Sharing Some Further History of Merced Williams Rains and Francisca Williams Carlisle With the Chino Valley Historical Society

by Paul R. Spitzzeri

It was a great pleasure to be invited, for the fourth consecutive year, to speak to the Chino Valley Historical Society at their annual Pioneer Picnic, this one marking the centennial of the organization. Previous talks have included discussing some of the history of the Rancho Santa Ana del Chino, embracing the modern cities of Chino and Chino Hills, including that of its grantee, the redoubtable and formidable Don Antonio María Lugo, who received the former Mission San Gabriel holding in 1841 and his son-in-law, Isaac Williams, who ran the ranch until his death in 1856.

Today, the topic concerned the remarkable and convoluted lives of Williams’ teenage daughters and heirs, Merced and Francisca, about whom a prior post on this blog was concerned. That discussion was mainly about how the 17 and 15 year-old sisters quickly married ranch employees John Rains and Robert Carlisle; how the two men quickly arranged for the former to sell his wife’s half to the latter (well, his spouse) so he could buy the nearby Rancho Cucamonga; and how the fortunes of the hot-headed Southerners, financially and legally, led to their violent deaths in 1862 and 1865. The post briefly touched upon what happened to their widows after that, but what we’ll do here is supplement that material with some further detail.

Rains’ unsolved murder in late 1862 left Merced with young children, the substantial Cucamonga ranch and suspicion among some persons that she was directly involved in her husband’s death, purportedly over concern of Rains’ indiscriminate use of her money for all kinds of projects and scheme during the preceding four years. It was also whispered that she was too intimate with Ramòn Carrillo, of a prominent Californio family and who was killed as he left Cucamonga not long after Rains’ death. There were other suspects, moreover, but the truth was never discovered.

As for Carlisle, he, too, might have had a motive to kill his brother-in-law, due to conflicts between them, but he also worked to gain control over Merced’s business affairs, though he was then removed on accusations of mishandling her estate. When Los Angeles County Under-Sheriff Andrew Jackson King was appointed to take control, Carlisle sought revenge and this culminated in a spectacular gun battle in early July 1865 at the Bella Union Hotel in the Angel City (of which Rains was an owner when he died) in which he and one of King’s brothers were killed.

With the sisters now widowed, their paths diverged radically from that point onward. Because Rains mortgaged Cucamonga and encumbered it with other debts, Merced, who faced threats on her life that required Army troops to guard her residence on top of the economic uncertainty with which she was left, had to deal with a foreclosure action by the estate of Philip Sichel, one of a cadre of Jewish merchants in Los Angeles and who executed the mortgage with Rains, but died in 1865.

The Los Angeles Star of 1 May 1869 quoted from the San Francisco Alta that Sichel or his estate did not make a claim on the mortgage within the time Merced claimed was allotted for such actions. Consequently, it was reported, “when it was subsequently presented to Mrs. Rains, she refused to pay it, on the grounds that it was barred by the statute of limitations” and claimed that there could, therefore, be no execution of the foreclosure of the mortgage.

While a district court ruling went in her favor, this was overturned by the state supreme court, which ruled “that there were two contracts—one that Rains would pay the debt, and the other that the lands of Mrs. Rains would pay it.” The lack of fulfillment of one did not obviate the other and the time limitations were deemed to be different to boot, so, said the high court, as paraphrased, “the mortgage is not a claim on Rains’ estate, and is not barred by failure to present it to the administrator, who could not pay it, and had nothing to do with it.”

The conclusion, then, was “it was a lien on the wife’s separate property, and she is treated in our law as an independent contractor,” even though it was obvious that Rains acted on her behalf in all the transactions involved. Lastly, it was pointed out that, “ordinarily, a mortgage is given by the maker of the note, and in such a case the mortgage and note are barred.”

With Sichel’s estate successful in this legal morass, Cucamonga passed out of Merced’s hands, through a sheriff’s sale in fall 1870 and, in the federal census, taken in late August, she and her second husband, José C. Carrillo, were listed in the Chino township, with him claiming real property valued at $100,000 (presumably her lands). The couple had in their household, her four children with Rains and three by the two of them. Carrillo died during the ensuing decade and Merced, when the 1880 census was taken in early June, resided in Los Angeles with the seven children and her occupation given as “laborer,” though in what is not known.

After her daughter Fannie Rains married attorney Henry T. Gage later in 1880, the couple were given an adobe house on the Lugo-owned Rancho San Antonio, the large tract just southeast of Los Angeles. Merced resided with the Gages, almost completely out of the public eye, though her son-in-law served as California’s governor from 1899 to 1930, for more than a quarter-century. She died in late January 1907 and the Los Angeles Herald of the 29th stated that,

Mrs. Merced Williams Fernandez, 67 years of age, a member of one of the most prominent Spanish families in this district, died at her home on the Gage ranch near Downey . . .

Mrs. Fernandez was born and passed all her life in the same house in which she died. She has been suffering with rheumatism for several months, and it was this disease which caused her death.

