by Paul R. Spitzzeri
Moving on with our look at some of the history of the La Puente/Temple School in the Whittier Narrows-area community of Misión Vieja, or Old Mission, located between Pico Rivera and South El Monte and near Whittier and Montebello, the Homestead’s collection included an “Official List of School Trustees and Teachers of Los Angeles County For The Year Beginning July 1, 1899” as the 19th century came to a close.
The elected trustees for the La Puente district were Clerk Lewis Farmer, whose term ran from 1897-1900, Giovanni Piuma, whose three-year stint was from 1899 to 1902 and Charles P. Temple, whose tenure was in the middle of the others and spanned from 1898 to 1901. Piuma was an Italian-born winemaker who leased the adobe dwelling at the Temple Homestead from at least 1893 before moving his successful enterprise to Los Angeles.
As for Charles Temple, he was embroiled in major controversies during this period stemming from the death of his wife Rafaela Basye and conflicts with her brothers, who believed Temple killed her. Charles co-owned the 50-acre Homestead with his older brother, Walter, who was the district’s census marshal in 1892-1893, 1895, 1899-1901 and 1903-1906. The publication also listed the teacher as E.R. Camp, who held a grammar-school teaching certificate which expired at the beginning of 1903 and who was paid $100 monthly.
In the 27 July 1901 edition of the Whittier News, Walter Temple provided some “Old Mission Notes” with community news including his report that “W.P. Temple has erected a one-story dwelling house on his magnificent walnut grove, which is a part of the old [family] homestead property” and that his brother, John, who’d lost the Workman Homestead, where the Museum is now, to foreclosure two years before and who was census marshal in 1902, “has leased the building for business purposes.” This comprised “a delicacy and ice cream parlor” where John “is ready to entertain his numerous patrons” and was, presumably, very near Charles’ La Paloma Club.
Separately, Walter reported that “Messrs. Temple and Zuniga,” the former being Charles and the latter, Manuel Zuñiga, being the husband of their sister, Lucinda, “who occupy the new two-story business block at the junction of Pasadena and Whittier roads, report an excellent trade at their store.” It is presumed this was at the Homestead and about where San Gabriel and Rosemead boulevards meet, though it is not known for certain. In a short while, the Zuñigas left for the copper mining town of Clifton, Arizona and, after Charles’ legal problems referred to in the link above, he joined them there for several years.
With respect to education, Walter observed that a movement was afoot to establish a high school at El Monte to serve four districts: Bassett, La Puente, Mountain View and Savannah. El Monte High did open in 1901 and remained the secondary institution to which La Puente district pupils completing grammar school matriculated. Apropos of which, Temple remarked,
La Puente school is beginning to be felt as an educational factor in our community. At the commence exercises last June there were three graduates: Miss Lucy Zuñiga [Manuel’s daughter from his first marriage to Carmel Davis, an Old Mission native], Miss Ava Farmer and Fred Farmer [the children of the aforementioned Lewis Farmer.]
The present board of trustees of La Puente, consisting of Messrs. W.P. Temple clerk, Fred Thienes and Chas. Mulholland, have reappointed Miss Lucy Lopez principal and Miss Idell Weatherholt to teach for the ensuing year.
Apparently, Piuma left his seat a year earlier while Charles Temple and Farmer termed out. Whatever the case, the next major change came in summer 1904 when 44 residents of the district submitted a petition, a copy from 31 August of which is in the Homestead’s holdings, petitioning the Board of Supervisors “to change the name of said School District from La Puente to that of Temple School District.”
The Temple brothers, John, Walter and Charles, were obviously among the signatories and came up with the idea, likely to honor their family’s more than half-century living in the area, and others who agreed with the idea included surnames of those with a long history at Old Mission, such as Andrade, Barry, Basye, Bermudez, Bojorquez, Briano, Duarte, Estrada, Manriquez, and Manzanares, while Piuma was another signatory.
Three months later, the Los Angeles Record of 30 November reported that “there are two factions in the La Puente school district and each one wants the name of the district changed, but the trouble is that each wants a name different from the other faction.” The supervisors, seeing that “each side stigmatized the other as trouble makers,” turned to county superintendent Mark Keppel (whose namesake high school is in Alhambra) and her tersely replied, “I do not believe that it is good policy to decide in favor of either faction . . . unless some good result can be served thereby.”
