“Few People Appreciate the Real Greatness of this Garden Spot Just at the City’s Gates”: Some Early History of Montebello to 1930, Part One

by Paul R. Spitzzeri

It was a pleasure for the Homestead to host teachers from the Montebello Unified School District, including some from Bell Gardens, along with staff from the U.C.L.A. History-Geography Project working on professional development for those teaching at the elementary, junior high and high school levels. In addition to a tour, led by my colleague Beatriz Rivas, a slide presentation was given that covered some of Montebello’s history, especially the diverse groups that have made that place home.

That talk began with a statement that Montebello is adjacent to the Whittier Narrows, which might be something of a “fertile crescent” of our region because of the vital importance of the Río Hondo (the old San Gabriel River) and the later channel of the San Gabriel River running from the steep, granitic San Gabriel Mountains and through the Whittier Narrows these watercourses cut through what are now the separate Puente and Montebello hills systems.

Where there’s water, there’s life, so the lushness of the landscape and the abundance of wildlife naturally drew our area’s indigenous people to settle in the Narrows section with several prominent villages in its vicinity and along creeks and washes that empty into the rivers. For thousands of years, native peoples managed their environment to maximize the returns of its resources, including hunting and gathering throughout the area including Montebello, and then came a shocking encounter in summer 1769.

This was with the Portolá Expedition, the first European incursion by land in California, and which stopped at the Narrows to take advantage of those resources, while Father Juan Crespí identified as a premium location for a mission. Two years later, Mission San Gabriel was established along the banks of the Río Hondo, though the missionaries soon learned just how dangerous the river could be in flood, so the establishment was relocated to a higher, dryer location where the old stone church remains today.

In 1921, for the 150th anniversary of the mission’s founding, Walter P. Temple, flush with oil money realized from the entirely accidental by his nine-year-old son, Thomas, of the precious “black gold” on their 60-acre tract in and adjoining the northeastern corner of the Montebello Hills, erected a marker for La Misión Vieja (Old Mission was moniker for the mostly Latino community that settled in the Narrows from the time the missions were secularized in the 1830s) and the site is now a State Historic Landmark. The problem is that the actual site was actually a short distance north, but the landmark status convinces people that the plaque marks the spot!

In any case, that shuttering of the missions freed up huge tracts of land embracing many ranchos formerly controlled by the padres at San Gabriel. Among those made available for land grants was La Merced, an unusually shaped tract with a sharp point at its western end and which became, in 1844, the property of Casilda Soto de Lobo—it bears pointing out that women could own real property under Spanish and Mexican law, which American women could not under common law.

The widow constructed an adobe house on a bluff overlooking the Río Hondo and lived there during several years of enormous change, including the American invasion of Mexican California that included the Battle of the San Gabriel River, which took place just a short distance south of the Soto Adobe. Following the war came the Gold Rush, which was a boon for many local ranchers whose cattle proved an invaluable food source for miners and migrants, who mostly flocked to the more northern reaches of California.

Yet, Doña Casilda got into financial difficulties and borrowed money from her neighbor, Rancho La Puente co-owner William Workman, and, after she was unable to pay him back, lost La Merced to Workman by foreclosure at the end of 1850. He immediately conveyed the 2,363-acre tract to his ranch foreman, Juan Matias Sánchez, who took possession of the Soto Adobe and added a wing to what remains a City of Montebello historic site, and to his daughter and son-in-law, Antonia Margarita and F.P.F. Temple.

The couple built an adobe house near the southeast corner of today’s Rosemead and San Gabriel boulevards in what has long been a flood zone controlled by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and kept from development. Over a quarter century, however, the Temples had a substantial adobe, described as measuring 70′ x 110′ feet, outbuildings, vineyards and orchards and other elements that made it the headquarters of a successful, if somewhat small by standards of ranches of the day, farming and livestock operation.

Sánchez, too, enjoyed a high standard of living on his half of La Merced and, with Temple and Workman, controlled large amounts of acreage in adjoining ranchos and the three men were compadres, entailing duties and responsibilities beyond mere friendship. This was severely tested when the Temple and Workman bank, an early Los Angeles financial institution, economically foundered in late 1875 and Elias J. “Lucky” Baldwin would only lend money to it if Sánchez included his half of La Merced as collateral, though he had no involvement in the bank.

