by Paul R. Spitzzeri
For the first time in several years after many prior appearances, the Homestead staffed a booth at the Earth Day celebration held at the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts facility near the Museum on Workman Mill Road at the confluence of Interstate 605 and the 60 Freeway and on the east bank of the San Gabriel River.
This location is particularly rich and important in our regional history as the ample waters of the river provided the plant and animal life that drew our indigenous ancestors to establish large villages there in what is often called the Whittier Narrows. After thousands of years there, the native peoples were likely stunned to witness the arrival of the Portolá Expedition in summer 1769 and, two years later, the original Mission San Gabriel was established just a short distance to the southwest.
The clash and collision of cultures was, of course, profound and devastating for the Indians of our region and conditions worsened greatly after the missions were secularized by the Mexican government in the 1830s. The Sanitation District site was part of Mission San Gabriel’s Rancho La Puente, where cattle and horses raised and wheat and corn grown, but, after secularization, La Puente was granted in 1842 to John Rowland and then, three years later, regranted to him and William Workman.
Workman controlled this western part of the rancho, primarily engaging in running livestock in that section until his expansion into agriculture following the debilitating floods and droughts of the Civil War years led him in the late 1860s to construct a mill at the base of the northwestern corner of the Puente Hills along San José Creek and close to the river. A road running along the eastern edge of the Narrows took on the name Workman Mill Road and the Sanitation Districts facility is on that thoroughfare within a short distance of the mill.
Workman’s daughter, Antonia Margarita Temple and her children owned what was generally known as the La Puente Mill Property in the last decades of the 19th century, though the subdivided tracts were sold in pieces. Among those who took possession of lands there were Italians, who planted vineyards and made wine, and the Pellissier Dairy was also just to the south, and the area remained largely agricultural until after the World War II period.
In the early 20th century, Japanese farmers could be found throughout this section of the San Gabriel Valley, though, because of laws preventing them from owning land, they leased and rented property. A man named Yatsuda, for example, leased the 75-acre Homestead in the 1910s and, when Walter P. Temple purchased the ranch in late 1917, he was unable to take possession until the end of the following year because of Yatsuda’s occupancy.
Greater Los Angeles saw a major increase in Japanese immigration during these years, with large populations living in the South Bay, especially in the Gardena area, while there were substantial communities in and around Huntington Beach in Orange County, Norwalk and Artesia, and other sections. High-value crops like citrus, walnuts and the like were excluded from them, so the Japanese tended to focus on intensive truck farming of vegetables and fruits, as well as nurseries with many dedicated largely to flowers.
At the Earth Day event, artifacts from the Museum’s collection related to nurseries were brought and displayed, hopefully tying in that topic to the theme of the day. Among these is an ink blotter, probably from the 1920s, from the Pico Street Nursery, located in Pico-Union district, southwest of downtown Los Angeles, and at the southeast corner of the intersection with Burlington Avenue. Today, there is a fashion and designer fabrics business at that address.
The object has a colorful vignette of a Cotswold-style cottage covered by a profusion of floral vines, as well as bushes, shrubs and trees, while below the business title is “Florists” and the name of proprietor Joe M. Yoshida. Text indicated that “We Carry Only the Freshest Stock of Flowers” and “Funeral and Decorative Work Our Specialty”, the nursery was located a short distance east of Rosedale Cemetery. Also mentioned were “cut flowers, floral designs, palms, trees and all species of plants.”
Newspaper references are limited to advertisements found from 1911 to 1922, though the business operated for considerably longer than that. Moreover, a search for “Joe” Yoshida can be challenging, although the owner was found under that name in the 1910, 1930 and 1940 censuses (he could not be located in 1920, though there were references to his being in Los Angeles), while his obituary was located by that moniker. His given name, however, was Masajiro Yoshida and he was born in December 1893 at Hiroshima, the city of 1.2 million residents on Honshu Island that was one of the two Japanese metropolises attacked by atomic bombs dropped by the United States in August 1945 at the end of World War II.
Yoshida came to America in May 1907, during the period when President Theodore Roosevelt reached an informal pact with the rising international power of Japan in what is called the “Gentlemen’s Agreement,” by which immigration was halted in exchange for the desegregation of public schools in San Francisco. A ship manifest for a landing at Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada lists Masajiro Yoshida, age 14 and his occupation given as a merchant. A stamp indicated that he was one of several arrivals who were “Detained,” but, assuming this is the same person, he was released.
It seems he quickly headed to Los Angeles, almost certainly to join a brother, Tomokichi (who went by Tom), who migrated to America in 1900, and, under the name “Masa,” was listed in the 1910 census as residing with his sibling in a house just west of the University of Southern California. The Yoshida brothers were both shown “nursery gardner [sic],” suggesting that the Pico Street Nursery was already in operation.
The first found advertisement for the nursery is from the Los Angeles Express of 1 April 1911 with readers advised of a “Special Sale on Phoenix Canariensis Palms,” this being the Canary Island date palm that a LAist article states became popular a little later in other high-end residential enclaves like Beverly Hills and Hancock Park, so who knows if Yoshida, who was still in his teens, supplied such examples there or elsewhere in the burgeoning Angel City.
He continued that 1,500 of the trees, from three-and-a-half to five feet tall, “must go at sacrifice prices,” while also mentioned were “imported and domestic ornamental plants, fruit trees for early planting, shurbbery, ferns, etc..” Not only were visitors welcomed, but landscape gardening services were offered, as well. A few weeks later, a second ad in the paper specified that 100 of the palms were to be sold at $1 each, fifty cents below the regular price, while 1,500 more were offered for a “bargain week” at $70 per 100.
