Take It to the Bank with a Check to David W. Alexander from Temple and Workman, Bankers, 8 May 1872

by Paul R. Spitzzeri

The fateful decision in the early 1871 dissolution of Hellman, Temple and Company, Los Angeles’ second bank, with managing cashier Isaias W. Hellman, the brilliant Jewish merchant and financier, severing ties with F.P.F. Temple over differing philosophies on how the operate the institution, which opened in September 1868, led to two new banks.

Hellman joined forces with ex-Governor John G. Downey, who, with James A. Hayward, opened Hayward and Company, the town’s first bank in spring 1868, and established The Farmers’ and Merchants’ Bank, which welcomed its first customers in April 1871. Undaunted, Temple and his father-in-law, William Workman, who was the “and Company” in the previous institution, formed their establishment of Temple and Workman.

The private bank was situated on the ground floor of the newly finished three-story addition to the Temple Block, located at what was then the triple intersection of Main, Spring and Temple streets—the site is now part of the City Hall complex completed in 1928. When Temple and Workman opened its doors in November 1871, Downey toasted the proprietors and affirmed that there was more than enough room in town for two banks and one of the well-wishers was David W. Alexander (1810-1886).

Meanwhile, as Workman tended to his massive share, comprising some 18,000 acres, of the Rancho La Puente, investing money in the bank while leaving its operations to Temple, he was ably assisted by Frederick Lambourn (1837-1914), who began his employment with Workman in 1860 as teacher in the private school attached to the Workman House and which was primarily attended by Workman’s grandchildren through his daughter, Antonia Margarita, and Temple. Lambourn’s executive ability soon led Workman to make him the foreman of the sprawling La Puente ranch, including its substantial ranching and farming activities.

The featured object from the Homestead’s collection for this post is an 8 May 1872 check from “Temple and Workman, Bankers” issued to Alexander and signed by Lambourn on Workman’s behalf for $1,500. One online inflation calculation site determines that this amount is about $36,000 in today’s dollars and it would sure be interesting to know why Workman paid out this substantial sum to his long-time friend. In any case, Alexander’s endorsement is on the reverse, a PAID stamp dated the next day is on the front and a hole is punched next to that, a common practice to denote that the instrument was thereby cancelled.

Alexander and Workman had a history going back more than three decades and some of the former’s history has been the topic of a prior post here. The men met in Taos, New Mexico, where Workman settled in 1825 and was long a merchant, while Alexander, who migrated from his native Ireland to New York and then Missouri, wound up in Taos in 1837 for reasons still not known and also worked as a merchant. After the Rowland and Workman Expedition of late 1841 came to this region, with the Workmans settling on La Puente following John Rowland’s securing of the land grant from the governor of Mexican Alta California, Rowland returned to New Mexico to retrieve his family.

On that second trip, in fall 1842, Alexander was among the travelers and, after a brief period at the Rancho El Rincon near today’s Corona in Riverside County, he settled next to the rudimentary port at San Pedro. There, he and Jonathan Temple operated, from 1844-1849, a forwarding and commission business dealing with goods coming and going through the harbor. Alexander’s next endeavor was a Los Angeles store operated with Francis Mellus, whose widow, Adelaida Johnson, he later married. In 1851-52, he and Workman traveled to their respective home countries and a photo of the friends was taken in New York City, purported by famed photographer Mathew Brady, during their excursion.

During the 1850s, Alexander purchased interests in three area ranchos—Cahuenga, Providencia and Tujunga, served as a member of the Common (City) Council and Board of Supervisors, and served as sheriff, though that tenure abruptly ended after a near riot in summer 1856 following the killing of a man by a deputy constable. For much of the next decade, Alexander was a rancher near Fort Tejon and, with F.P.F. Temple, acquired the Rancho San Emigdio, where cattle were pastured on the long march to the gold fields of Tuolumne County.

In 1865, Alexander was back in Los Angeles and settled in the town of Wilmington (formerly East San Pedro), where he became the partner of Phineas Banning in a forwarding and commission business not unlike the one he and Jonathan Temple operated two decades prior. When the Los Angeles and San Pedro Railroad project was launched by Banning, Downey, Benjamin D. Wilson and others a few years later, Alexander joined as a director of the region’s first railroad line, which connected the port to the growing city, then in the early stages of its first boom.

He was still a Wilmington resident in 1872 and served as the township’s assessor. Eleven days after the check was issued to him, Alexander joined F.P.F. Temple at a mass meeting held in the District Court room at the County Court House (built by Jonathan Temple in 1859 as a commercial building, but leased after a couple of years as the city hall and county hall of justice.) The purpose was to establish a plan for working with any major railroad companies that would build a line through the city, with the understanding that no community could thrive without such a connection.

