by Paul R. Spitzzeri
A long-running witticism was that Los Angeles was the land of fruit and nuts and there certainly were no shortage of eccentric, if not mentally ill, figures of note in the region during our interpretive time period of 1830-1930. Two who have been featured here were William Money (who affected the pronunciation of “Mo-nay”) and who was known for his strange ideas about cosmography, religion and much else while his status as a doctor was more than questionable during his years here in the 19th century and Peter Howard, the “Hermit of Hollywood,” a 20th-century character who long resided at Lookout Mountain near Laurel Canyon.
Chronologically splitting the difference (roughly) between the two was Frederick M. Shaw (1827-1914) who preceded Peter at Laurel Canyon, residing there around four decades and displaying a remarkable catholicity concerning his interests, the main ones of which were the intent to establish a sanitarium and industrial college, build an artificial harbor and establish a way for humans to fly long before there were airplanes.
The reason he comes into our purview here is because, in the 23 May 1873 edition of the Los Angeles Express, which we featured in a first part two days ago, an advertisement appeared for the Southern California Sanitary Hotel and Industrial College Association, incorporated in the Angel City with stock of $250,000 divided into 2,500 shares of $100 each, salable starting the following day in an office in the Temple Block, the commercial center of a town in the midst of its first boom.
The president of the SCSHICA was Mayor James R. Toberman, the secretary was attorney George C. Gibbs and the directors included nursery owner Thomas A. Garey (he and Gibbs later became co-founders of Pomona), city surveyor William Moore, and Civil War Union Army General George Stoneman, who was an orange grower near San Gabriel and later was California’s governor. Lastly, the treasurer was F.P.F. Temple, whose building housed the Association’s headquarters and whose bank, Temple and Workman, was the depository for its funds.
These were all prominent, respected figures in Los Angeles, but Shaw was a newcomer, though he was able to convince these pillars of Angel City business and society of his audacious and ambitious ideas. His background, however, was murky, at best. Born in Rutland, Vermont and raised at nearby Castleton, he came from a farming family, but little is known about his upbringing other than “he ascended the educational ladder of the academy” in that small town before heading to Gold Rush California with the ’49ers.
He apparently stayed a fairly short time, after perhaps making the trip for health reasons as he once said he suffered from tuberculosis, and told a story of heading back home in 1850 and nearly getting hung from the mast of the ship after getting into a fight with a crew member. That summer, he was enumerated in the 1850 federal census at the family home in Castleton with his occupation listed as a farmer.
What he did for nearly twenty years is unclear, though he sometimes claimed he was a physician and told a court he graduated from several colleges and other times denied he was a doctor and also claimed he “practiced in hospitals during the [Civil] war” and “was wounded during the Rebellion.” Whatever took place during most of the 1850s and 1860s, he was a merchant in 1867 at Donner Lake near Truckee in the Sierra Nevada Mountains east of Sacramento and north of Lake Tahoe and two years later was in San Diego, where he listed his occupation as a lumberman, which is what he usually stated on public records like voter registration lists.
The earliest located reference for Shaw in Los Angeles is when the Spanish-language newspaper, La Crónica, noted in its 6 July 1872 edition that he was an agent for the paper in the southern counties of California. A month later, it recorded that he was an agent for the San Francisco firm of Dewey and Company, which was a patent agent, engraving firm and magazine publisher. He then devised his “sanitary hotel” and “industrial college” scheme and sold the idea to his fellow members of the SCSHICA.
On 12 April 1873, Shaw wrote a letter (he became extraordinarily prolific at this over his many years in the city) to the Los Angeles Star concerning the “clear conception of the importance to this section of the establishment of a Sanitary Hotel and Industrial College.” He remarked that “a long and arduous survey of the southern portion of the State has been in progress for more than eight months,” including “thermometrical and hygrometrical tables,” the analysis of water, examination of wind, the study of altitude, “together with the effect of each upon sensitive organizations, and all the minute details which go to make up comfort or discomfort to the valetudinarian [a person very worried about their health.”
