by Paul R. Spitzzeri
It was a great pleasure to speak this afternoon to the Monrovia Historical Society at the city library, sharing some background on the Workman and Temple family and the Homestead, artifacts in the Museum’s collection related to the foothill city, and regarding the short-lived Safer Aeroplane Company and its owner, Harvey F. Sutton. Displayed among the artifacts are some very early cabinet card photographs of the nascent town, dating to about 1887, when Monrovia was one of many communities emerging during the important Boom of the Eighties, which peaked when William H. Workman was mayor of Los Angeles. A great end to the presentation came when Mike Andrews of the Society shared a pair of models, one in a case representing the barn where the work was conducted, of the Safer plane designed by Sutton.
This post shares some of the early history of Monrovia, situated on the northeastern sections of Rancho Santa Anita, which was purchased in spring 1875 from Los Angeles merchant Harris Newmark by Elias J. “Lucky” Baldwin just before Baldwin bought the neighboring western 2/3 of Rancho San Francisquito from Lewis Wolfskill, F.P.F. Temple and William Workman and then acquired by the 1879 foreclosure of a loan to the Temple and Workman bank many thousands of acres to the east and south, as well as what became known as the Baldwin Hills west of Los Angeles.
While Baldwin held on to much of his vast holdings for more than three decades until his death in 1909, some portions were sold relatively quickly, including tracts to William N. Monroe, John D. Bicknell, James F. Crank and Edward F. Spence, from whose lands Monrovia emerged as the great boom developed. Monroe, who was a superintendent of construction for the powerful Southern Pacific Railroad and a former Los Angeles City Council member and owner of a hotel next to the SP’s River Depot in what is now the Angel City’s Chinatown, returned in summer 1884 from a stint working for the railroad in Texas and soon acquired large tracts of Santa Anita from Baldwin. The 16 November edition of the Los Angeles Herald referred to his building a “villa” on his new holding.
Bicknell, a successful Los Angeles attorney, and Spence, who preceded Workman as mayor, serving from December 1884 to December 1886, acquired Santa Anita land as did Crank, who was president of the Los Angeles and San Gabriel Valley Railroad, which worked on a line from the Angel City, up the Arroyo Seco to Pasadena, and then along the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains as it sought to compete with the SP’s route through the southern portion of the valley.
The first located reference to the name Monrovia was in the 2 December 1885 edition of the Herald, which briefly observed that “W.N. Monroe, Mayor of Monrovia” was in the Angel City. A little over a week later, under the heading of “Another California Gem,” the paper reported on the purchase of 360 acres from Baldwin by Bicknell, Crank and Spence “on the line of the Los Angeles and San Gabriel Valley Railroad, at Monrovia, below the Sawpit Cañon.” It was added that additional land was purchased to the east at Duarte “so that there is room for 2500 people.
Further, “among the improvements will be a monster hotel of 100 rooms erected by Mr. S[amuel] Keefer, of the Grand Central Hotel in New York.” Keefer, like so many others from points east, came to this area for health reasons, having been a merchant and proprietor of hostelries and then traveled through Europe and México before settling in Monrovia, where his project was the Grand View Hotel.
The piece added that water for these properties was to be brought out of Sawpit Canyon with the statement that “this water is tinctured with iron and magnesia and considered the finest in the Union” and then remarked,
About a dozen capitalists will unite in making a paradise of the easterly portion of the Santa Anita Rancho. In fact, their intention is to make Monrovia the model colony of the State in every respect. As soon as a cargo of delayed ties arrive, the track of the L.A.&S.G.V.R.R. will be laid from Lamanda Park [northeast Pasadena] to Monrovia, when a scene of activity will be presented that will be an astonishment to the people.
In its edition of the 15th, under the heading of “An Earthly Paradise,” a representative from the Herald visited the area, passing by the construction of the Hotel Raymond in South Pasadena, Abbot Kinney’s Kinneloa, the Sierra Madre Villa, Carterhia (Sierra Madre) and Leonard J. Rose’s Sunny Slope, with Lucky Baldwin leading the tour and Monroe along for the ride, and wrote, after an extensive review of Baldwin’s ranch, that “near the Saw Pit Cañon is the fine residence of Mr. W.N. Monroe” who “began here about a year ago in the brush, and now has a beautiful place” with fruit-bearing orange trees, peas, potatoes and strawberries, much of the latter planted between the rows of the citrus trees. “Further up is the new purchase” of Keefer, who was mentioned as being among the many American capitalists investing in México during the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz and who owned 280 acres.
After mentioning that Keefer was building a house in addition to the Grand View, he was quoted as telling Baldwin, “I will put up, to begin with, a wing costing, say $200,000, and if that pays I will then put some money into the venture.” The host stated that more than two decades prior, $125,000 in gold was mined from Sawpit and that he had some samples of gold at his residence. Examined were the remains of the old Mission San Gabriel zanja, or water ditch, Baldwin’s first ditch and the cement pipe being laid for the Bicknell, Crank, Keefer, Monroe and Spence properties, among others, as well for Baldwin. It was also mentioned that tunnels were drilled into the mountains in which was considered “exhaustless treasures” while it was asserted that “the pipes will last forever.”
As 1886 dawned, a small, but notable, report from the Herald of 9 January was that an “amateur minstrel troupe” was established at Monrovia, with Monroe’s son Milton said to be “a prominent member of the ‘Nobby Nigger Minstrels,'” this a reminder of how pervasive and casual racism was at the time, when such groups performing in blackface were so common. A little over a week later, the paper noted that the LA&SGVRR was building bridges over washes coming out of the mountains and three stations in the works, one at Baldwin’s Santa Anita headquarters, the second at his town of Baldwin (later, Arcadia) and at Monrovia.
