by Paul R. Spitzzeri
This afternoon, I had the privilege of speaking at the 99th annual Chino Pioneer Picnic, this being the third consecutive year giving a presentation at the event and following last year’s talk of Antonio María Lugo, grantee of the Rancho Santa Ana del Chino, with this one on his son-in-law and successor to the ranch, Isaac Williams (1799-1856.)
Williams was from Exeter, between Scranton and Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and migrated, as so many did to the “Old Northwest” when about 11 years old to Johnstown, northeast of Columbus, Ohio and remained there until 1826. He then ventured down other familiar western routes along the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to St. Louis and then west to Franklin, Missouri, which was the end of the United States.
In spring 1825, William Workman departed Franklin on the Old Santa Fe Trail for New Mexico and was recently settled in Taos, though his brother David remained operating his saddlery and harness business with a young Kit Carson as an apprentice. The following year, Williams followed the same path to Santa Fe and may well have done so with Carson, as Workman had done, was issued a fur trapping license on the last day of August 1826.
Williams ended up in Taos, where Workman settled and owned a store, and was baptized as a Roman Catholic in June 1831, with the baptismal name of Julián (the same moniker adopted by Workman three years earlier upon his receiving the sacrament), allowing him to become a Mexican citizen. That fall he joined a trapping party led by Ewing Young and ended up in Los Angeles in April 1832. He built an adobe house on the east side of Main Street and operated a store with Jacob Leese (later of San Francisco) for a couple of years.
In 1835, he constructed another adobe building, also single story, as a store, but this later became the famous Bella Union Hotel, later operated by future son-in-law John Rains and where another son-in-law, Robert Carlisle, was killed in an (in)famous gunfight with the King brothers in 1865.
When Williams was enumerated in the 1836 district census, he was listed as a merchant and, later that year, he was one of the members of California’s first vigilance committee which met at Jonathan Temple’s house and carried out the execution of a woman and her lover after they ambushed and murdered her husband. Another controversial act of Williams during this period was his involvement in the removal of indigenous people from San Nicolás Island.
Also in 1836, Williams married María de Jesús Lugo, daughter of the prominent ranchero Antonio María Lugo, owner of the Rancho San Antonio. Five years later, Lugo received a land grant to the Rancho Santa Ana del Chino of more than 22,000 acres and installed Williams to operate it, later turning the property to him. Williams soon obtained a 13,000-acre addition and ran a princely domain there for about fifteen years.
In September 1846, Williams and other Americans and Europeans gathered at his adobe house on the ranch, where the Boys Republic facility for trouble youth is in today’s Chino Hills, during the difficult period following the American invasion of Mexican California and seizure of Los Angeles.
When the Californios revolted and reasserted control of the pueblo, the presence of the Anglos at Chino raised an alarm and a force led by two of Williams’ Lugo brother-in-laws led to the Battle of Chino, which ended in the surrender of the Anglos, who were then taken to what became Boyle Heights in Los Angeles and held there until William Workman and Ygnacio Palomares of what is now Pomona obtained their freedom.
During the Gold Rush, Don Julián Williams was widely known for his hospitality and assistance rendered to miners and other migrants flocking to California along the southern route (the 71 Freeway is basically that road now) on their way to Los Angeles and/or the gold fields. Travelers like Thomas J. Farnham and future Los Angeles District Court Judge Benjamin I. Hayes wrote of their layover at Chino and Williams kept a ledger of such stays that is now in the Huntington Library collection.
In 1851, Williams nearly sold the Chino ranch to Mormons looking to established an outpost for the religion’s Zion, but the deal fell through and the Rancho San Bernardino was acquired from the Lugo and the town of San Bernardino established. Williams, however, prospered during the Gold Rush, just as Workman and other ranchers, by selling cattle for fresh beef in the northern mining towns.
The rush, however, was over by the time Williams died in September 1856 at age 57 and was interred the Old Calvary Cemetery in Los Angeles (his remains were later moved to Rose Hills Mortuary Park in Whittier). For a few years prior to his death, Williams was assisted at Chino by a nephew, Wallace Woodworth (1832-1882), of whom the Homestead has, in its collection, a CDV (carte de visite) photograph that is the featured artifact for this post.