Thanks to lobbying by Wilson and others, Congress, the prior year, mandated that the powerful Southern Pacific, which sought a charter to build a line south from the Bay Area to Fort Yuma, Arizona, with intentions of extending further east, had to go through the Angel City. While it was clear that Los Angeles had to negotiate terms with the Southern Pacific as part of this project, there were some locals who wanted to explore other options, notably a plan from the Texas and Pacific Railroad to build a transcontinental line that would include Los Angeles.

The meeting, which featured orations by prominent citizens, such as Downey, Volney E. Howard, Edward J.C. Kewen and Harvey K.S. O’Melveny, led to the establishment of a Committee of 30, comprised of men from the county’s townships, who would continue the work explored at the mass meeting. Among those were several Californios including Antonio Franco Coronel, Francisco Palomares, Andrés Pico, Francisco Machado and Tomás A. Sánchez. American and European representatives included Downey, O’Melveny, Henry Dalton, Louis Phillips, Harris Newmark, Leonard J. Rose, George Stoneman and F.P.F. Temple.

Later, a Committee of Nine was created to negotiate directly with Southern Pacific officials, with Temple among them, and the result was a election in early November during which voters were asked to choose between the Southern Pacific and a competing proposal from the Texas-Pacific. The former won out and the cost included yielding the Los Angeles and San Pedro, of which Alexander remained a director to that point, to the SP as well as a subsidy of 5% of the assessed value of county property, which amounted to some $600,000, to assist with the expenses of the main line from the north and its eastward route through La Puente, along with a branch from Florence (South Los Angeles) to Anaheim.

When the Los Angeles Democratic Central Committee convened its summer meeting in advance of the 1872 presidential and other elections, the Los Angeles News, which was a Republican paper, though the party did poorly in the region, observed, “it may be worth noting that those well-known Democrats, the genial Banning and Don David Alexander, were present as spectators, evidently interested in the proceedings.” Banning was long a Republican and attracted a great deal of Union patronage at Wilmington, where Camp Drum was established, during the Civil War, but Alexander seems to have long been a Democrat.

The paper criticized a decision to forego the usual election of delegates from the various townships in favor of a committee initiative that “favors a surrender of the Democracy to [Horace] Greeley,” the New York newspaper publisher being the eventual unsuccessful nominee of the party (his death in late November would have proved unique if he’d won the election), though also a nominee of the Liberal Republicans, against incumbent Republican President Ulysses S. Grant. The News then commented, “a[g]against the gentlemen personally we have nothing to say; they are citizens of standing and character,” this presumably was directed to the Committee, but it criticized the “usurpation of power that deserves unqualified rebuke.”

Whether his observation of the convention was an influence or not, Alexander, after nearly two decades, reengaged with local politics in 1873, toying first with running for the office of tax collector before deciding to make a second run at sheriff, challenging the incumbent William R. Rowland, the 27-year old son of John Rowland. The Star of 31 July, however, reported that Alexander “seems to be making no effort” to campaign, though whether this was because of Rowland’s popularity and like reelection was not stated. The results of the early September election found Rowland taking almost 80% of the votes, a margin of victor far greater than those of other races, such as F.P.F. Temple’s narrow defeat by incumbent County Treasurer Thomas E. Rowan, 52%-48% and William H. Workman’s third-place finish for State Assembly, with just 200 votes fewer than the top vote-getter.

In 1874, Alexander, along with Temple, Downey, Rose, Wilson, Banning and others, formed the Southern California Cooperative Warehouse and Shipping Association, which looked to expand on the older forward and commission business model with a stockholding venture for the port at Wilmington and San Pedro. He served as treasurer of the enterprise, which, however, dissolved in late 1876 after the economic disaster hit that wreaked havoc on California and Los Angeles, including the failure of the Temple and Workman bank.

In 1874-1875, however, with that first boom in full flower, few, if any, Angelenos had any inkling of what was ahead. In the summer of 1875, Alexander decided to make another run at the Sheriff’s office, especially as it was known that Rowland was not going to seek another term (though he did, successfully, in the early Eighties.) At the Democratic convention, which included Joseph M. Workman, William’s son and who lived and worked with Alexander in the late Fifties and into the Sixties in the Tejon area, as a delegate from “[El] Monte,” Alexander secured the nomination and ran against area newcomer Edward H. Boyd.