This intensive effort, he went on, was conducted so that he could “select, if possible, the very best place irrespective of any private interests,” and recommended that “those who have real estate to dispose of would do well to favor this movement,” even if this was to advertise to “the whole civilized world to what they have to sell.” Averring that he had connections, such as with the press and was “enabled to reach persons and places that an ordinary advertisement would not,” Shaw noted that such schemes “are always looked upon with suspicion in some degree,” but,
The projector of the Sanitary Hotel and Industrial College has been actuated thus far solely by the desire to obtain a location that was healthful; that the selection falls upon this county is not that he has an acre of ground or any other interest here, except the great desire to have the Institute of which he is the originator, the most useful to the human race. If it turns out to be a good investment pecuniarily, both those who lend their countenance and material aid will be doubly blessed; for can any one conceive of any more pleasant combination than that of doing good to our fellow beings, and at the same time receiving fair returns?
The investment is not only bound to be profitable, but is productive of a real amount of happiness without injury to any, which it is not often given to man to enjoy.
The incorporation which soon followed identified three main objectives for the Association: “First—The promotion of health and the art and science of preserving health; “Second—The encouragement and prosecution of agriculture and the mechanic arts;” and lastly, “the acquirement of real estate and the erection of suitable buildings . . . to be arranged on improved sanitary principles . . . to accommodate the thousands of persons who are flocking to Los Angeles for health, pleasure or permanent residence.”
Shaw convinced his partners to fund his trip to a world’s fair held at Vienna from May to October 1873, though it is not known if he attended or, if he did, whether he spent much time there because he later reported “after a rapid canvass of the European field, it was decided that the time and means at hand would be best used by confining operations to the British Islands principally.” This involved the publication of five booklets, advertised in the London Times and five other publications, with Shaw later reporting,
Four thousand copies of these books, containing good and valuable matter relating to health, finance, etc., and advertising Los Angeles and its advantages as a place of resort for health, pleasure, occupation or permanent residence, were distributed throughout the United Kingdom to editors and prominent personages, calling for an extensive correspondence and enquiry.
He asserted that, by the beginning of 1874, though “persistent effort and constant labor,” Association stock was ready to be sold and successfully “had the association seen proper to have placed at the disposal of the Superintendent sufficient funds to open a bank account” to handle the sale. Shaw added that it called for $1,000 but “which sum failing to come to hand, it was thought best to return” to Los Angeles.
The promoter also claimed that there questions from potential British investors “if accommodations of a certain description could be obtained” in the Angel City, but “the Association was not far enough advanced to offer them.” Shaw further remarked that “it was painful in the extreme,” after all of his labors “to be compelled to abandon [the project] for a time and return,” even if the work could be resumed. He’d done, he insisted, all he could “to place Los Angeles in its proper light before the people of the East[ern United States] and Europe,” but he and his family were forced to “suffer from the zeal and faithfulness.”
Shaw listed his expenses on behalf of the Association as north of $1,300, aside from personal expenditures of several hundred dollars and, having received not quite $600 from the organization, he claimed he was owed about $750. What he suggested was that suburban residences “in a higher altitude” were needed and beyond the ken of the Association, so what was needed was a program by which about 5,000 acres be purchased, subdivided into lots from one to 40 acres. He projected that an outlay of $50,000 would, through proper management, yield a profit of $300,000 in three years and “this the Superintendent will undertake to do, if his plans meet with your approval.”
It is not known when Shaw returned to Los Angeles and the next mention located of him and the Association was in the 19 June 1874 edition of the Los Angeles Herald as he answered an editorial a couple of days prior about the importance of education in community building. He commented that,
Over a year since, the writer originated and gave publicity here to a plan for the founding of a college here in Los Angeles. No one can feel deeper the vital necessity of thorough educational institutions in this portion of the Pacific Coast than the writer, and every energy has been bent toward the establishment of such an one.
After observing that what was needed was not just a classical curriculum, but that also offered “a practical every-day and work-a-day common sense,” Shaw wrote that it was ideal to acquire a large tract “within a reasonable distance of the pueblo” and at an altitude that contained “a pure and healthy atmosphere” as well as an adequate water supply. He reiterated that he spent months surveying the region for just a locale and “the ground selected . . . comprises a tract of over 3,000 acres,” almost certainly west of Los Angeles, suitable for raising oranges and wheat” and which he thought would cost $35,000, with another $15,000 to be used for building construction.
Shaw continued that “with this outlay the institute can be placed in self-supporting order within two years of the commencement of the work” and he confidently asserted that “the Southern California Sanitary Hotel and Industrial College [is] a necessity of the age.” He went on to note that “too many visionary people” conceived that “education was a sort of ornamental appendage, to be sported as Sunday apparel or jewelry, on especial occasions, but of little or no use in everyday life.”
