by Paul R. Spitzzeri
This second part of a post concerning the Sierra Madre Villa estate of Walter P. Temple’s attorney and business investor, George H. Woodruff, takes us into the early 1910s, when Woodruff was in his late thirties and appears to have had some measure of financial success. After a decade as a lawyer, he’d worked as Whittier’s city attorney, was counsel for two title and insurance firms and practiced solo and with partner Fred D. McClure, with whom he also embarked on some business enterprises.
As mentioned in part one, I had the opportunity last Sunday to take a tour, led by long-time residents Marlene Griffith and Gregory McReynolds, of the Sierra Madre Villa, ensconced on a mesa between Pasadena and Sierra Madre at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains. Gregory mentioned that it was in 1912 that Woodruff, his wife Nellie and their children George, Jr. and Lois—a third, Rolland, was born in August of that year, and the youngest, John, followed in 1916—moved to the community.
Gregory further explained that there was an late 19th-century single-story cottage on the ten-acre property before the Woodruffs greatly expanded the residence with the second floor as well as major architectural elements, turning the dwelling into something akin to a Neoclassical structure. A lushly landscaped front garden extending quite a distance west to Sierra Madre Villa Avenue, where later subdivision of the property brought the building of a house there, while to the south now is a tennis court and swimming pool.
Just east of the house, a large reservoir, used then as a pool (much as Walter P. Temple did at the Homestead in later years), irrigated citrus and avocado trees and part of that structure is a swimming pool for an adjacent house. Beyond that was a carriage house and garage, which still exists as part of a dwelling and it is said there are still a few remnant trees from the Woodruff grove in the subdivided tract.
The earliest located reference to the Woodruffs at their residence was when his nieces (daughters of his sister, Grace King) visited from Whittier in the summer of 1914 and the location was referred to by the Whittier News as “Villa Hill, Sierra Madre.” Two years later, when Ethel and Mildred King were joined by two friends for another sojourn, the area was referred to as Pasadena Glen, which is a community just to the east in a canyon below the mesa where the Woodruff place is located.
In September 1918, when Woodruff registered for the draft in the waning days of the First World War, there was no street or street number listed for his residence and, for “city or town,” the place name was given as Lamanda Park. This is an area of Pasadena southwest of where the family resided and, as we’ll discuss in an upcoming post, that community name came from Amanda Rose, the wife of Leonard J. Rose, owner of the Sunny Slope Ranch. Lamanda Park was annexed to Pasadena that year.
Speaking of Temple, it was in October 1912 that he acquired some 60 acres on the northeastern edge of the Montebello Hills and adjoining flat land at the west bank of the Río Hondo (the old San Gabriel River)—property lost in the late 1870s by his father F.P.F. Temple to Elias J. “Lucky” Baldwin in the foreclosure of a loan to the failed Temple and Workman bank. In April 1914, his oldest child, Thomas W. II, then just nine years old, discovered indications of oil that led to the leasing of the land to Standard Oil Company of California and the resulting establishment of the Montebello Oil Field, which brought a fortune to Temple, not to mention Baldwin’s daughters, Anita Baldwin and Clara Stocker.
It was speculated in the first part of this post that the two men may have met when Woodruff lived in Whittier, working as a principal at the state reform school and then as city attorney and a lawyer in private practice, during the years 1900-1907. Woodruff, however, with his extensive connections to the real estate industry, as well as oil, may also have known Milton Kauffman, an El Monte merchant who was a primary developer of Baldwin Park (on the part of Rancho La Puente lost to Baldwin by Temple’s grandfather, William Workman.) The earliest we know of Woodruff representing Temple was early in 1920, though he may well have done so not long after the latter began receiving the royalties from the Montebello wells starting in summer 1917.
While Woodruff was involved in a flurry of business ventures in the first decade of the 20th century, this tailed off considerably in the Teens, perhaps partially because of his move to Sierra Madre Villa and involvement in agriculture and water development there. He was a partner in the 1919 formation of the Duplex Cushion Tire Company, which looks to have been involved with auto and truck tires, but his other located non-legal activities concerned farming and water.
Just down Sierra Madre Avenue from Woodruff’s residence was the estate of Frank J. Hart, a native of Cleveland who came to this area in the early 1880s with the family of his uncle, John, and settled in Sierra Madre where John H. Hart operated a vineyard. The latter was music teacher in Cleveland and continued doing so in this region, while founding, with Frank and a son, confusingly named Frank R., the Southern California Music Company, which became a very successful business in Los Angeles.
Another of the Hart clan was Edwin, who launched a real estate career, including the founding of the subdivisions of North Whittier (Hacienda) Heights and La Habra Heights, very near the Homestead. Both of these tracts were established and marketed for the raising of citrus and avocados with Edwin a leader in promoting the latter. This included the establishment, in 1915, of the California Avocado Growers’ Association, which adopted the brand name of “Calavo” for the fruits of the labors of its members in the cooperative organization (not unlike “Sunkist” for regional orange growers.)