Notably, the Los Angeles Herald of 9 June 1875, heralding Alexander’s announcement of running for sheriff called him “one of our oldest and best citizens” and praised the candidate for having “done as much for the development and prosperity of Southern California as any one man in it,” concluding “if he is nominated he will be elected, and if he is elected, he will make an excellent Sheriff.” The rival Los Angeles Express, which supported the Republicans, however, commented in its 6 August edition on Alexander in language that resonates in 2024:

He is a very worthy old gentleman and has been Sheriff before. He is about sixty years old [actually, Alexander was 64 that year], and will suffer from the fact that many of our citizens think that the office needs a younger man, like Boyd. He is popular with the native California element. He was at one time wealthy [including, it was mentioned, his partnership with Banning and his years at San Emigdio] . . . As we have before said, we think this excellent and amiable old gentleman is doomed to be defeated by Boyd.

The Herald of a week later took umbrage at its competitor’s critique, growling that the Express “cannot rake up an argument against the Democratic nominee . . . and so it objects to his age.” Targeting prominent Republicans like former Union Army General Edward Bouton and another local, who, the paper remarked, “must supply their organ with arguments a little more effective” and insisted that “Mr. Alexander’s age will not prevent the people” from electing him as he “is in the prime of life and fully competent to effectually discharge all the duties of Sheriff or of any other office to which the people may elect him.” The average life expectancy of the 1870s compared to today should be borne in mind, as well.

Alexander, however, won handily, besting Boyd by nearly 950 votes and taking 57% of the total (a third candidate, J.D. Byrd, collected 5% of the tally), while Temple managed to unseat Rowan and became the only Republican to win office in the 1875 campaign by capturing not quite 53% of the votes for County Treasurer. Alexander took office as the economic disaster was unfolding and served a single term (he did complete this one unlike his 1855-1856 one). He spent his last decade living quietly at Wilmington, where the 1880 census recorded his occupation as “Retired or ex-Sheriff,” until his death in 1886.

As for Lambourn, his work as teacher and foreman at La Puente meant that he was not a public figure until 1873, when he announced his candidacy for the State Assembly, but, when the Democratic convention voted on its choices, William H. Workman came in first and Lambourn fell just one vote shy of being the second candidate of voters. Co-owner of a store, with miller William Turner, at the Workman Mill built by his employer, Lambourn played an unidentified role in the lynching of Jesús Romo, who robbed the business and, in a struggle, wounded Turner and the miller’s wife, Rebecca, who miscarried as a result.

Whether that notorious incident, which was one of the last lynchings recorded in the region, garnered support for Lambourn or not, he reentered the lists for an Assembly seat in the same 1875 campaign in which Alexander and Temple were victorious. This time, the Democrats voted him as one of the party’s two candidates, along with former state Attorney General John R. McConnell, and the two secured election over attorney and future Los Angeles Mayor Henry T. Hazard and Alexander Bailey.

Interestingly, he was mentioned in an early 1876 article in the Express concerning efforts from Anaheim residents to divide Los Angeles County—a frequent endeavor that finally bore fruit when Orange County was established a baker’s dozen of years later. The paper’s edition of 10 January quoted an advocate for division, William R. Olden, agent of the Los Angeles and San Bernardino Land Company, which controlled the massive former holdings of the late Abel Stearns.

Olden claimed that Downey and William Workman, who had close ties with Anaheim residents including the Anaheim Landing port where Seal Beach is today, were among the supporters of county division, but the paper castigated Olden by noting that he held that:

Mr. Fred Lambourne [sic], one of our representatives in the legislature, had been in the employ of Mr. Workman for fourteen years, and that that gentleman (Workman) had stated that Mr. Lambourne was untrammeled on the question—which office seekers have been agitating for the last ten years—of county division. What inference can be drawn from this gratuitous insult thus offered to the integrity and intelligence of Mr. Fred Lambourne? Only this: That because “Mr. Lambourne has been in the employ of Mr. Workman for the last fourteen years,” that he [Workman] owns him body and soul, and that he will do as he is bidden by his master . . .

The article concluded that the views of Downey and Workman were misrepresented by those working sedulously for county division and added “we call Mr. Lambourne’s attention to the esiimate [sic] that the advocates of county division have placed upon his honesty and good sense.”

After serving his single term, during which his long-time employer’s bank failed followed by Workman’s tragic suicide, Lambourn returned to Los Angeles, where he and Turner embarked on a very successful and long career as wholesale merchants. Lambourn was a Whittier walnut rancher when he died in late 1914.

This check is interesting because this transaction involves two crucial figures associated with William Workman and F.P.F. Temple as well as with greater Los Angeles generally and we’ll certainly encounter Alexander and Lambourn again in future posts.