Take Me To The River: The Lost Community of Misión Vieja/Old Mission Preview and a San Gabriel River Park Grand Opening Postview

by Paul R. Spitzzeri

Today, the Homestead participated as an exhibitor at the grand opening of the long-developing San Gabriel River Park, a county facility situated on the east bank of that watercourse between Valley Boulevard and the California Country Club in the Avocado Heights community where, for a half-century until the start of this century, a duck farm operated.

It was great to talk to dozens of visitors about the Museum and its connection to our regional history and we shared photographs and documents related to the river from our collection. As the park grows over coming years, it will become another part of a series of projects along the San Gabriel for public access and use.

Meanwhile, tomorrow’s presentation at the Museum on “The Lost Community of Misión Vieja/Old Mission” will also relate in a fundamental way to the river. This is because, while the Los Angeles and Santa Ana rivers were also important in this regard, the San Gabriel was likely more essential for the development of animal, plant and human life in greater Los Angeles because it drained a huge watershed emanating from the San Gabriel Mountains through the canyon that spawned the river.

Not only that, but the sheer volume of the life-giving fluid was pretty remarkable and, from the earliest written descriptions forward, the abundance of the flow was striking, especially the fact that the intense amount actually flowed underground for a considerable distance, a few miles or so, below the canyon before literally erupting to the surface.

The river, having cut a channel through what had been a continuous range of hills, now divided into the Montebello and Puente ranges, came to a particularly vital point in the Whittier Narrows before heading down to the Pacific Ocean, though its course changed many times, which also happened with the Los Angeles and Santa Ana rivers.

Beyond this, the wider watershed of close to 700 square miles featured many creeks and washes that fed into the river from Pasadena on the west to Pomona on the east, including such tributaries north of the Narrows as Big Dalton, San Dimas, and Live Oak washes and Walnut and San José creeks.

While diarists, like Father Juan Crespí provided our first written accounts of the plentiful plant and abundant animal life found in this well-watered domain, the indigenous people, for thousands of years, benefitted immensely from the wealth of resources found in this region and several substantial villages thrived along the river and its tributaries.

Crespí identified, as part of his reason for being part of the Portolá Expedition of 1769-1770, several sites for potential missions to minister to “the heathens” who were encountered, with no small amount of astonishment for the native peoples used to living in relative isolation for so long, along the route. When the priest saw the Whittier Narrows, with its teeming mix of plants and animals, he quickly realized the importance of the site.

On 8 September 1771, the priests Pedro Cambon and Angel Somera officially established the Mission San Gabriel at a spot along the west bank of the San Gabriel River, what is now the Río Hondo, and so began, with the establishment of this fourth in the chain of 21 missions, the European colonization of this local section of California with terrible consequences for the indigenous people, though for most of the period since then and until fairly recently, the history told of the “Mission Era” was decidedly one-sided. Fortunately, descendants of the native people remain to balance the record and advocate for their history and stewardship of this land.

What the natives obviously knew and the Spanish all-too-quickly would discover is that the San Gabriel, placid as it might appear with good winter rains and dry as it could be during drought years, could be a torrent during heavy precipitation. The mission buildings were largely made of plant material as the institution slowly developed, but it appears the flooding forced a hasty move, within a few years, to the current higher, drier location to the northwest.

While it was long claimed that there were adobe ruins of the original mission visible into the 1930s, these were not from the mission. Additionally, when Walter P. Temple, flush with a fortune from oil found on his 60-acre ranch in the northeast corner of Montebello Hills and the adjoining flats on the west side of the Río Hondo, commissioned a granite marker for the 150th anniversary of the founding of the mission, he placed it on the southwest corner of San Gabriel Boulevard and Lincoln Avenue.

This small flat spot and the base of the hills was not the actual location, but Temple put the monument there because he owned that land—the site was across San Gabriel Boulevard, probably within a few hundred yards and, with so much disturbance over the decades, including for oil development, there is no way to know exactly where the mission buildings were situated. Because Temple’s marker is a California Historic Landmark (#161), however, people tend to believe it was on the exact ground.

As tomorrow’s presentation will discuss, the mission controlled the land embraced by the river and its adjoining lands from the mountains to the Narrows, but, with the onset of secularization, imposed in the 1830s by the Mexican government, the ranchos of the mission were made available for private settlement.

Very shortly after secularization, families began to settle in what was quickly denoted as Misión Vieja, or Old Mission. The ranchos La Merced, Potrero Chico (also known as La Misión Vieja), Potrero de Felipe Lugo and Potrero Grande were granted in the 1840s to families with the surnames of Alvitre, Lobo, Pérez, Valenzuela, Morillo and Romero.

After the American seizure of Mexican Alta California and the ensuing Gold Rush, the community of Old Mission grew and names like Andrade, Barry, Basye, Bermudez, Lugo Manzanares, and many others filled pages of censuses from 1850 onward. After Casilda Soto Lobo, grantee of La Merced, lost the ranch in 1850-1851 by foreclosure of a loan made to her by William Workman, he turned over the 2,363-acre holding to his Rancho La Puente mayordomo (foreman) Juan Matias Sánchez and his son-in-law, F.P.F. Temple.