Woodworth was born, the same year his uncle came to Los Angeles, in Johnstown, Ohio to John Dennison Woodworth and Samantha Williams, a younger sister of Isaac, and the family moved to Van Buren County, Iowa. He joined his father in a trip to Gold Rush California in 1850 and the duo remained for about a year before returning to Iowa.
Woodworth then, in 1852, made another overland journey, this time to Oregon, but shortly afterward headed to Chino to work for his uncle as a majordomo, or overseer, and received a share of profits from cattle sales. When Williams died, Woodworth used some of his funds to purchase a cabinet-making business.
He then formed a partnership with another Licking County, Ohio native, William H. Perry (1832-1906), with the enterprise involved in milling wood, making furniture, constructing boxes, doing upholstery, as well painting, glazing, hanging wallpaper, and providing undertaking services with coffin manufacturing, grave enclosures and provision of a hearse. The business operated on the ground floor of the building of Lodge 42 of the Free and Associated Masons, of which Workman, F.P.F. Temple, Williams and others were members.
In 1857, Woodworth’s family came out and settled near San Gabriel and farmed, later selling the property to Luther Titus for what became the latter’s “Dew Drop” estate. The elder Woodworth was a postmaster and held other positions in local government and Wallace, too, became very prominent in the local political realm and was a leader in the dominant Democratic Party.
In September 1860, he was elected to a vacancy on the Los Angeles Common (City) Council and became it president. The photo from the Museum’s holdings has an inscription on the reverse, reading “The mayor of Los Angeles / 1860,” but what was confusing on seeing this was that the two official mayors that year were Damien Marchessault, who was elected in spring 1859 and served a year, and Henry Mellus, who won the seat in May 1860, but died the day after Christmas.
The image on the CDV was clearly not either Marchessault or Mellus, but then it was learned that, after the latter’s death, Woodworth, as council president, became the town’s interim chief executive until a special election led to Marchessault‘s return to the mayoral seat. Woodworth’s term was, therefore, very brief, lasting under two weeks until 7 January 1861.
He continued, however, to be very active in Angel City politics, including his membership in a Union Party that involved Democrats not supporting Southern secession during the Civil War, another term on the council in 1864-1865 and three terms on the County Board of Supervisors between 1868-1872. He was chair of the county Democratic Party committee for several years and remained involved with it until the end of his life.
Upon leaving the board, Woodworth was credited with bringing financial discipline to the county during that latter tenure with respect to retiring or reducing debt and improving the creditworthiness of the county, and also was appointed to the Board of Education in 1862 when a vacancy was established on that body.
On a personal level, there were a couple of notable ties to the Workman and Temple family as well as to the Lugos through his late uncle’s connections. With the latter, Woodworth married, in April 1857, María Antonia Pérez, whose mother was Mercedes Lugo, sister-in-law of Isaac Williams. The couple had six children, including two daughters and four sons.
One of his sisters, Mary Alice, married Thomas H. Workman, nephew of William Workman and who was the chief clerk for Phineas Banning, the so-called Port Admiral at Wilmington, who established most of what became the Port of Los Angeles and much else in that area. Thomas, however, was killed in the April 1863 explosion of Banning’s light steamship, the Ada Hancock, and his widow married Henry D. Barrows, though she soon died in childbirth.
Another sister, Amanda, married Jonathan Friend in Iowa in 1852 and the couple, who had three daughters, migrated to California three years later, settling in Butte County in the northern part of the state when John Friend was involved in mining. After he died in August 1861, Amanda, likely after coming to Los Angeles to join her siblings, married James Gilday, who was an employee of Perry and Woodworth.
One of Amanda’s three children with Friend was Nettie, born in Iowa in 1854 and who was a infant when the family moved to California. When she was a child in Los Angeles she was sometimes known as Nettie Gilday and, in the early 1870s, she began dating Thomas W. Temple, a widower who was the son of F.P.F. Temple and Antonia Margarita Workman and a cashier at the Temple and Workman bank.