Obviously worried, Sánchez paid a visit to a trusted friend, Los Angeles merchant Harris Newmark, one of a cadre of European Jewish immigrants to the Angel City during the 1850s and who amassed a significant fortune during his more than six decades in the metropolis. Newmark counseled his friend to refuse the demand by Baldwin (who acquired Newmark’s nearby Rancho Santa Anita for more than $200,000 just months before), but Sánchez, as a compadre yielded, even as he uttered “no quiero a morir de hambre” (“I don’t want to die of hunger”) as he huddled with Newmark.

Despite the infusion of cash, the bank soon failed and Baldwin foreclosed in 1879, though he allowed Sánchez to remain in his home with some 200 acres around it and sold the Temple homestead of 50 acres back to that family. Among the land Baldwin secured were the largely barren Montebello Hills, basically considered of little value other than for grazing of livestock, though four decades later that would change dramatically.

Another notable figure in the area’s history was Alessandro Repetto, a native of Genoa, Italy (hometown of Christopher Columbus), who settled in Los Angeles in the 1850s. He undertook sheep raising on a ranch belonging to Ozro W. Childs, a nursery owner who went on to great success in real estate and other business interests in the Angel City, and resided on the “Old Mission road,” almost certainly the historic route from town to the Mission San Gabriel.

Over some years, however, Repetto amassed a significant amount of land, somewhere in the vicinity of 5,000 to 6,000 acres including the northern reaches of the Rancho San Antonio, long held by Antonio María Lugo until his death in 1860, as well as public land not part of any rancho. About where the western pointed tip of La Merced met San Antonio, Repetto built an adobe residence just east of Garfield Avenue in the southern part of Monterey Park—there is an El Repetto Drive in that area now. Though a common-law marriage with a member of the Alvitre family, early settlers of Old Mission, he had a son, Timoteo.

Repetto was best known in his day for being the victim of a spring 1874 robbery by the famed bandido, Tiburcio Vásquez, who surprised the rancher at his residence and demanded money. Repetto sent Timoteo into Los Angeles to withdraw $800 from the Temple and Workman bank, but his nervousness drew the attention of F.P.F. Temple, who contacted Sheriff William R. Rowland. Despite the law enforcement officer’s careful plan to send a posse to follow young Repetto home and surprise the outlaw, Vásquez escaped and headed north into the San Gabriels, pausing just long enough to relieve a surveyor working on the new Indiana Colony property, what became Pasadena, of his watch as he fled.

Repetto died in 1883, leaving the vast majority of his estate, the executor of which was none other than Harris Newmark (who also happened to acquire, for a song, the Temple Block in Los Angeles after the Temple and Workman bank failure—Repetto was a debtor of $10,000 to that institution), to a brother, Antonio, who came from Italy to handle its affairs. At the end of 1885, Antonio sold most of the Repetto Ranch to Newmark for $60,000, and just prior to that period, some Italians, Gaetano and Scotto, advertised for the rent of pasture land on the property.

While the Boom of the Eighties followed, Newmark apparently used the ranch as grazing land until the 19th century came to a close. In 1899, he, along with another Jewish Angeleno of note, Kaspare Cohn, created what was initially called the Newmark Colony, or Newmark Tract, by subdividing large sections of the Repetto Ranch. The 20 January 1900 issue of the Los Angeles Record reported,

The subdivision into five-acre tracts of the Repetto ranch, which adjoins Boyle Heights, and also of 200 acres of the Laguna ranch [a portion of San Antonio and which is in modern Bell Gardens], which is adjacent thereto, is to be undertaken immediately. There will be a townsite named Newmark. A plentiful supply of water has been obtained for the acreage and town. This improvement will aid the local business and general progress of Boyle Heights [founded by William H. Workman, banker Isaias W. Hellman, and merchant John Lazzarovich a quarter-century prior], and will add another thrifty suburban town and district to this city.

Despite these early efforts, it was not for a few more years until some major advertising was undertaken, with the 15 March 1903 edition of the Los Angeles Times publishing one that referred to the larger subdivision as Montebello and the town as Newmark. Notably, the latter was platted to take advantage of the newly built San Pedro, Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad and the proposed, and soon completed, Pacific Electric Railway line, not to mention what is now Whittier Boulevard, for easy access to and from downtown Los Angeles, which may explain at least partially why there were some delays in getting the project out to the public.

