by Paul R. Spitzzeri
Access to Workman and Temple family documents, almost all donated by descendants over more than four decades has allowed us to become far more familiar with the lives of its various members than could be learned from public records, newspaper articles, books and articles and other sources and, so, we are very thankful for these gifts and their enhancement of our understanding the remarkable history of the family.
Today’s featured object from the Museum’s collection is yet another example, specifically in the “Reading Between the Lines” series highlighting letters from our holdings. While it is true that we still have only a fraction of what once existed, we make the most of what is available, gleaning insights that are far more personal than other papers, be they invoices, reports or others, almost all of which, however, have value for varied reasons.
One of the more intriguing aspects of the family history are the ties that were maintained by Temple family members here in greater Los Angeles with their kindred in Massachusetts, where the earliest of the clan settled back in the 1630s. The collection has a group of letters from the 1840s, following F.P.F. Temple’s departure from his hometown of Reading to travel half a year by ship around the Horn of South America to come to Mexican-era Los Angeles, where he met his much older brother, Jonathan, who’d left Massachusetts not long before the younger Temple’s birth.
As would generally be expected, communication diminished over the years, but there was a notable reestablished tie when, in the first half of the 1870s, F.P.F. sent some of his sons to Reading and nearby Boston to further their educations. These were Francis, who studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; William, who earned his juris doctorate degree at the prestigious Harvard Law School; and John, who completed high school in Reading and then went to the Bryant and Stratton Commercial School in Boston.
When the Temple brothers pursued their studies, the family was the wealthiest in Los Angeles County, then undergoing its first boom, which lasted from about 1868 until late summer 1875, when a financial panic in California included the stark, sudden collapse of the Temple and Workman bank. Francis had long been back home and was the winemaker for his grandfather William Workman at the Homestead, but William was in London doing post-graduate work at the famed Inns of Court when he was quickly summoned to return to Los Angeles to deal with legal matters emanating from the bank’s failure.
As for John, he was near the end of his commercial course work at Bryant and Stratton and, as his father did not want him to cease his studies when he was so close to finishing, the young man finished his work. Even then, the opportunity was afforded him to delay his return home to California so that he could attend the celebration of the centennial of the Declaration of Independence, held in summer 1876 in Philadelphia. After enjoying the distraction and respite, John made the long transcontinental railroad trip home to find his family’s situation to be nearly completely the reverse, financially, of what it had been when he left a few years prior.
Four months after the bank’s closure, William Workman, in despair over what had been outside his direct control, took his life in the house on Rancho La Puente in which he’d resided for nearly thirty-five years. John’s father, while taking office in March as Los Angeles County Treasurer after winning election the prior September, suffered from a series of strokes, no doubt from the tremendous stress.
While the family retained some property, mainly land granted to Antonia Margarita Workman de Temple and, therefore, excluded from what was put down as collateral for a loan given to the stricken institution by Elias J. “Lucky” Baldwin, whose 1879 foreclosure involved tens of thousands of acres of valuable land on several ranchos, the challenge was to make that land financially viable.
John moved home to what became a 50-acre homestead on the Rancho La Merced in the Misión Vieja or Old Mission community in the Whittier Narrows and then his mother gave him 130 acres nearby on the Rancho Potrero de Felipe Lugo, where he raised walnuts and other crops on what is now the Whittier Narrows Nature Center, a county park.
Francis remained at the Workman Homestead after his grandfather’s suicide and continued working the vineyard and making wine during the three years before Baldwin filed his foreclosure action. This enabled Francis to raise the money to buy from Baldwin 75 acres, the Workman House and various outbuildings, such as the wineries, while also assisting his mother in the purchase of the Temple homestead.
The letter highlighted here is dated 2 August 1877, three days before Francis’ 29th birthday, and written by his cousin Ellen Maria Temple Bancroft from her home in Reading. Ellen was born in 1841 (her birthday was not quite two weeks away when she penned her missive) in Gardner, a town more than fifty miles west of Reading to Cassandana Bickford (1812-1894), who hailed from Gardner, and Abraham Temple (1814-1851,) who was very close to his brother F.P.F. and a regular correspondent until not long before his death. The couple, who moved to Abraham’s hometown not long after Ellen’s birth, had four children, but only two survived to adulthood, Ellen, and a younger sister Alice.
Ellen attended schools in Reading before graduating in the early 1860s from the Bradford Academy for Young Ladies, which opened in 1803 as an early coed school before becoming an all-girls institution after more than thirty years (after just shy of two centuries of operation, Bradford College closed in 2000.) She also achieved an unusual distinction in early 1868, when, as reported by the Boston Transcript of the 6th,
the citizens of Reading, at their town meeting on Monday last, elected as members of the school committee [board], Miss Emily Ruggles, Miss Anna Appleton, and Miss Ellen Temple—the first instance in this state, we believe, of the election of ladies to that office . . . Miss Temple is well known as a successful teacher of music, whose sweet voice has long been heard leading the choir of the Old South [Methodist] Church . . . As regards the religious faith of these pioneer women, Miss Ruggles is a Universalist, Miss Appleton a Unitarian, and Miss Temple a Congregationalist. They are women who will command respect everywhere, and will doubtless do a good work for the schools of Reading.
Two days before Christmas that year, Ellen married Solon Bancroft, whose first name was that of an ancient Greek statesman and lawmaker, so that was more than appropriate given that he became a lawyer and judge, as well as a member of the Massachusetts state legislature in the 1890s. One can imagine that Solon and William Temple had many interesting conversations during the time that the latter was at Harvard Law School, where Bancroft (a graduate of Dartmouth College) studied in 1866 before joining the bar and entering into a practice in Boston.