At the end of February, Monroe informed the Herald that his “rich warm mesa land” at Monrovia was yielding substantial amounts of tomatoes, selling at three cents a pound, or $240 an acre per month, meaning that a seasonal income of some $1800 was possible. A couple of weeks later, Keefer was setting out 1,000 Washington navel orange trees like to bear in 1887 along with “500 deciduous fruit trees and a vineyard” on his property bordering Monroe to the east.
Little was said about Monrovia for a couple of months, though the Herald of 18 May briefly reported that Los Angeles liquor and wine dealer Henry J. Woollacott, who was building a complex of structures at Pasadena, “will also erect a building at Monrovia for mercantile uses,” and he ended up buying and selling real estate there, as well. The next day, the paper commented that the railroad line was progressing east of Lamanda Park and that “it is important to get down to the new town of Monrovia as soon as possible, to haul lumber in for the great improvements to be initiated at Baldwin and Monrovia.”
Just under a week later, the Herald informed readers that the LA&SGVRR “are about to extend their track from its present terminus to Monrovia,” which was “to give a great impetus to settlement along the foothills, a region which is destined to be the most attractive region of Los Angeles county.” The same day, the 25th, the paper briefly remarked that “a contract was let yesterday for the construction of a Town Hall and two stores at Monrovia to Messrs. J.G. Rebber & Bro.”
The Times of 3 June listed among the real estate filings that that “map of Monrovia tract” was submitted, while the next day’s Herald listed the first of the located lot sales there, as Spence, Crank and Bicknell completed two transactions of lots, one for $1500 and the other for $200. These followed by a few days the first major description of the new town that was found, with the Herald observing,
A short distance from the nascent city of Baldwin lies the young and vigorous settlement of Monrovia. There is something unique about the history and progress of this enterprise, which promises to be the most successful and beautiful of all the experiments of the kind thus far made in Los Angeles county.
It was added that the property began at the base of the San Gabriel (then usually called the Sierra Madre) range “and runs at a gentle slope, which admits of perfect irrigation, towards the plain.” At 1200′ elevation, Monrovia, like the other places (Carterhia, Duarte, Kinneloa and Sierra Madre Villa), had a perfect climate, so that “no man with bronchitis or in the opening stages of consumption [tuberculosis], could long remain sick here” given that “the air is too bright and stimulating to admit of any obstructed human organs.”
Moreover, the account noted, “gentle sea-breezes . . . reach the settlement after passing over the warm plain for a distance, in an air [straight] line, of twenty-five or thirty miles.” The trio of principals, Bicknell, Monroe and Spence, though why Crank was left out is unknown, “saw the advantages of what is now Monrovia and bought the land” and it was Monroe’s lot to engaged in “reclaiming it from the wild state,” while he also “completed the erection of what is perhaps the most elegant and complete country residence in Southern California” and embowered “with the most exquisite flora and foliage.” Monroe also cleared the brush to provide for the supply of water from Santa Anita Creek and Sawpit Canyon, “half of each stream being available for irrigating and domestic uses at Monrovia.”
The piped-in water was for 480 town and 100 five-acre farm plot lots with “wide and handsome avenues” given such names as Lemon and Orange (the east-west streets named after fruit trees) and Myrtle and Magnolia (the north-south thoroughfares named after flowering trees). The article went on that,
The progress which has already been made at Monrovia is simply astonishing. A number of handsome buildings have been erected in the town and many more are in the process of erection. Mr. Samuel B. Keefer . . . is now engaged in erecting a small hotel which will contain thirty rooms. Mr. Keefer intends shortly to build a large and sightly hotel on the scale of the Raymond, on a commanding site which has already been selected. He has purchased a tract of one hundred acres in Monrovia, which he has already partially improved.
As for the agricultural aspect, it was averred that the work to date “is astonishing considering the short time which has elapsed since ground was first broken” and the citrus and other fruit trees were such that the area “is not surpassed for fine flavor, size and beauty, anywhere on the footstool,” or foothills of the mountain range. Moreover, “it is the hands of specially energetic and pushing people, who possess the means to develop all its latent possibilities, and we risk nothing in predicting that its growth will be unprecedented.”
Adding that Monrovia was close enough to Los Angeles “to combine the pleasures of city and country life,” the Herald noted that, once rail service was opened, it would take but 40 minutes to reach the Angel City. In fact, along the LA&SGVRR route, “a development really magical is to be noted” and, with its purported to be profitable, the road was expected to extend to San Bernardino, where the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe had just reached with a transcontinental line that was crucial to the opening of the Boom of the Eighties. Future work would mean that the road “will be attended by such phenomenal development as that we have noted at Monrovia.”
Town lots were originally offered at $100, but “so eager has been the competition for them that they have already gone up to $200 and $250,” while the five-acre parcels saw a similar increase in price “and the end is by no means yet.” The paper always promoted the value of foothill tracts, provided they had plenty of water and it concluded that “a second Pasadena is now rapidly developing at Monrovia, and it will not take half the time to reach respectable numbers and wealth as was required of the tentative effort of the Indiana colony.” When Pasadena was established, however, any early momentum was thwarted by the bust that followed the smaller boom of the late 1860s and first half of the Seventies.
We’ll pause here, noting that the featured photograph for this post from the Homestead’s collection, is by Charles H. Shaffner of Los Angeles for the Keefer Ocean View Subdivision sale in 1887, and return soon with part two as we carry some of this nascent Monrovia history forward through the rest of 1886, so check back with us for that.