in late 1917 when Walter P. Temple, flush with cash with the astounding discovery of oil on his Whittier Narrows land leading to the bringing in of the first well that summer, purchased it for $40,000 from Pratt and Bassett with the Los Angeles Times of 8 December reporting,
The old Temple homestead near Puente will again become the property of the original owners [well, a grandson!] by the terms of a deal now in progress between the present owners and Walter Temple, scion of the old Temple family. [After providing some early history, the article continued] About ten years ago Pratt and Bassett of this city came into possession of the ranch. Because of the old associations, particularly those connected with the relatives buried there, the family have always been anxious to buy it back. The good fortune of finding oil on the Montebello holdings of Walter Temple have enabled him to achieve the family ambition and the old home will be his again as soon as the papers can pass.
In early January, Pratt and Bassett advertised in the Times for the sale of a railroad car’s worth of walnut wood, as well as a ton of galvanized barbed wire, as they prepared to divest themselves of the ranch. The Pratts resided in a Craftsman-style dwelling just southwest of Exposition Park in Los Angeles and, in 1920, Thurston worked as a real estate broker, though he had no listed occupation in the 1930 and 1940 censuses.
Bassett, remaining at his Walnut Avenue house, west of downtown Pasadena, was active in the community, largely as something of a gadfly, criticizing city government and trying, unsuccessfully, to secure a seat as a commissioner (council member.) He was also a frequent writer of letters to the editor to his old employer, the Times, as well as the Pasadena Post, with subjects ranging from unionism, patriotism, taxation, the alleviation of poverty to whether flies caused serious illness!
He wrote a couple of notable letters, including one published in the 27 November 1902 edition of the Times on the plight of the indigenous people of Warner’s Springs in northwestern San Diego County. He wrote that “the most colossal outrage of modern times is the proposed removal of the Warner ranch Indians from the hopes they have occupied” and posited that there weren’t “a half dozen people in Southern California who would not sign a petition to the government, asking for the condemnation of the land” to keep the native people there.
Nearly a quarter century later (and after leasing the Homestead to Yatsuda, as noted above), Bassett submitted a letter to the paper that, while he used the term “Jap” which was generally a pejorative for Japanese residents of the region, is remarkable on multiple levels:
This prejudice against the Japanese is born of ignorance, sponsored by labor unions. Do you ever see a Jap on the street corner with a few penny papers under his arms, yelling his head off in Greek or Italian? No, for he is at work. Moreover, you see no Jap beggars, burglars or highwaymen. They are a polite, clean, orderly, industrious, law-abiding lot of people, and if we had a few more Japanese people in place of some from other nations that I know of we would be much better off as a nation.
The 8 June 1929 edition of the Post featured Bassett’s poetic entry for a contest celebrating the American flag and it may be of interest to peruse his versifying:
Your crimson stripes, dyed with the blood
Of countless men, so freely given;
On battlefields of storm and flood,
Are fadeless as the stars of heaven.
Your bars of white in grandeur loom
Gleam out in sacred beams of light—
A guaranty of freedom’s boon
To all who battle for the right.
Your gleaming stars, divinely great,
Completes the combination rare;
And makes a flag to animate
The soul of mankind everywhere.
The photos include one of a woman carrying a suitcase and standing on a dirt road that appears to be at the front of the Workman House. Another shows a young woman astride a horse (named Daisy) near piles of lumber and other material, presumably near outbuildings. An image labeled “The school” may be of the local Hudson School which the Pratt boys would have attended when living at the ranch.
A rather humorous view is of two women sitting atop a massive barrel behind a simple picket fence amid a grove of trees, with ones to left likely orange trees as fruit is visible hanging from the branches, with one of them lifting a bottle to his mouth. A fine image shows “Tom and Charlie,” a man and a horse (which was which, however?) pulling a mower in a field, which may well be the oat hay mentioned above. In the distance, beyond open fields, is the San Gabriel Mountains range.
Lastly, there is a remarkable photo labeled “Taken at a Mexican village a short distance from the ranch.” It is very rare to find images of itinerant Latino farm laborers and their dwellings on local ranches and farms. Here two women and a girl, perhaps visitors to the Pratts, stand in front of a structure that has two rough wood walls, a flat wood roof supported by poles and a canvas covering.
One can only imagine the living conditions in such dwellings for the people who worked in grueling employment, picking fruit and nuts, baling hay and other field crops and other work and whose lives were almost completely left out of the historical record in a region that was one of the most productive in the world.
There are another half-dozen photos from this accession, so we’ll look to share those at a future date on this blog.
It’s truly a nostalgic journey through the early 1900s, retracing the Homestead’s fate across its varied ownerships until it found its way back into Walter Temple’s possession. Yet, a minor confusion captured my attention while reading the blog regarding the oversight of the Homestead during the Pratts’ absence in the summer of 1909. According to the blog, the responsibility for caring for the ranch may have fallen to Bassett; however, as also noted on the Covina Argus that Eugene Bassett would depart soon as well for the Pacific-Alaska-Yukon Exposition, held in Washington during those very summer months.
Another intriguing aspect lies in Bassett’s published remarks regarding the Japanese community in California, where he highly praised their diligence and self-discipline. I believe most people will agree that his observations, even after a century, remain relevant today, and these commendable qualities can indeed be extended to encompass a broader spectrum of Asian origins.
Hi Larry, thanks for the comment and the observation about Bassett—good point about his leaving for the exposition, so we’ll make a change. Yes, the comments about the Japanese were interesting, though one wonders from which nation the undesirables came. Bassett’s statement about the Cupeño Indians was also noteworthy.