“As Time Went On It Lost Its Former Glory and Began to Fall Into Decay”: Some Further History of Sierra Madre Villa, 1900-1923

by Paul R. Spitzzeri

Though it only operated for a little more than two decades, from 1877 to 1899, the Sierra Madre Villa hotel, once famed for its elevated location, stunning views, healthy environment and the attractiveness and taste of its furnishings and décor, really began to decline about halfway through that period, as larger and more opulent hotels throughout greater Los Angeles drew more visitors.

From basically the end of the Boom of the 1880s until the end of the century, the Villa straggled along, including after painter William Cogswell, who acquired the 500 acres of Rancho Santa Anita on which the establishment was created and which was operated by his son-in-law William P. Rhoades and then son Gardner, sold it in 1891. After some subsequent controversy involving owner David Lyman and then the assumption of the property by his brothers, attempts were made to keep the Villa viable, but to naught.

The compound appears to have been largely empty for a few years, though, in October 1902, Ellen G. White, the founder of the Seventh Day Adventist Church, replied to a letter from church members from her Elmshaven estate in the Napa Valley:

We received your letter in regard to a sanitarium all ready to be occupied, so that work could be begun at once. I am sure that we ought to secure the control of this place if possible . . .

The Sierra Madre Villa property, as described by you, has all the advantages that have been outlined to me. Land is a great advantage. And the opportunity to secure a furnished building is a wonderful chance if the conditions are reasonable. If it can be secured, it will be far more favorable [than a place considered in Monrovia].

The Church founded its first sanitarium to advance its medical views, including vegetarianism, at Battle Creek, Michigan, where prominent members in the Kellogg family established their cereal empire (and Will K. Kellogg later acquired a horse ranch at the east end of the San Gabriel Valley that is now Cal Poly Pomona). What happened, however, was that a Glendale site was soon chosen while White also took a liking to a property near Riverside and, in summer 1905, the Loma Linda Sanitarium opened and a community, including a hospital and university, developed in subsequent years.

Late in 1902, the realty firm of Bennett and Gould advertised that “we will next offer for sale the Sierra Madre Villa, with all the real and personal property, water rights, etc., and will say that this property carries one of the best orange groves in the State . . . It is going quick now, as we have a price on it that will sell it.” Early the following year, the Los Angeles Times of 19 January, reported that news from the east was that investors from that part of the country acquired the Villa, with the account adding,

This is one of the oldest hotels in this part of the State, and the public will be pleased to have it opened, as it will be in a short time. The location is one the best.

The hotel, however, did not reopen, or, if it did, it was very short lived, as a year later, the Times of 5 January 1904 observed that “residents of the pretty suburb adjacent to [the] Sierra Madre Villa Hotel are much wrought up, it is said, over an institution which has recently been established in their midst” with rumor being that residents were ready to carry their complaints to the Board of Supervisors.

The paper continued that “the trouble was caused by the establishment of an asylum for ‘nervous’ patients in the hotel, once one of the handsomest and most popular of the tourist resorts in Southern California” and where “in former times it was the scene of much gayety, parties of dancers frequently going there in the moonlight to trip the light fantastic until far into the next day.”

Looking askance, however, at the inmates who were to occupy the Villa, the locals “are reported to be sleeping with the cover over their heads, their doors and windows locked and barrel and ‘guns’ under their pillows” afraid that some inmate “with the hallucination that he is appointed to reduce the population, may appear armed to the teeth.”

The Times continued that “the new occupants of the Sierra Madre Hotel have been transferred from the San Gabriel Sanatorium” by Dr. John W. Harpster (1867-1934), a native of Illinois, who opened his “Dr. Harpster’s Private Sanitarium” on San Pedro Street between Washington and Adams boulevards in south Los Angeles in 1899 before relocating to the former East San Gabriel Hotel, situated at the southwest corner of Las Tunas Drive and San Gabriel Boulevard.

The account also included the statement that “residents of the neighborhood declare that these patients are nothing more nor less than insane people, and they don’t think that anybody has any right to keep such people in a place not provided with the ordinary precautions and protection of an insane asylum.” Harpster signed a six-month lease with the Lymans, but remained longer, acquiring the adjacent Longyear property for his residence and then the Vosburg ranch of 125 acres, including the fine residence there.

A fall 1904 advertisement noted that the institution was “for mental and nervous diseases only,” though Harpster’s Los Angeles sanitarium also treated those with morphine and alcohol addictions, and added that “a good home [is] given to [the] chronic insane” with “no commitment necessary.”

The following year, additional information was given in ads for “a good home given to chronic nervous invalids and the mildly insane” by an “experienced resident physician,” this being Harpster, “and a corp[s] of competent nurses.” Treatment methods included dietary and nutrition plans, hydrotherapy, physical culture and outdoor exercise and it was added that, not only was commitment not required, nor was “publicity necessary,” implying that well-known persons could expect anonymity and privacy.

After about three-and-a-half years, however, another change was made as the Los Angeles Herald of 28 August 1907 reported that Arvin B. Shaw, manager of the Los Angeles College of Osteopathy, “has purchased 150 acres of ranch, canyon and mountain land near Sierra Madre Villa from Dr. J.W. Harpster, proprietor of Sierra Madre sanatorium.” Shaw was said to be ready to build a house as well as open “a sanatorium under the control of the College of Osteopathy.”

What this meant was that Shaw took over the Villa for that purpose, advertising by the next spring with an image of the former hotel buildings that “nervous and mental cases [are] a specialty” and that the Sierra Madre Villa Sanitarium was “an ideal health resort.” While Shaw, who became president of the institution, remained in Los Angeles and maintained an office there, Boardman S. Weymouth, the secretary, was the onsite manager and superintendent, with the two appearing to operate the sanitarium for more than five years.