While the vast majority of the residents of Misión Vieja were Spanish-speaking Californios or Mexicans, a sprinkling of Anglos lived among them—this was a significant and often stark contrast to the situation just several miles north in El Monte, which was populated almost exclusively by Anglos, most from the American South. In both communities, the waters of the San Gabriel and tributaries fed farms and livestock ranches during the rest of the 19th century, as well as other communities like Azusa, Duarte, Los Nietos and more along its course.

Flooding in 1867-1868 led to the river following an irrigation ditch used by ex-Governor Pío Pico, the last chief executive of the Mexican period, and the New San Gabriel River became distinct from the Río Hondo. The latter took over the course of Coyote Creek coming out of what, in 1889, became Orange County and emptied into the sea at Anaheim Landing, now Seal Beach, where that city meets Long Beach, while the latter headed southwest and emptied into the Los Angeles River.

After the collapse of the Temple and Workman bank in 1876, which included the foreclosure of a loan by San Francisco capitalist, Elias J. “Lucky” Baldwin, on a loan he made to the institution, a dramatic change ensued along much of the land fronting the river. A quarter of a century after his foreclosure on Señora Lobo, Workman was dispossessed of many thousands of acres of his half of Rancho La Puente and, in despair and shock, committed suicide.

On the west side of the river, he, Sánchez and Temple had, in the 1850s and 1860s and beyond La Merced, taken possession of most of the ranchos Potrero Chico, Potrero de Felipe Lugo and Potrero Grande. While Workman granted some of this, as well as the Workman Mill portion of La Puente, to his daughter Margarita Temple, almost all of these landholdings wound up in the hands of Baldwin or his agent, Richard Garvey.

For most residents of Old Mission and the other communities along the San Gabriel Valley portion of the river, change was, otherwise, relatively slow and small through the 19th and into the early 20th centuries. After Lucky’s death in 1909, the new town of Baldwin Park was founded, but, even then, most of the surrounding land continued to be used for farming, including rapidly expanding citrus and walnut orchards, and, to a lessening extent, raising livestock.

Then came an astounding discovery in 1914 by 9-year-old Thomas W. Temple II, son of Walter P. Temple and Laura González, a Misión Vieja native, as he rushed to the family’s home to reveal the finding of oil. Within a couple of years, the powerful Standard Oil Company of California, now Chevron, executed leases with the Temples and Baldwin’s daughters, Anita Baldwin and Clara Stocker, and brought in, late in 1916, a successful test well on the Baldwin portion. This was followed in June 1917, by the first Temple oil well and, from that point, the rush was on to develop nearby properties.

Many oil companies, large and small, signed leases with nearby families, some of them descendants of the early Old Mission settlers, and the expected mixed bag of success resulted, with some lessees getting varied amounts of royalties from producing wells while others found that drilling efforts were unsuccessful.

In any case, the physical remaking of Misión Vieja was dramatic and far-reaching, and it is only now that some of the last oil wells are starting to be decommissioned and removed, such as in the Montebello Hills, where houses are springing up where derricks have been for more than a century.

While some agriculture remained, including several dairies, during the oil boom years—the Montebello Field proved to be shallow, so the abundant early production quickly tailed off—the next major transformation proved to be that perennial problem, flooding from a river that could quickly become swollen from the outpouring of water from the steep, granitic canyons of the San Gabriel range and overflow its banks.

There had been some major flood years in the 19th century, such as “Noah’s Flood” in 1861-1862, during which an estimated 50 inches fell, the aforementioned 1867-1868 season, and 1883-1884, among others. It wasn’t until the region’s population skyrocketed during the early 20th century, however, that calls for a comprehensive flood control program began to take root, especially after a flood in 1914 that did tremendous damage, followed by another one two years later.

While Los Angeles County tried on its own to develop a flood control system, with some significant projects completed through the Roaring Twenties, it was realized that, on scale, but also with the challenging years of the Great Depression and the Second World War, that federal leadership was required to complete what was begun locally.

Under the auspices of the United States Army Corps of Engineers, whose local offices are in what was the Temple (formerly La Puente—even though it was not in La Puente and an Old Mission school was to the north and not in Misión Vieja!) School on Durfee Avenue, the Whittier Narrows Dam was completed in the postwar period.

As part of its management of the area north of the dam, the Army Corps established a flood plain zone that prohibited or strictly limited use of much of the Old Mission area. Those few residents that remained after the oil boom period left, while some commercial and agricultural uses were permitted and the expansive Whittier Narrows Regional Park was established to create an important recreational resource for local residents, as was the Whittier Narrows Nature Center. In recent years, an extensive retrofitting of the dam has been in the works and another park, the Bosque de Río Hondo was opened along with a growing network of trails.

Driving along such major streets as Durfee Avenue, Rosemead Boulevard and San Gabriel Boulevard, there are large tracts that looked as it they were never developed or utilized, but much of these areas were inhabited and used as ranches and farms by those above-named (and other) families who constituted what can be now characterized as the lost community of Misión Vieja/Old Mission. Actually, as long as the history is preserved and shared, it isn’t strictly “lost,” so we might also consider the term “reclaimed,” which can apply to today’s grand opening of San Gabriel River Park, as well.

If you can’t be with us tomorrow for the Misión Vieja/Old Mission presentation, it will be recorded and posted soon on the Museum’s YouTube channel.