The statement about her living in what has long been called the “Gage Mansion,” now hidden within a mobile home park in Bell Gardens, was not true, of course. She was born at the San Antonio ranch, but lived most of years until age 40 at Chino, Cucamonga and in Los Angeles, and it is a little surprising that nothing was said about her marriage to Rains, his dramatic death, and other details that would certainly have been of interest to readers of the Herald.

Francisca, however, had a much more visible public profile. In 1868, she married Dr. Frederick MacDougall, a successful doctor and, when they were enumerated in the census two years later, he declared $25,000 in real and $3,000 in personal property. Francisca, however, had totals of $50,000 and $20,000, while her four Carlisle children were each denoted as having $15,000 and $3,000 as a result of their inheritance based on their shares of interest for the Chino ranch. MacDougall’s two children were also in the household, as were Francisca’s two half-sisters, Refugia and Concepción Williams, ages 16 and 22, respectively.

Notably, the MacDougalls were neighbors of Isaias W. Hellman, who came to Los Angeles in the 1850s and became a successful merchant and pillar of the Jewish community. In 1870, he was the partner of William Workman and F.P.F. Temple in the bank of Hellman, Temple and Company and, just a few months prior, was married. The two families resided on San Pedro Street, with Hellman occupying a house owned by Joseph Bridger, who just happened to be Francisca’s superintendent at Chino.

Bridger was another Southerner, born in Tennessee in 1830 and his early years are murky, though it is said that his father brought him to California during the Gold Rush and he was enumerated in Mariposa County when the 1850 census was taken there in late October, several weeks after California statehood was achieved.

Later in the decade, Bridger was in San Bernardino and served as county sheriff at the end of the decade, which may be how he got to know the Carlisles. In any case, he was hired to manage the Chino ranch after Carlisle’s death, having married Francisca’s half sister, Victoria, daughter of Isaac Williams and María Antonia Apis, whose grandfather was a Luiseño Indian chief in the Temecula area.

In spring 1875, Hellman, then co-owner, with ex-Governor John G. Downey, and manager of The Farmers’ and Merchants’ Bank of Los Angeles after having split with Temple and Workman some four years prior, purchased half of Chino from his neighbor Francisca MacDougall for $150,000. It appears this section was the half leased to Scottish-born H.J. Stewart, who lived in the original ranch headquarters where the Boys Republic institution is now in Chino Hills next to the 71 Freeway, and stocked with sheep. Bridger and Martin Echapar, like an early Basque resident in what later became a large community throughout greater Los Angeles, also ran their livestock on the ranch.

Frederick MacDougall died in 1878 and Bridger followed two years later, so these tragedies may well have led Francisca to sell the Chino ranch to Richard Gird, who’d made a fortune in mining at Tombstone, Arizona Territory and who had a brother residing west of Los Angeles. Gird’s purchase at the end of 1880 would eventually lead to his important efforts at planting sugar beets in the region, as well as the founding of the town of Chino in 1887 during the Boom of the Eighties, during which William H. Workman was mayor of Los Angeles.

In November 1888, Francisca, twenty years older and to the considerable surprise of family and friends, eloped to the Bay Area with Edward Jesurun, a “handsome young West Indian” and native of Curacao, a Dutch Caribbean island near the coast of Venezuela. A former classmate of one of her sons, Jesurun was a stage driver of tourists visiting Yosemite National Park and then an employee of the Southern Pacific Railroad in the Angel City when he married Francisca.

In little more than a year, she filed a legal complaint against him regarding $22,000 she said she loaned him, though that appears to have been settled between them. In 1894, he was arrested for having claimed that a team of horses were his and for which he received some payment a year or two prior, though the animals belonged to Francisca. Two years after that, having separated from her, he vanished from Bakersfield, leaving a business partner in the lurch.

Apparently, though, these youthful follies passed away and the couple reunited and remained married for nearly forty years. Francisca had numerous property holdings in greater Los Angeles, including in downtown, where she had a streetcar franchise, built, in the 1890s, a hotel that spanned a block between Spring and Main streets near Seventh street (and the Spring Street facade of which still stands), owned 40 acres along Wilshire Boulevard that was acquired for subdivision in the 1910s, had ranches in Whittier, and maintained her residence on Washington Boulevard south of downtown that was purchased, though not without some legal challenges, from her and became Los Angeles Polytechnic High School.

Francisca was also a major stockholder in a water company in which her son-in-law, William J. Brodrick, a former bookseller, was a major figure as the private Los Angeles City Water Company, in which he was interested, was not getting its 30-year lease with the city renewed, so its principals formed a new firm to seek a contract, though this was not successful and the city assumed control of managing water resources. In 1895, she gave thousands of date palm trees to the city for use in parks.

Later in her life, she and Edward moved to Palo Alto near Stanford University, where he was president of the Palo Alto Mutual Building and Loan Society. She died in April 1926 at age 85, with the last remnant of the Chino ranch passing from her to heirs in the form of the Los Serranos Country Club, which opened the prior year, having outlived Merced by almost two decades and having lived a far more different life, with greater wealth and public attention. One wonders if the conditions of their first marriages to Rains and Carlisle and the drama and tragedy entwined with these had an effect on their relationship in all the decades that followed.