The institution was then acquired and operated by the Rest Hotel Company, with C.B. McCartey in charge and the New Year’s Day 1914 edition of the Times ran a feature that was likely an ad and which observed that the facility was “hidden in a wilderness of orange blossoms, in the most beautiful, restful and picturesque site in the world,” where “one turns about to face the valley from the balconies and sun parlor of the charming place and realizes that here is a true haven for rest, quiet and healthfulness.”

The sanitarium catered to three types of patient: “those needing the rest cure,” the nervous and mildly insane, “and those who desire to be reduced of obesity by natural methods, amid cheerful, wholesome surroundings, and without the dangerous methods of patent nostrums [medicines].” The elderly were particularly identified as those needing “a quiet home,” while it was added that modern methods were used for baths, electricity and exercise.

Trouble for the institution soon came, however, when attorney George H. Woodruff, who’d recently purchased a house adjacent to the Villa and later was the lawyer for the Homestead’s owner Walter P. Temple, filed a complaint against the facility and who

asserts that his wife and children are terrified by the peculiar antics of the inmates. He sets out at length these alleged vagaries, specifying particularly one man who attempted to enter his home and when barred out, kept guard in Woodruff’s orchard for four hours.

The attorney’s spouse, Nellie, called the Villa about the attempted invasion and was told to lock up her residence until the man could be apprehended and returned to the institution. A young man purportedly appeared at the Woodruff house and engaged in “dancing and loud singing” as he imagined himself to be a brass band, while “women patients . . . are cited by Woodruff as samples of the strange things his children are subjected to” as they apparently showed up at the house sans clothing.

Defendants in the suit included McCartey and three members of the Lyman family and it appears that Woodruff’s legal filing had the intended effect as there were no further located references to the sanitarium at the Villa. In May 1918, reported the Arcadia Tribune of the 18th, “the owners of the Lyman estate in the old Sierra Madre Villa tract have undertaken the development of water on a large scale” through a scheme to drill tunnels into the mountains, expected to cost some $10,000, but yield a supply for future development of the property.

The 19 October 1919 edition of the Times included an advertisement from Los Angeles auctioneer J.J. Sugarman for the “entire furniture and furnishings of the Sierra Madre Villa” to be sold in two days at what was referred to as Pasadena Glen, a recently applied name for an area just north and east of the Villa. Included in the auction were a piano, paintings, a desk, a safe, a pool table, tables, 150 chairs, bedding, silverware and dishes, window shades, heaters, mattresses and bedding, a refrigerator and more.

Another three years went by before the Times of 25 June 1922 reported,

The sale of the Sierra Madre Villa property, seventy-four acres . . . has been made to T[homas] B. Wilson of Los Angeles for $65,000 by the owners, James and Mary Lyman of Chicago [actually, the suburb of Evanston]. They have owned it since 1878 [actually, 1892]. One of the first tourist hotels in Southern California was once located on the site.

At the end of the year, in ad in the Monrovia News, the realtors Stewart and Ainley, stated that “last June we sold the Sierra Madre Villa for $52,000” but “it has since sold for $114,500.” There was yet another massive real estate boom going on at the time, but Thomas retained ownership, so this most recent transaction appears to have fallen out of escrow.

Not quite five years later, however, another sale was announced in the News of 9 August 1927, in which it was reported that Wilson sold 175 acres for more than $230,000 to a Pasadena man and that “the property which consists principally of mammoth orange groves was the former site of the old Sierra Madre Villa hotel.” The buyer, Jerry Hawkins, was said to be prepared to subdivide the tract “into high-class acreage estates” which would “transform [the area] to a marked degree,” but, again, Thomas ended up keeping the land for nearly another two decades.

When Wilson died in 1947, the Pasadena Star-News (a columnist, Perry Worden, whose Temple family history years before went unrealized, wrote a feature on Cogswell and the Villa in 1942) stated that he kept the ranch “until two years ago when he sold it for subdivision purposes” and moved to the Crown City. In the meantime, the Times, in its fiftieth anniversary edition in December 1931, ran an 1880s photo of the Villa, with a caption outlining some of its history, while reproducing signatures of famous visitors from the hotel register, including Civil War generals Ulysses S. Grant (also a president), William Tecumseh Sherman and Phil Sheridan.

More than two decades later, in the 15 February 1953 issue of the paper, Anita, daughter of William P. Rhoades (who ran paint and stone companies in Los Angeles after leaving the Villa and died in 1913) and Sarah Diem, daughter of Gardner Cogswell (William died in 1903 from injuries sustained when he was hit by a streetcar, while Gardner died a decade later) visited the site.

They recalled that “hard-working Chinese helped clear the jungle of chaparral” to prepare the land and “Ah Eat” supervised “with plenty of savvy” those who maintained the grain fields, vineyards and managed livestock. Other famous visitors beyond the generals included railroad tycoons and partners Collis P. Huntington, Charles Crocker and Mark Hopkins, as well as Helen Hunt Jackson, author of the immensely popular novel Ramona.

The article concluded,

As time went on it lost its former glory and began to fall into decay, until the buildings finally were torn down in 1923.

Today the Villa’s acreage is completely subdivided, with homes and gardens standing where orchards and fields once were. Only the old laundry house, now rebuilt into an early American [style] residence with lumber taken from the old dormitory that housed the Chinese workers, remains of what used to be. A few majestic magnolias planted by Miss Rhoades’ mother and one century plant still stand.

The Sierra Madre Villa story, part of which has been summarized in this series of posts, reflects on general San Gabriel Valley history, tourism, health, agriculture and more and we’re fortunate that the Homestead has a collection of photos and ephemera to illustrate what has been shared over the last week or so. Meanwhile, for more about the Villa, be sure to check out eastofallen.com.