by Paul R. Spitzzeri
When the featured artifact from the Museum’s collection for this post, the 14 October 1875 edition of the Los Angeles Star, was published, there was no small amount of uncertainty about conditions in the region. Two years before, a depression began and was so severe that it became known as “The Long Depression,” spanning the remainder of the decade. Locally, it seemed as if greater Los Angeles was immune to its effects as a regional boom brought thousands of new settlers and business activity was fervent.
Then came news, on 24 August, from San Francisco of the closure of the Bank of California, the state’s largest, amid a burst stock bubble emanating from silver mining companies at Virginia City, Nevada and, once the telegraphic dispatches were received, a panic burst forth in the Angel City, sending jittery depositors to the two commercial banks in town, Farmers’ and Merchants’ and Temple and Workman.
The manager of the former and prior partner of the latter, Isaias W. Hellman, was on a well-deserved vacation in Europe when he was alerted to the situation and found that, on 1 September, his partner and bank president, ex-Governor John G. Downey, agreed to close for a month along with Temple and Workman. Furious, Hellman hurried back to Los Angeles, stopping to borrow cash in New York City, so he could reopen on the first of October with all the assurance and confidence he could muster about the stability of his institution.
F.P.F. Temple, president of Temple and Workman, however, could not reopen at the end of the the thirty-day suspension and the county-treasurer-elect, who would not assume office until the following March, continued to spend a good deal of his time as summer transitioned to fall in San Francisco desperately seeking loans to get his institution back into operation—and to do so without incurring the distrust of depositors.
In this context, it is perhaps not surprising that this edition of the Star, the city’s oldest paper, having made its debut in May 1851 and, except for a four-year interregnum from 1864 to 1868, operated continuously, including as a daily for the prior several years, since, was somewhat bare of news. For a couple of years to date, the sheet was operated by Benjamin C. Truman, whose unflagging boosterism of greater Los Angeles and southern California was epitomized by his 1874 book Semi-Tropical California, which sang the praises of the region to all and sundry.
Yet, even Truman’s sunny optimism was decidedly tempered in the wake of the panic and, if he had difficulty filling the pages of his paper, half of which were largely dedicated to advertisements, the situation would not improve and, in 1877, he sold out with the Star ending its long run two years later as the economic environment continued to worsen.
In the editorial section of the edition, Truman paid some attention to upcoming election for California Superintendent of Public Instruction, advising voters of the necessity to ” address themselves carefully to the task of choosing wisely” because “it is scarcely possible to overestimate the importance of the result of this election.”
The editor called for readers to support the candidacy of Professor Ezra Carr, then living in northern California, adding that his election
will secure the services of a gentleman skilled in whatever it is best to know in the matter of public education. An able writer and an eloquent speaker, we can look for an active exercise of these valuable gifts on his part, and reasonably expect to see them employed in the dissemination of truths which will arrest public attention and spread useful information broadcast throughout the State.
Truman continued that the young scholars of California “are entitled to the best” and that “we owe it in all its fulness to those who are to come after us” so that this level of excellence was such that Carr’s election would “enlarge its borders and make it wider and deeper and stronger and better than that which we have received and now enjoy.”
The editorial observed that any further laudation of the candidate “would be merely cumulative” because of previous commentary in the paper that more than amply demonstrated “his indisputable fitness for the office to which he has been nominated.” It then merely concluded that “we urge the friends of liberal and progressive education to go to the polls and vote for him.”
Carr (1819-1894), a native of New York state who earned a medical degree from a Vermont college, taught in the eastern states until, in 1855, he was appointed a professor at the University of Wisconsin and chaired the natural sciences department. One of his students was John Muir, who went to great fame as a naturalist and whose friendship with Carr and his wife, Jeanne, was a deep one.
Never one to shy away from offering his opinions, Carr lost his position at Madison in 1867 and traveled with his wife to the east and to California, where they decided to settle. It happened that the University of California was being formed and Carr was able to secure a professorship in agriculture and related fields, but controversies continued with his outspokenness and this affected his health, so he was dismissed in 1874.
Soon after, he ran for state superintendent and won election, with Jeanne as his assistant, though family tragedies, including the untimely deaths of two sons, led him to retire and he and his family resettled in what had first been called the Indiana Colony and became Pasadena. The Carrs owned a 42-acre estate at the west end of town, calling the property Carmelita (get it?), and, on part of it sits such landmarks as the Gamble House and the Norton Simon Museum.
In the “Local Items in Brief” column, some notable tidbits were published, such as the fact that the water works at the new seaside town of Santa Monica (where the Los Angeles and Independence Railroad, of which Temple was treasurer, was about to complete its service from the Angel City) was about completed, while “there were just twenty cars of lumber, railroad material and merchandise” on the Los Angeles and San Pedro train that came into town the prior day—indication of the financial issues of the day.
Despite the low amount of arriving merchandise, the Star did ask its female readers to visit the Commercial Street store of Charles Prager, informing them that “he has now on hand at present a very large lot of all kinds of goods for ladies which will be sold at very low prices.” Also mentioned was a “fireman’s tableau” included at a recent concert and which was accounted as “really one of the most beautiful things of the kind we ever witnessed.”
