by Paul R. Spitzzeri
I had the privilege to represent the Homestead yesterday at the Founders Day celebration held by the Compton 125 Historical Society in the Hub City, sharing some of the artifacts in the Museum’s collection related to the community. A wealth of displays about Compton’s rich history, musical and other performances, a talk given by historian Robert Lee Johnson and much else took place during the event. Other historic sites with displays included the Dominguez Rancho Adobe Museum, the Historical Society of Centinela Valley and Rancho Los Cerritos.
For a community that has long been maligned because of a wide array of negative associations in recent decades, but which, like so many cities in our region, is animated with pride in their history, commitment and enterprise for their present and hopes and plans for a better future, Compton’s appreciation of its past is important. This was amply demonstrated at the Founders Day celebration.
The connection between Compton and the Homestead goes back to the beginnings of the community in the 1860s. The Rancho San Pedro was one of the first land grants in Spanish California, with a massive 75,000 acres being given in 1784 to soldier Juan José Dominguez. A quarter-century later, the unmarried and childless Dominguez left the property to his nephew Cristobal, but, because there was no survey or documents regarding the ranch, it was regranted in the early 1820s in the first years of the Mexican period.
Cristobal never resided at San Pedro and, after his death in 1825, his eldest child, Manuel, inherited it and, while residing at Los Angeles, built a house and improvements on the ranch. A member of the pueblo’s ayunamiento, or governing council; an alcalde, or mayor; and a member of the legislature of the department, the name given to Alta California to reflect its status under Mexican rule, as well as prefect, or an administrator, for greater Los Angeles.
During the American invasion of 1846-1847, there was a battle fought on the San Pedro ranch near the Dominguez adobe, and, after the end of the Mexican-American War and the seizure of California by the United States was complete, a lack of action by Congress regarding the status of the new possession led citizens to form a convention and approve a constitution, of which Dominguez was a delegate and signer. Later, he was a member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.
As to the ranch, it was down to 25,000 acres when it was patented after the lengthy and expensive claims process mandated by Congress with its land claims act of 1851. While most of the remaining land was partitioned after his 1882 death among Don Manuel’s six daughters, a one square league portion of about 4,600 acres was given by him as a wedding gift to niece, and daughter of his sister Victoria, Rosario Estudillo.
In early 1866, however, Rosario and her second husband (the first was José Antonio Aguirre) Manuel Ferrer were subject to a foreclosure initiated by Jonathan Temple over a debt of $1,635 incurred by them. A mortgage sale was held on 17 January and, as Temple, former owner of the adjacent Rancho Los Cerritos, had moved recently to San Francisco and then died there at the end of May, his half-brother, F.P.F., secured ownership of this northeastern corner of the San Pedro ranch.
In an editorial two days after the sale, the News ran an editorial on the “Business Prosperity of Our City and County” as it touted the best financial conditions in greater Los Angeles in a decade. It noted an increase in stores and inventory, a demand for livestock in Utah and the Montana Territory, while demand for agricultural land, as ranchos were being increasingly subdivided, was growing.
At Los Nietos, northeast of what became Compton, thirty new houses were built and the voting population (men with property) doubled in the past year—in fact, that township’s Anglo population mushroomed from just two dozen in the 1860 census to over 1,100 a decade later, as migrants from the devastated post-Civil War South and elsewhere came to the area. the editorial concluded that irrigated lands, with extraordinarily fertile soil, would be in great demand over the next year.
In early April 1867, Temple and a near neighbor, Fielding W. Gibson of El Monte, with whom he shared an interest in raising purebred horses, embarked on a subdivision plan for the property. Officially called the Temple and Gibson Tract, the land was earmarked for farm lots of 40 acres each, laid out “on the right bank of the San Gabriel river,” which meant the west side as they appear to have referred to what visitors would see as they headed south to the tract from the Angel City. While Temple was a native of Massachusetts and a Republican and Union supporter during the Civil War, making him a regional minority in that cause, Gibson was from Mississippi, though his wife hailed from Vermont, and he was an anti-secessionist Democrat.
Also laid out was a town that briefly was referred to as Centerville, because of its position just below the Halfway House on the southern edge of the adjoining Rancho San Antonio, about where Jefferson Elementary School is in Willowbrook, and which was a rest stop for stages plying the route from Los Angeles to the rudimentary port at Wilmington/San Pedro. The community was then renamed Gibsonville and, though there were sales of quite a few of the Temple and Gibson Tract lots to others, a major buyer was Griffith D. Compton, whose arrival came just as greater Los Angeles was poised to enter its first boom period, lasting from about 1868 through most of 1875.
