by Paul R. Spitzzeri
Continuing this post concerning a lengthy lawsuit filed by Josephine M. Workman Akley, a retired actor who was a popular film star under the stage name of Princess Mona Darkfeather, against Charles N. Bassett, who owned hundreds of acres on the Rancho La Puente formerly owned by Akley’s father, Joseph M. Workman, son of Homestead founders Nicolasa Urioste and William Workman, we turn to the Bassett family background.
Oscar Thomas Bassett (1847-1898) was born in Middletown, which is actually on the western side near the New York border, of Vermont, the elder of two sons of Abner, a sailor, and Betsey Seward, but, after both died, he and his brother went to the Illinois town of Coral, northwest of Chicago, where their mother’s uncle, Ephraim Seward was a farmer.
Little is known about Bassett’s early life, though at 16 years of age, he enlisted with a volunteer regiment comprised of what was known as “Hundred Days Men.” This concept came from the idea in early 1864 to recruit of young men by the Union Army for enlistments of that length of time so that they could be guards, laborers and reserves for regular soldiers who were sent to the front lines in an effort to win the war in 100 days.
Bassett joined from Coral on 5 May 1864 and mustered in with the 141st Illinois Infantry on 16 June, with that regiment serving at Columbus, Kentucky, a town at the southwest corner of that state not far from the Illinois border. After serving the requisite time, Bassett was mustered out on 10 October from Chicago and, presumably, returned to Coral.
Nothing more could be located at Bassett’s younger years other than that he may have traveled from Missouri to Sioux City, Iowa in 1873, but, three years later, having relocated to Clinton, Indiana, north of Terre Haute and near the Indiana border, where he found work as an engineer designing the town’s first railroad bridge, he married Myrtle Nebeker. In October 1880, their only child, Charles Nebeker Bassett, was born in Clinton.
By then, Oscar was at Fort Worth, Texas, where, from at least 1878, he was in the lumber business with cousin Henry R. Seward. Myrtle suffered from tuberculosis, so it might have been that she remained in Indiana with her family for that reason, as well as the raising of Charles, but she died in September 1882 at just age 25 from the disease that was so prevalent at the time. Charles remained with her family throughout his childhood.
Oscar soon developed a partnership with Charles R. Morehead, who’d had business ties at Leavenworth, Kansas and in Missouri (perhaps he and Bassett met there) and the pair traveled to the border town of El Paso as part of their traveling through the Southwest to investigate mining opportunities and to purchase property for the Texas and Pacific Railway. The Texas State Historical Association quoted from Bassett’s diary entry of 15 February 1880 that there was “plenty of room here for a big city, which it will be in time after the railroads come.”
That took place within a couple of years and Bassett prospered as he opened a lumber business to supply much of the construction activity that came to the booming town. He, Morehead and others opened the State National Bank, which further enhanced their financial fortunes. Much of the lumber inventory involved wood from California’s redwood trees, so Bassett traveled to the Golden State during his years in El Paso, including passing through Los Angeles in March 1881.
The Angel City, after several years in an economic doldrums following the collapse of its first boom, occurring during the late 1860s and first half of the 1870s, was just starting to see a small recovery after Bassett’s first visit. In the cases of Los Angeles and El Paso significant railroad links meant their emergence from small towns into more substantial cities and, just as often been said about Los Angeles, El Paso’s rail ties meant, according to the Texas historical group, “transforming a sleepy, dusty adobe village . . . into a flourishing frontier community.”
After more than a decade amassing wealth in El Paso, Bassett made his first investment in the Los Angeles area, with the Los Angeles Times of 22 April 1892 reporting, “A.B. Judkins yesterday sold to O.T. Bassett, a wealthy horseman and business man of El Paso, Tex., [former Illinois grocer] John F. Humphrey’s 273-acre ranch at Gardena for $41,000 cash.” With plenty of water from artesian wells, Bassett was expected to “commence substantial improvements” to increase the value of the ranch and the paper lauded the fact that “this is one of the heaviest cash real estate transactions for some time past,” as the Boom of the Eighties went bust at the end of that decade.
The Los Angeles Express of 9 February 1893 reported that Bassett, though it said he was from Chicago, was staying at the Hollenbeck Hotel and “has a large force of men” at what it called the Burlingame ranch at Gardena “employed planting the ranch,” said to be 300 acres with fruit trees, as well as reservoirs, pipe and other irrigation material. The account added that the owner “will embellish it for private use” and concluded that “Mr. Bassett will hereafter spend his winters among us, and add to his possessions as his fancy dictates.”
The next dictation came along soon enough. Bassett was back in the Angel City early in 1895 and was said to have been happy with the progress of his Gardena ranch when an opportunity came up with the foreclosure by the German-American Savings Bank on a loan to Joseph and Josephine Workman for their 814-acre ranch within the former holdings of Joseph’s father William on the Rancho La Puente.
On 1 March, Joseph issued a grant deed to the property to Bassett in return for the latter’s redemption of the accumulated debt on the tract and, in return, received some property in El Paso as something like compensation. Bassett then instituted a court action against all of the Workman children to quiet title to the land, including Josephine, who was then 12 years old, but not to her parents as state law required. On 25 June, judgment was made by the court on the quiet title action and this seemed to settle the matter.