The couple were apparently very popular among Los Angeles society during its first boom period, with Thomas known as “Lord Chesterfield” for his refined manners. In the aftermath of the failure of the bank and the tens of thousands of dollars which Thomas owed the bank, the couple, married not long after its closure in spring 1876, settled on some Temple family land in the Whittier Narrows community of Misión Vieja or Old Mission.
In the 1880s, the couple, who had and then lost a son, resided in Hermosillo, Sonora, México and Tucson, Arizona before returning to Los Angeles, where Thomas engaged in real estate with Reginaldo F. del Valle and then was proprietor of the Spanish-language newspaper, La Crónica. In a terrible three week period during a flu epidemic, including the deaths of his mother and grandmother, Nicolasa Workman, Thomas died.
Nettie lived with sisters and then on her own, often relying on the financial assistance of Temple family members, including Walter after he made a fortune from oil. A post here covers some of the correspondence she had with her late husband’s family and, after her death in 1928, Walter had her remains interred in the mausoleum he built in El Campo Santo Cemetery at the Homestead.
By the time Los Angeles embarked on its first boom during the late 1860s and first half of the subsequent decade, Perry, Woodworth and Company, which included Stephen H. Mott as a junior partner, specialized in lumber, because growth in the city and county meant a burgeoning business for the firm.
Perry, Woodworth and Mott were also key figures in the establishment of the Los Angeles Gas Company and the Los Angeles and San Pedro Railroad at the end of the Sixties. On his own, in 1869, Woodworth sought a sewer construction contract with the city and a streetcar franchise, the latter coming a full half-decade before F.P.F. Temple and Robert M. Widney, and others, built the Spring and Sixth Street Railway, the first streetcar line in town.
In September 1871, Woodworth was part of a public meeting to discuss the possibilities of building a rail line to the Owens Valley where silver mining was in a boom period. This effort stalled, but, in 1874, Temple became president of the Los Angeles and Independence Railroad for that purpose and Woodworth joined Temple on a committee to solicit stock subscriptions to the project, which was only partially realized.
Despite the collapse of the regional economy in 1875-1876, including the failure of the Temple and Workman bank, Perry, Woodworth and Company continued operations. When state law required boards of public works in spring 1876, Woodworth, who, by lots, drew a three-year term, was one of three persons chosen for the first Los Angeles version and he was lauded for the fact that “his integrity as a public officer and business man is without spot or blemish.”
A smallpox epidemic in the Angel City in 1877 led to Woodworth being summoned to a meeting to explained what happened during a previous outbreak when he was a county supervisor. After explaining the measures that were taken in the late 1860s situation, he was asked to be on a five-person committee to work with Dr. Joseph P. Widney on a plan to combat the virulent and highly contagious disease.
In 1878, he was on a committee to plan the annual fair for the Southern District Agricultural Association, established at the beginning of the decade by such figures as F.P.F. Temple and which held the event at Agricultural Park, now Exposition Park across from the University of Southern California. The Association and fair are precursors of sorts for what, in the early 1920s, became the Los Angeles County Fair, this year’s edition of which ends a week from tomorrow.
Perry and Woodworth, in 1881, successfully petitioned the Board of Supervisors for a wharf-building project at the Port of Los Angeles and were in the midst of working on this when Woodworth, who visited his home state in summer 1880 while serving as a delegate to the Democratic Party national convention at Cincinnati, was stricken by liver disease and which led to his death by “apoplexy [stroke] of the heart” in September 1882.
Woodworth’s death occurred at his impressive house (Perry’s manse, Mount Pleasant House, in Boyle Heights, is now at the Heritage Square Museum—why wouldn’t successful lumber company owners have richly-appointed residences?) on San Pedro Street between 1st and 2nd streets—he resided very near his cousin Francisca Williams. He was interred at Evergreen Cemetery in Boyle Heights, where an imposing cenotaph marks his final resting place along with other members of his family.
The Homestead is fortunate to have, in its collection, two photographs of early mayors, that of Marchessault and, brief as his tenure was, Woodworth, though the latter’s nearly three decades in Los Angeles showed him to be one of its most active civic residents, even if he did so quietly and without as much recognition as others of the time.