Compton was born in 1820 in Chatham, Virginia, in the southern part of the state around 25 miles from the North Carolina border. As a young man, he moved to Hamilton County, Illinois, in the southern section of the Land of Lincoln, northwest of Evansville, Indiana. The same year, 1840, he married a cousin, Lucy Compton, who happened to be born on the same day he was and with whom he had a daughter, Fannie.
Six years later, the family moved to Marion County, southeast of Des Moines, but, in 1849, the lure of the Gold Rush enticed Compton to take his wife and daughter to California and they settled in Woodbridge, northwest of Lodi and stayed for sixteen years. During that time, Lucy Compton died and Griffith soon married the sister of a future son-in-law, with two sons and a daughter (a third son died as an infant) being born in succeeding years. The next stop was Watsonville, north of Monterey, where the Comptons remained for two years, but health reasons, as was so often the case, led to yet another relocation, this time to Los Angeles.
Compton and two other men, as part of a small colony of 30 Methodists pledged to temperance (no drinking of alcoholic beverages) pooled their money to buy 80 acres at $5 an acre on the Temple and Gibson Tract and, because of a very wet winter and flooding during the 1867-1868 season, the abundance of water served him well as he planted a crop of potatoes that netted him nearly $1,700, a handsome sum for the time.
Notably, though, he was not the first to plant potatoes, which were not common raised in the region—in June 1867, one of the first buyers of land in the tract, Henry Osburn, who planted seed towards the end of March, brought eight potatoes to show off to the Wilmington Journal newspaper. Another early experiment concerned mulberry cultivation with Henry H. Spencer of Compton and Robert M. Widney, a recent settler in Los Angeles and soon a prominent attorney, judge, and Methodist layman, offering a 71-acre “plantation” for sale in March 1869.
An early reference for the new town of Compton appeared in the Los Angeles News of 10 July 1869 with members of the community Sunday school offered free rides to Wilmington on the completed section of the Los Angeles and San Pedro Railroad, the first in the region, for the Independence Day celebration in the harbor town.
The correspondent, Alanson Coplin, noted the pride of having tracks laid through his fledgling burg, these being the on the same route as those for the commuter rail line running down Alameda Street through Compton today, by stating, “we begin to already feel elevated in the scale of modern civilization.”
Yet, because the 4th was on a Sunday and Comptonites were “a God-loving and Sabbath-observing community,” Coplin added “we did of course not take our ride” then “but deferred [the holiday’s] celebration until Monday.” While there were no passenger cars available, residents made do with riding on freight cars, thrilled with the idea that “it would be quite an honor to take the first ride on the first railroad in Southern California.” Praise was meted out for the excellent construction of the track and the smooth ride to Wilmington.
There, the contingent was met by Phineas Banning, the “Port Admiral” and founding figure of the railroad, who took the group on a cruise through the port in his steam lighter, Cricket. On completing their visit, the school members issued a formal resolution of thanks to Banning for the royal treatment and “gave three cheers for Banning & Co., and three for engineer, conductor, &c., and then dispersed to their homes.”
The holiday spirit was soon dissipated by the harsh realities of the tax assessor as Compton joined 29 other denizens, including Methodist minister Asahel M. Hough, of the Green Meadows Township, embracing Compton and surrounding areas, to petition the Board of Supervisors for a reduction of what the group considered a highly unjust determination that property was to be assessed at some $10-15 an acre.
As signs of progress for the town, a post office was opened toward the end of August 1869, with a school following shortly thereafter. The 3 September edition of the Los Angeles Star reported that “Comptonville,” as the settlement was sometimes called, was to have its own cemetery with ten acres in the southwestern corner of the town laid out for the purpose and meaning that the community “is to be placed on a par with other large cities in the matter of a resting place for the dead.” What came to be Woodlawn Cemetery may have been considered a landmark but the paper ended its brief notice with “we hope that a long time may elapse before our neighbors shall have much use for it.”
Compton comprised just a small portion of the Temple and Gibson Tract and, after Temple and his father-in-law William Workman, half-owner of Rancho La Puente and founder with his wife Nicolasa Urioste of the Homestead, along with the prominent Jewish merchant Isaias W. Hellman, joined forces in founding, in 1868, the second bank opened in Los Angeles, this being Hellman, Temple and Company.