Live characters created the vignette which “represented a burning house with a fireman descending a ladder, holdings in his arms a child which he had rescued from the flames.” A woman knelt “representing the mother imploring aid,” while Charles E. Miles, chief engineer, and his assistant, George Gard, of the volunteer 38s fire department, which also included Elijah H. Workman as a member, and others from the force filled the stage.
A change in the time of trains leaving Los Angeles for Wilmington and connections to steamships leaving the rudimentary harbor that has now become the massive Port of Los Angeles, and a reminder that city taxes would become delinquent on the first of November, were also in the column. Delinquency, not surprisingly, would become much more common in years to come.
The East Los Angeles subdivision, the first suburban tract within city limits and the first east of the river, was about two years old and it was mentioned that a committee a half-dozen was formed by the Pioneer Lot Association “to agree upon the best plan of distributing the lots” and to report to the broader group on the 18th. This community was, about four decades later, renamed Lincoln Heights and was where Walter P. Temple resided when he died in 1938.
It was also reflective of changing financial times that, of a dozen reported real estate transactions in the preceding twenty-four hours, almost all were for small amounts in the hundreds of dollars, though two larger ones stood out. Former district attorney Cameron E. Thom and others sold just under 73 acres, including interest in two irrigation ditches of the Rancho Los Coyotes in modern Buena Park and Fullerton for $3,000, while Norman C. Jones sold lots with no acreage provided for land, with water rights on the Rancho Azusa de Duarte in around the city of that name to a group for $8,000, but the land must have been close to 200 acres if prices were roughly equivalent to the Los Coyotes property. .
What was surprising with another ranch that was in what, seventeen years later, became Orange County was Andrónico Sepúlveda’s sale to merchant Samuel Hellman of 95 acres of the Rancho Santiago de Santa Ana for just $587 or not much over $6 an acre. Perhaps, however, the land was in hilly or mountainous terrain and was, therefore, of little practical value aside for livestock grazing.
With respect to real estate, we also return to the beginning of this post concerning the impetus for the panic that led to the economic downturn and one individual, Elias J. “Lucky” Baldwin, whose fortune (hence the nickname) in exiting the Virginia City silver mine stock bubble as prices peaked and he emerged with several million dollars. Eyeing greater Los Angeles land, Baldwin purchased the Rancho Santa Anita in the San Gabriel Valley paying a then-record price of $200,000 after a hardboiled negotiation by owner and Los Angeles merchant Harris Newmark.
Adjacent to the southeast was the Rancho San Francisquito, the western two-thirds of which were owned by Lewis Wolfskill, son-in-law of its previous owner Henry Dalton, along with William Workman and F.P.F. Temple. With the Temple and Workman bank in trouble and Temple, as noted, seeking loans in San Francisco, Baldwin was about the only capitalist who would consider such a transaction.
First, however, “Lucky” engineered the purchase of that majority of San Francisquito, executing that deal the day before this issue of the Star was published. The paper was obviously not aware of that transaction, which involved some 6,000 acres for the price of $60,000 (that $10 per acre was seemingly a bargain, given that Santa Anita was acquired at $25 per acre) and which reflected the dire straits facing the bankers.
The paper, though, did report that,
It is stated that Mr. E.J. Baldwin intends to subdivide the Santa Anita Ranch into tracts of forty and eighty acres, build comfortable houses on each tract, and put them in market. In addition to the 8000 acres Mr. Baldwin purchased of Messrs. Newmark, he has purchased 3,700 acres of adjoining lands. Mr. Baldwin’s scheme, besides being feasible and practicable, is one which is calculated to attract towards this county a very desirable class of immigration.
It is unclear what the 3,700 acres comprised, though perhaps it was a misunderstanding of the amount of land acquired in the San Francisquito purchase. In any case, despite the Star‘s wish (!) that Baldwin’s development plans were quickly realized, this was not the case, though it was true that “the whole tract thus proposed to be utilized is one of the most beautiful in the State.”
It was also something of a forecast of many years, but the paper concluded that “when it and the lands of the Lake Vineyard Association,” of which Temple was treasurer and which embraced the area in and around San Marino, where Association president and vice-president Benjamin D. Wilson and his son-in-law James deBarth Shorb resided, “are covered with smiling and prosperous homes, the result will be a subject for general congratulations.”
In spite of the relative paucity of news and given the shaky financial environment of the period, this edition of the Star does provide some notable material and is an interesting window into the end of greater Los Angeles’ first boom, which included the impressive rise and dramatic fall of Workman and Temple as the frenzy went bust.
One last point of significance is that close to a half-century later, in spring 1923, Temple’s son Walter bought 285 acres of that section of San Francisquito purchased by Baldwin and established his Town of Temple, renamed Temple City on it. This followed the accidental discovery in spring 1914 of oil in the Montebello Hills, on land Baldwin acquired by foreclosure of his loan to the Temple and Workman bank, several weeks after this issue of the paper was published, and of which Walter Temple took possession by striking a deal after Baldwin’s death with the estate. That windfall provided Walter the funds to buy the land for his town and reflected a determination to put his family name very publicly forward during yet another of the region’s many booms.