With the proper attention and support, however, and the advantages of “the most salubrious climate,” Shaw’s idea could be a superior one, especially as,
The whole world is looking toward Southern California as a place of resort for health and permanent residence, and not a small proportion of the attention drawn to this section is attributable to the earnest, faithful labor, and money expended by the writer in the East and Europe to show the advantages of our soil and climate over any known portion of the earth’s surface.
The Independence Day issue of the Herald included another letter from Shaw, in which he claimed that “there is no valid reason why the Southern California Sanitary Hotel and Industrial College should not be the best institute of learning on this coast.” He reiterated the need to combine the classics with practical study and added that “the conservatory of music has always been a favorite feature with us; and the higher branches of art, as painting, drawing and sculpture has ever been an unending source of pleasure and profit.”
Shaw concluded that there was no question that if the plan published while he was in England was promoted in the Angel City and in other places, “their desirability and feasibility would be so apparent that there could be no lack of harmonious co-operation.” Strangely, when he wrote the Herald a letter published in its issue of 12 September, he demurred being called a doctor (though he elsewhere made that claim, as noted above—he also took on the title of “Colonel” for no known reason), though he insisted that, within the last three decades, he earned diplomas from three institutions that had medical programs and had successfully treated more than 15,000 cases of illness.
This protest included his damnation of the profit motive in medicine, as well as the lack of differentiation in holding those responsible for neglect in addition to malice and he averred that “my proctice [sic] has been thus far gratuitous.” He lamented that, after half of his life devoted to research, including his finding “the perfect curability of most of the so-called incurable maladies,” he was saddened to discover “that I have mistaken mankind and do not yet understand them.” He claimed that “most of the world prefer to be ill in body, mind or morals” and that, lest he be labeled as a fanatic, lunatic or reformer, “we have ventured to differ with the most of our brethren, and have started an Association.
Shaw had not yet given up on his vision for which he claimed to have expended “hundreds of thousands of dollars and the weary years of time already expended in perfecting our plans for the benefit of the race.” Adding that there were those who would profit in the millions through his concept, the visionary concluded that “the Great Lease-Holder saw fit to renew indefinitely . . . regardless of the cynicisms of doubters.”
As an Association stockholders’ meeting loomed, Shaw wrote again to the paper for its 4 October edition reiterating that there was a felt need for accommodations for “tourists or temporary sojourners” as well as for Los Angeles “to keep pace with the rest of the world and reap our proportion of the harvest.” He remarked that “there are now thousands of people and millions of money kept away from us ” because there weren’t adequate apartments, cottages, hotel rooms or villas “suited to the tastes and requirements of certain classes.”
Shaw expressed concern that, in talking with British gentlemen during his stay there, “I could not give them the assurance that such quarters as they required could be obtained in case they should visit Los Angeles with their families to spend the Winter, and possibly to acquire properties with the view to future residence.” In short, Los Angeles lacked what those of “cultivated tastes” required, something apparently emphasized by Shaw’s wife and he hoped that the meeting would deal with this issue, as he concluded, “it is hoped that the re-organization will have infused into the organization elements of substantial vigor.”
The next day, under the heading of “The Los Angeles Sanitarium,” Shaw continued to apply pressure to his fellow Association officers by citing from his upcoming report with the idea of jumpstarting a reorganization:
There was time in the history of Southern California, when it was almost impossible to induce certain classes of people to visit us, simply from the fact of the want of such accommodations in the way of lodgings and entertainment, as is class of persons insist as necessary for their comfort . . . And all that is now wanting to have thousands of people with us through the Winter—who will not be here otherwise—is to set to work, immediately and energetically, to prepare at least sufficient first-class accommodation . . . for their reception and entertainment.
The day prior to the meeting, Shaw condemned current practices in transportation by sea as steamer and other companies which conspired to keep from the public the facts about such firms were operated, including the condition of vessels which were not properly maintained and posed a risk to passengers while enhancing profit. This is why, he continued, that proper “naval architecture,” along with land transportation models, were to be “a leading feature in our industrial college” and “only second to those of hygiene.” If the reorganization went right at the confab, there would be “opportunities to educate young and old in those much needed but now neglected branches.”
The meeting was followed with the full report that was largely cited above with respect to Shaw’s description of his work, trip to England and his suggestions. His cohorts, including Temple, however, had tired of Shaw, the idea or both, but he did not concede the value of his concept nor his ability to, somehow, see it through.
We’ll return with part three and continue the story, so be sure and check back with us on Tuesday for that.