The Los Angeles Times of 23 August included an ad in which the nursery promoted “fine palms, ferns and ornamental trees” as well as the “largest assortment of pot plants” and a “variety [of] choice roses,” while it was added that “landscape gardening [is] a specialty.” Notably, among the half-dozen other nurseries in the category was the Figueroa Street Nursery, located on that major downtown thoroughfare near the intersection with Pico, where the Convention Center sits today, and we’ll highlight that Japanese-owned business in a post coming soon.
A few weeks later, the paper carried a want ad that sought “a position by first-class Japanese gardner [sic], has good experience” with the Pico Street Nursery being the address, so it may be that Yoshida or a sibling sought that extra work. By the following March, the Express ran advertisements stating that the business was operated by the “Yoshida Bros., Props,” and added that there 8,500 Canary Island palms that had to be sold at “sacrifice prices.” In addition to the general run of plants mentioned above, it was added that the enterprise sold “Japanese persimmon” and “Japanese pear” trees.
When a June 1913 ad in the Times spotlighted a “Closing Out Sale,” it seems there was a change in management afoot and it was noted that “all kinds of plants for sale at cut prices” offering a “fine opportunity to get first-class flowers, shrubs and plants at a very low figure.” Examples included a dozen two-year old roses at $1.80 marked down from $3, arbor vitae trees discounted from 75 to 50 cents, fancy hanging baskets reduced by half to 50 cents, and “beautiful Japanese flower pots” as low as that price.
The Valentine’s Day 1914 edition of the Express included an advertisement that Pico Street Nurseries, with that plural change, was “under new management,” perhaps meaning under Joe’s sole control and it was added that he operated retail and wholesale aspects, as well. Under the phrase “Landscape Gardening” was the statement that “we have restocked the Pico Street Nurseries with a new and complete line of Imported Trees, Shrubs, Plants, Rose Bushes and Palms of all the new and popular varieties.” Along with cut flowers and floral designs, readers were implored that “now is the time to plant Fruit Trees and Roses.”
A couple of months later in the Los Angeles Tribune an ad featured 500 dozen choice roses with a special offered to make room for new inventory at just a quarter each and $2.75 per dozen delivered, while “home plants and shrubs of all kinds” were presented “at all prices.” Beyond the cut flowers, it was added that “floral pieces [are] our specialty.”
In 1916, a quartet of advertisements were found, two of which were focused on the Easter season and the obvious promotion of the lily, said to be the best obtainable in Los Angeles, with one in the Times stating that they were “very late this year, but we have lots of them” and the other having two images of potted examples. At the end of the year, the focus, of course, was on Christmas holiday offerings, with one in the Times of the 16th asking readers “part of your holiday pleasure is spent in decorating, isn’t it?,” so they were encouraged to get holly “and all kinds of Christmas trees.” A less detailed ad was in the same day’s Rural World, along with another one from Figueroa Street Nursery.
For the next several years, from 1917 to 1922, the located advertisements were all for Easter, with the 3 April 1917 one in the Times offering the most material for the “grand and tremendous sale of superb and beautiful” examples to “decorate your church” and “decorate your home.” Otherwise, readers were warned, “the Easter season is incomplete if you do not procure some of our exquisite” plants as “prices are so reasonable as to be within the reach of all.”
Thousands of begonias, ferns, hyacinths, palms, pansies, roses and tulips were also listed beyond “others too numerous to mention.” Otherwise, the last of the ads from 1920-1922 were essentially the same and no more were found beyond then. Notably, Tomokichi and Masajiro were both recorded at the nursery address when they registered for the draft during the First World War and Tomokichi was still there when the 1920 census was taken, so the partnership was apparently resumed, but nothing could be located about Tomokichi afterward.
The 1930 census found Yoshida at the same address and his occupation as a florist in a florist shop and a decade later he was shown as a “nursery florist.” Then came World War II and the internment in 1942 of Japanese-Americans in concentration camps and he (shown as a nursery operator and flower grower), his wife Yoshiko—they were married in 1919—and their daughter Yuriko and three sons, Takeshi, Seiji and Toshio, were taken to the Santa Anita racetrack before being sent to the Gila River camp, southeast of Phoenix, in Arizona.
Yuriko ended up being released in March 1945 from Poston, Arizona, near the Colorado River, while Takeshi left the camp in late July 1944 and went to Chicago and Toshio joined the military and in September 1944 was sent to Fort Douglas, Utah. Masajiro, Yoshiko and Seiji left the camp on 12 October 1945 and ended up in Compton. Five years later, the family, including Seiji and Toshio, resided in a still-standing Craftsman bungalow in the Jefferson Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, west of the University of Southern California, with neighbors including other Japanese as well as Black families, and Masajiro, who became an American citizen in 1954, was listed as a “private home gardener.”
He lived until July 1972 when he died not far shy of his 80th birthday, with his funeral service held at the Hompa Hongwanji Buddhist Temple, which moved just a few years before from its original location a short distance to the west in Little Tokyo in a building now part of the Japanese-American National Museum. Masajiro Yoshida’s life arc in Los Angeles was a remarkable one, including as a young entrepreneur in the nursery business for many years through his Pico Street Nursery.