The Bancrofts had two children, daughter Edith (1870-1949) and Edward (1874-1952,) the former long working as a teacher (an occupation her father briefly held in teaching high school Latin before entering his law career) and the latter following his father into law after received his Harvard Law School degree in 1898. So, Ellen was an accomplished singer and musician, pioneer woman school board member and mother of two when she wrote to her cousin Francis.
She began by informing him that “very many times within the last months, my thoughts have wandered California-ward, and as many times I have said ‘I will write to Frank’ or ‘I will write to John.'” Ellen continued that the problem was that “how rapidly old Time moves on and when the hands are busy, the impulses of head and heart cannot always be regarded and so you have been seemingly neglected. But I assure you, we have not forgotten you.” It was when cousin Thornton Sanborn made his “sudden arrival” home that it “put a new ‘spin on my heel,’ and yesterday, I spent the afternoon with Aunt Clarinda, and I said again, “I will write,” so here is the beginning.”
Clarinda Temple Sanborn was sister of F.P.F. and Abraham and her son Thornton, likely because of health reasons (lung trouble plagued many of the Temples as it did so many Americans), migrated to southern California in the mid-1850s to work for F.P.F. at the Rancho La Merced as well as at Springfield, in the gold fields of Tuolumne County, where his uncle had extensive interests with cattle grazing lands, butcher shops and others. When the bank failure happened after some two decades, however, Thornton Sanborn had to return to Massachusetts.
Ellen wondered if Francis would inquire of her, “well, Cousin, what’s the news,” but her reply was “not much of importance, and still the every day matters of gossip, are about the same as usual.” She then mentioned marriages, deaths, and births as well as sewing circles and beach trips as being among the general subjects, while noting that the new pastor at the Old South Church was staying at the Bancroft residence, though he expected to live elsewhere after returning from a vacation.
She then asked if Francis had been to Nantucket, the popular island resort past Martha’s Vineyard and well over a hundred miles from Reading, saying that she and her family took several trips there during the summer to date. If, Ellen continued, Francis did return to Massachusetts, “we will take the trip with you, for I think you would enjoy it. You see I am anticipating a visit from you again sometime, and earnestly hope the time may not be far distant.” Moreover, she added, “we wanted you here to go to the Centennial with us” as she, Solon and her sister Alice spent a week in Philadelphia and visited the nation’s capital and George Washington’s Mt. Vernon, these the highlights of “a trip which we all enjoyed exceedingly.”
After a week recuperating, Alice Temple “then turned about and with Mother went again and remained another week.” Ellen offered the view that “it did seem too bad that every one who desired could not go, and it also seemed ridiculous that anyone should desire to go.” She shied away from offering a summary of the Centennial excursion, excusing herself by saying that he did not possess “the pen of a Taylor,” this being the well-known poet, novelist and, especially, travel writer, Bayard Taylor. Ellen then turned to John H. Temple, telling his older brother,
John enjoyed it [his Centennial visit], I think. I have been intending to write to the boy ever since he went home. We all enjoyed his being here very much, though we didn’t see him as much as we could have desired for he was always studying. He did splendidly for himself while here, and won many friends. If you could only both come again! Perhaps you will, soon, who knows?
In only the briefest of statements, but still very poignant, Ellen wrote her cousin that “our hearts are saddened at the thought of Uncle’s sickness. I hope he is much better, and that the sunshine of his face will be visible here again.” This illness was not specified, but, as noted above, the period was filled with stress for F.P.F. Temple, including a barrage of lawsuits and actions taken earlier in 1877 that separated the bankruptcies of him, his late father-in-law and the assets they owned jointly. There can be no doubt that the heavy weight of affairs had a serious effect on his health, including those aforementioned strokes.
Ellen then discussed a variety of family news with her cousin at the end of her missive before concluding with a plea:
Now Cousin, do write. Let us not forget our relationship, even though the continent lies between us. I will try to write as often as you do, and it will do us all good. Give much love to your Father and family from us all . . .
It is not to be wondered at that communication largely ceased between the Temples of California and Massachusetts, at least from what we know of existing correspondence. Yet, almost exactly a half-century later, a new chapter emerged, following the extraordinary change of fortune experienced by Walter P. Temple, the much younger brother of Francis (who died of complications from tuberculosis on 5 August 1888) and John.
A stunning discovery of oil on land in the Montebello Hills lost by F.P.F. Temple to Baldwin and then sold to Walter by the latter’s executor three years after the capitalist’s 1909 death brought significant wealth after the first well was put into production in summer 1917. Subsequently, Walter pursued a real estate development career, as well as independent oil prospecting, and, in summer 1926, he and his family traveled to Massachusetts.
There Walter’s sons were enrolled in various schools: the eldest, Thomas W. II, at Harvard Law, where his uncle William and cousin Edward Bancroft had earned their degrees and the younger two: Walter, Jr. and Edgar registered at Dummer Academy, an all-boys’ school of long-standing at South Byfield, some twenty-five miles north of Reading.
Ellen Temple Bancroft was then still alive at 85 years of age and she and her children welcomed their cousins, the Temple brothers, into their homes for frequent visits, including holidays, which proved invaluable for the young men, who only returned to the Homestead during their summer vacations in 1927 and 1928, until they graduated in 1929 (as did their sister, Agnes, who remained in northern California, where she attended Dominican College.)
Thanks to Thomas, a faithful weekly correspondent to his father, we have some information regarding the late 1920s ties between the cousins, as well as some photos—including those owned by Ellen’s great-grandson, Douglas MacDonald, copies of which we’ve featured in a post here and more of which we’ll look to share in future posts.