The Los Angeles Express of 18 May included an ad for an auction by the sole agent, James R. Collins, who had an office on 4th Street between Spring Street and Broadway, for Newmark, to be held nine days later, including 40 “choice building lots” of 50’x125′ and half that many adjoining five-acre tracts. As per usual for such auctions, there was free transportation from town and a free lunch, while lot sales involved a quarter of the price up front for town lots and a third for the five-acre portions and the “balance [paid over a] long time, at 6 per cent” interest.

Collins, in what was also pretty standard booster language for such projects, proclaimed that,

Most everyone has heard of beautiful Montebello and the wonderful richness of its soil; the $95,000 water system that was installed some two years ago, with its twin reservoirs holding upwards of six million gallons of mountain water [likely the water transported by the Río Hondo], supplied by the greatest pumping plant on this coast; of its $5,000 schoolhouse, occupied by forty robust [!] pupils; of the six-inch strawberries grown at Montebello; of the new depot at Newmark, on the Salt Lake railroad; the fine new cottages that dot this frostless belt of rich, sandy loam. And yet few people appreciate the real greatness of this garden spot just at the city’s gate . . . This is the place that has possibilities far greater than any suburban town.

Notably, the northern portion of the Repetto Ranch (in which Newmark Avenue runs east to west paralleling parts of Garvey Avenue) ended up in the hands of Isaias W. Hellman, the banker and financier who was a former partner of Temple and Workman before launching the very successful Farmers’ and Merchants’ Bank and then went to run the Bank of Nevada and Wells Fargo.

In November 1891, a partition of the Repetto Ranch was effected in which Newmark took possession of not far under 3,000 acres, Hellman received a bit above 1,500 acres, and prominent legal figures John D. Bicknell and Stephen M. White (the latter later a United States Senator and instrumental in securing federal support for the development of what is now the Port of Los Angeles) obtained not quite 530 acres

The 15 March 1892 edition of the Los Angeles Herald reported that “natural gas has been struck adjoining Los Angeles” and “is pouring out in large quantities, under high pressure, and appears to possess all the qualities necessary for heat and power purposes.” The location, three miles east of the Los Angeles city line, was the property of Hellman and “formerly known as the Repetto place” and, once the odor of gas was detected, crews kept at it until, on a Saturday, “it burst forth in large volumes” and “when lighted the blaze extended for twenty feet up in the air.”

The following day’s issue of the Los Angeles Express included a staffer’s notes on the discovery, said to be on the western edge of the tract of 2,000 acres, came as Hellman’s workers were drilling an artesian well seeking water for irrigating the portion of the ranch leased to a farmer. The well, of eight inches diameter, was down some 135 feet and went only through gravel and sand, not bedrock, and there was no water found at all when the gas pocket was struck. Another 25 feet down, water was encountered, but it was “bubbling and sputtering like a boiling pot,” while no oil was encountered.

Hellman was in San Francisco and his brother, Herman, told the paper that there were no defined plans as to the well, though the paper entertained the possibility that a fuel plant could be located there if conditions warranted. In late July, Hellman talked of establishing such a facility and a pipeline to supply gas to Los Angeles, but nothing came of the idea. Notably, there was mention of the adjacent ranch of Bicknell and White and a well drilled there four years earlier apparently had some oil in it, though not enough to pursue further.

About a dozen years prior, to the east, former Sheriff Rowland and partner Boyle Heights resident and oil prospector Burdette Chandler, who was succeeded by Los Angeles pipe manufacturer, William Lacy, began drilling oil wells on Rowland’s inherited portion of Rancho La Puente, at the top of the Puente Hills. In the mid-Eighties, Chandler earnestly prospected at Petrolia in Soquel Canyon further southeast, though with little permanent success. In 1892, Charles Canfield and Edward L. Doheny, recent mining transplants from New Mexico, used a primitive drilling apparatus on a shoestring budget and hit oil northwest of downtown Los Angeles.

What became increasingly clear was that an oil belt existed that ran from the Canfield and Doheny Los Angeles Oil Field southeast to northeast Orange County, embracing the areas mentioned. Doheny followed his Angel City success by bringing in, in 1897, a well at Olinda, now part of Brea, that became Orange County’s first producer. In 1895, the Central Oil Company was formed with the intention of working two tracts, one in the Puente Hills not far from Rowland’s field and the Homestead and the other “on the Repetto hills.” While the firm extensively worked its Whittier-area holdings with some success, it does not appear the Repetto Ranch area was much developed.

We’ll return with part two and go further into the development of Montebello, including in oil and the stunning resurgence of the Temple family, so join us for that.