Shortly afterward, Hellman took out ads offering 2,000 acres “of the best agricultural land” in those 40-acre lots with interested parties requested to go to the bank to buy their holdings. For those moving to Compton and building on their property, in February 1870, the lumber firm of Lynch, Porter and Company opened a yard in Compton “for the accommodation of the people of that section.” Sedgwick Lynch, who worked the redwood forests near Santa Cruz for years, later had a major firm in Los Angeles, Griffith and Lynch.
Other early buyers of tract property were County Clerk Thomas D. Mott and another important Jewish merchant Harris Newmark, best known now for his memoir, Sixty Years in Southern California, both of whom acquired their land in the first part of 1869. Later that year, Spencer, who was also an agent for the aforementioned mulberry land, offered for sale three dozen acres of property suitable for alfalfa, beans, corn and more, with mention of an irrigation ditch running from the San Gabriel River through the land, a lake for ducks and geese, two acres of mulberry trees, and an artesian well.
With regard to those wells, it is no accident that Artesia Boulevard runs through part of Compton and that a townsite of that named was established in 1875, because there was an abundance of water underground in an area once known for its wide expanses of swamps and sloughs (one of which, however, was called N***** Slough, reflective of the rampant racism of the period).
The News of 21 October 1869 reported that boring on Compton’s land yielded water at 90 feet and there was a continuous stream of the fluid at six inches in diameter. The paper rejoiced that “it is thus demonstrated that water is procurable . . . and the result will be that tens of thousands of acres, supposed to be incapable of cultivation, will be made to contribute to the wants of a thriving population.”
Falling under the heading of “be careful of what you ask,” though, the 30 November edition of the paper noted that artesian water “came rushing to the surface in such volume that all efforts to check its flow proved unavailing.” Not only that, but the ground was rent by the flooding, which came out of a “good-sized creek” emanating from the well and “it had been found necessary to remove the house of Mr. Compton, which stood in the track of the rushing flood.”
In spring 1870, though, the abundant supply of water led the Star of 9 April to comment on the agricultural bounty of the community. It noted that Compton, residing along the line of the Los Angeles and San Pedro Railroad and having planted those potatoes in June 1868 on two acres had a yield of 42 tons through the next summer and he sold those for $600, an amount “sufficient to pay for all his land.” In June 1869, he planted his next crop, which produced 30 tons, on another two acres, while he also introduced beets, which yielded fifty tons per acre. The paper closed the account by observing,
Let it be distinctly understood, that in all his farming operations, whether in field, in garden, in orchard, there is no water used—no irrigation at any time; in fact, he considers it would be a great detriment to both crops and land to irrigate. Cultivation is all that is necessary to insure abundant crops.
Another seeming landmark in Compton’s early progress was the arrival of Dr. Henry S. Brower, said to be a graduate of the New York Medical University, who announced in early May 1870 that he “will practice at Comptonville and Los Angeles,” that first name soon dispensed with because of the existence of a Camptonville in the gold country north of Grass Valley and Nevada City. The News of 9 June followed with a short note that “Comptonville is to have an infirmary capable of accommodating some twenty or more patients” and run by the physician, though it is not known if such a facility was opened.
In November, Brower conducted a Caesarian section, a rare procedure then, to deliver a baby from a Compton mother who died during childbirth, but no trace was found of the doctor after that surgery. In September 1871, however, the News of the 13th reported of a Dr. Brower who stole a horse at Visalia and the paper wondered if it was the Compton medico who “vibrated” in the area for a short time and “departed leaving divers[e] creditors in the lurch.” Two years later, the doctor showed up in San Francisco and appears to have died in Memphis in 1876, claiming to have served in the California Senate, though no one of that name was in that body.
We’ll return in a couple of days with part two after tomorrow’s Memorial Day post, so be sure to join us then for more of Compton’s early history.
Mr. Compton’s perspective on farming without irrigation – dry farming, is both interesting and intriguing. As climate change intensifies and farmers are grappling with water shortages, it seems timely to promote this sustainable and once-common farming practice here in California.
Hi Larry, the Workmans at Rancho La Puente used irrigation for their vineyard and orchards at the Homestead, while dry farming such field crops as barley and wheat on several thousand acres, though this area was very different, of course, then the Compton region in terms of water supply. Here is an interesting discussion broadly about dry farming in California: https://agwaterstewards.org/practices/dry_farming/. Another, specific to the San Joaquin Valley: https://www.ppic.org/blog/can-dryland-farming-help-california-agriculture-adapt-to-future-water-scarcity/.