Woodruff, almost certainly because of his neighbor Frank J. Hart, planted avocados on his estate and one early instance of his involvement with the rapidly growing fruit (yes, it is a fruit) was his appearance as one of several featured speakers at the California Avocado Growers’ Association’s annual meeting in early May 1920 at the Los Angeles Y.M.C.A. The attorney, identified in a Pomona newspaper about the conference as a Lamanda Park resident (citrus and avocados were taken to a packing house there), joined a banker, dentist, doctor, dentist and merchant, as well as the well-known Rev. Dana W. Bartlett, for a program titled “Why I Should be Interested in the Avocado Industry.”
With respect to water, Woodruff was a representative counsel for the Pasadena Glen Improvement and Protective Association as it went to the California Railroad Commission, forerunner of the California Public Utilities Commission, to seek redress concerning the water system for residents like Woodruff and his neighbors that was operated by Woodruff’s near neighbor, Arvin B. Shaw. The Commission decided at the beginning of 1920 that, as “the service was very unsatisfactory to patrons of this utility, due to inadequacy of supply and storage facilities,” not the rates charged, Shaw was “directed to install additions and improvements to his water system and to develop an additional supply of water.”
Notably, however, Woodruff, in July 1920, got into some hot water, along with El Monte railroad brakeman and poultry farmer Bert Ballinger, in another railroad commission proceeding brought by the beautifully named Acheson Q. St. George, who resided two households away from Ballinger near Walnut Grove Avenue and Mission Road in Rosemead (there’s another L.J. Rose connection). St. George appealed to the regulatory agency “for an order to compel George H. Woodruff and Bert Ballinger to supply him with water to give better service at a more reasonable rate than the $2.00 an hour they are now charging for pumping.”
Woodruff’s involvement in citrus raising, however, went far beyond the Sierra Madre/Pasadena Glen/Lamanda Park area. In July 1918, before the legal battle with Shaw burst forth, Woodruff joined the water company owner, Dr. Harlan Shoemaker (a relation of Woodruff’s law partner, Clyde C. Shoemaker) and three others in the purchase of nearly 300 acres in what the Los Angeles Times of the 27th described as “an important citrus development for the thermal belt west of Owensmouth . . . in a sheltered cove at the extreme west end of the San Fernando Valley.”
The name Owensmouth was given upon the community’s founding in 1912 because it was soon the terminal point of the transformative Los Angeles Aqueduct when that completed the following year, bringing water to a largely dry valley. The property was planted to lemons and Valencia oranges and it seems certain that Walter P. Temple’s later half-ownership of 150 acres of land in Owensmouth devolved from what was later named the Canoga Citrus Association, once the community name was changed, in 1931, to Canoga Park.
Another Sierra Madre Villa connected controversy with which Woodruff was involved was in summer 1923 when the Times reported on a proposed annexation of the school district serving Sierra Madre to that of Pasadena. The paper noted that
Headed by George H. Woodruff, a delegation, favoring the idea of consolidating the two districts, presented the [County] Supervisors with a petition containing 600 signatures of the heads of families. The petition as presented by the annexationists was approved by Mary [Mark] Keppel, County Superintendent of Schools.
The Sierra Madre Chamber of Commerce, however, leapt into action to oppose the proposal claiming that the town’s schools could be managed perfectly well as it had been, though supporters of the merger decried the Chamber’s directors for acting outside the bounds of the organization.
The paper continued that, with a delay imposed by the county governing body, “both factions will, they say, circulate petitions for and against the proposition,” with those against the idea claiming those 600 signatures “were gained by misrepresentation.” Moreover, they asserted that any promise made by Pasadena’s district that a junior high school would be built in Sierra Madre if the merger was approved “was not officially authorized.”
John F. West, the superintendent of schools in the Crown City told the Times that a consolidation would mean better teachers and supervision of students, not to mention that offering of music and woodworking classes that were not possible in Sierra Madre under present circumstances. He added that “it is very likely that a junior high school will be built somewhere in that vicinity to accommodate students of Sierra Madre, Villa, and Lamanda Park.” Sierra Madre, however, did not agree to an annexation until 1960.
Issues involving school districts, water and other vital community components were frequently subjects of conflict and controversy as growth in the early 1920s during greater Los Angeles’ next big boom generated pressures for infrastructure to keep up with the incredible pace of population expansion and development.
This leads us to the next part of this post as Woodruff, during this boom and with him as a key partner of Temple and Kauffman as well as with others, embarked on a wide array of business activities that serves as something of a case study for the Roaring Twenties generally. That is, he was apparently riding the massive boomtime wave until it crashed on the rocky shores of The Great Depression, but join us tomorrow for more of the story.