According to a fall 1908 lawsuit heard by the California Supreme Court, Bassett and three others worked out an arrangement to acquire the Joseph Workman Ranch for just shy of $45,000, with Bassett to take a 10/16 share, two others to have a 5/16 stake and a third man to have the remaining 1/16 interest. Whatever transpired with the suit, Bassett ended up purchasing, in mid-November, the bank’s financial stake in the property, as noted in the first part of this post, for $60,000 with the intention of subdividing and selling it in 20-acre lots.
Within a month, the first of these sales was recorded with the Times of 19 December listing the acquisition by Edmond Archibald of a 10-acre half of a lot for $1,500 in what was officially known as “O.T. Bassett’s Subdivision of the Workman Tract.” Several such transactions took place over the next two years until Bassett’s sudden death on 4 January 1898 at El Paso at the age of 50.
The El Paso Times of the following day observed that Bassett returned from Los Angeles a month or so prior and soon afterward contracted the flu, which then led to heart trouble and it was reported that he died in his sleep from heart failure. The paper added that with “the handsome fortune of $250,000” built over his 17 years in the city, Bassett was “the wealthiest man in El Paso” including property in Oklahoma City and his Los Angeles County property, while he also had a lumber business with brother-in-law Byrd A. Nebeker at Santa Monica. The Times further commented that,
He was a man of strong individuality and was very strict in all of his business transactions. He lived up to all of his contracts, paid every cent he obligated himself to pay and demanded that others should live up to their contracts with him. His friends [say] he was ever ready to help and those most intimate with him say he was ever kind and generous to the worthy, Mr. Bassett’s genial disposition made him popular with those who knew him . . . Many struggling young men were started in life by O.T. Bassett and many a poor man with a family received aid from him. Those who owed him found him ever lenient and willing to help them.
At the time of his death, Bassett left only his son as sole heir and the young man, who was 17 years old, was still residing with relations in Indiana, and graduated from Wabash College, a private men’s liberal arts institution which has operated in Crawfordsville, northwest of Indianapolis, since 1832.
Initially, the estate was managed by administrators until Charles attained his majority and assumed control of affairs. In 1908, he joined the State National Bank, which his father co-founded, and rose to be its president, serving in that position for over two decades until his death. As a prominent banker, Charles was a civic leader, as was Oscar, in El Paso and, in 1929-1930, built the Art Deco O.T. Bassett Tower, the tallest structure in the city and now a national historic landmark.
As for the Bassett community in this area, a school district was formed very soon after it was established and a wood-framed schoolhouse constructed in 1899 on a 2 1/2 acre tract at the corner of today’s Vineland and Temple avenues. In 1912, after several years of holding services at the school, churchgoers constructed a non-denominational “Bassett Mission” of 24′ x 38′ and including two Sunday School rooms and an auditorium on the Hutchcroft Ranch.
The most commonly recognized term for what was basically a community of groves, orchards and small farms was Bassett Station, where a small depot was constructed along the Southern Pacific railroad line running along the north side of Valley (sometimes known as Puente or Pomona) Boulevard.
In 1904, Service Brothers, a Los Angeles realty firm, took out ads for both the Bassett Ranch in Gardena and for San Gabriel Valley property of 700 acres with tracts of 10-100 acres available at $150 an acre with 25% down in cash for what was deemed “the finest walnut and alfalfa district in Los Angeles County,” though some of this might have been on Elias J. “Lucky” Baldwin’s portion of Rancho La Puente lost in the aftermath of the Temple and Workman bank failure and from which the Joseph Workman/Bassett tract was exempted.
Otherwise, aside from an occasional dramatic news report, such as a man accused of killing his wife and then unsuccessfully attempting to kill himself or the suicide of Antonio Bessolo, a brother-in-law of Charles P. Temple, Bassett was generally a quiet, unassuming farm community for two decades. Charles Bassett continued running the Santa Monica lumber business with his uncle and both men bought property in 1905 on the Palisades at Ocean Avenue and San Vicente Boulevard to build large seaside residences.
Bassett maintained his full-time residence in El Paso and his second house at Santa Monica, while retaining ownership of the ranch, which, by 1918, was down to about 285 acres or about a third of the original 814 acre holding. He was serving as the food administrator for the El Paso area during the First World War when the undoubtedly shocking news reached him of the remarkable suit brought against him by Josephine (Workman) Akley, the retired film star Princess Mona Darkfeather, concerning her father’s former ranch.
The action, initiated in Los Angeles County Superior Court on 24 June 1918, made the startling allegation that, when Oscar T. Bassett acquired the property, he may have served notice directly to Josephine, who was legally a minor, but not, as noted above, to her parents as was required by statute. Therefore, she asserted in her filing, she had a rightful and legal claim to a proportionate share in the ranch and proceeds from any rents and other income received on it since the death of her father, the original owner, in March 1901.
With this, we will pick up the story tomorrow and get into the heart of the lawsuit, which contains some fascinating testimony about the nature of the deed of the ranch by William Workman to his son, but intended for his children, including Josephine. So, be sure to check back with us then!
Once we learned that Mr. O. T. Bassett consistently honored his contracts and payment obligations, it became clear that his business achievements were no accident. His success exemplifies an ancient Chinese teaching: “Trust lays the foundation of establishing a business.”