The Los Angeles Times, three days after Christmas, observed that “periodically trouble breaks out in the [La] Puente school district when all the residents rise up and split into two factions” concerning a name change.” The paper continued,
The time is at hand for the periodical scrimmage and first a petition was filed asking that [t]he district name be changed to the Temple school district. Then J[ames] D. Durfee [whose family were among the founders of the district some forty years prior] bobbed up with a request that the district be changed so as to bear his name. Heretofore Durfee has obtained a number of backers to his petition but this time he went alone.
The county leaders turned down the idea of any revision of the district’s moniker and it was added that “if the people in that district really mean business they were informed yesterday that they might have the opportunity to vote upon the matter.” Otherwise, the piece ended, “the board did not feel called upon to discriminate in a faction quarrel.” The issue did arise again close to two decades later, as we will see.
Walter Temple was a trustee in 1907 and by then was married to Misión Vieja native, Laura González, and the couple had a son, Thomas (born in January 1905) and a daughter Agnes (born on 6 August). Two months before they welcomed Agnes into their family, Walter received a report from principal Mrs. J.S. Willits that is in the Museum’s collection and which was signed by him.
The document attested that, during fiscal year 1906-1907, Willits and fellow instructor Nellie Haddock conducted classes for 180 days, including a dozen holidays with seven being the winter break, with 46 children (32 boys and 14 girls) in the primary grades and 21 (8 boys and 13 girls) in the grammar level. Notably, the year began with 45 students, including 27 boys and 18 girls, but additions came each month for the next six, thirteen in the second and third months.
Out of a whole number of 6,689 days of attendance for all students, about 8% involved absences and just a little more than that, 582 days, comprised truancies. The school had 72 seats, recorded that the superintendent visited twice during the year, though the trustees did not do so at all. The school library began the year with 776 volumes in its holdings and saw a 10% increase in new books, so that there were more than 850 at year’s end. Haddock was paid $540 for the year and Willits received $630.
Also in our holdings are receipts from the Hanna Lumber Company of Rivera, half of what is now Pico Rivera and which had three yards along the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe rail line in Rivera, Pico and Newmark, the latter becoming Montebello. While one document was issued to Temple, the other was made out to the district and included, for purchases made in October and December 1907, parts for the stove that heated the school building, while also listed are nails and 1×12, 2×4, and 3×4 boards.
The next major issue was in the summer and fall of 1911, with the Long Beach Telegram noting that,
At a special election to be held in La Puente school district, El Monte, September 16, bonds in the sum of $12,000 for school purposes will be voted on. The bonds will be in the denomination of $1000 each and bear 5 per cent interest.
The election was successful and the Halloween edition of the paper followed up with the report that the Board of Supervisors were to receive bids within a week for the bonds. In the Museum’s holdings is a missive from 7 November on Board letterhead from the deputy county clerk to Walter Temple, the clerk of the district board, in which it was stated that there was just one bid for the bonds, from J.H. Adams and Company and which offered a premium of $62. The letter concluded with a request that Temple and his fellow trustees “report to this board their recommendation as to the advisability of accepting the bid referred to.”
Another item in the collection is a 29 March 1912 letter to Temple from Pasadena architect Charles W. Buchanan, whose partner was Leon Caryl Brockway, and who inquired “for information relative to requirements in [the] School building for La Puente School Dist.” Buchanan expressed confusion about a reference to the proposed structure being a story and a half because of a notice for bids specified excavations were only to be for the cesspool and foundations, rather than an above-ground basement.
Temple also received a missive, about a week later, from the Whitaker and Ray-Wiggin Company, which specialized in chairs, desks, seats and other items, and which wrote “we understand that your District is about to build a new School” and mentioned an artificial slate blackboard as a choice product” while also asking “do you expect to purchase School Furniture this year?” If so, it asked for a list and when bids were to be received.
A new building, however, was not constructed at that time, though in October 1912, Walter Temple sold the family homestead and moved across the Río Hondo (the old course of the San Gabriel River) just a short distance to the west when he purchased 60 acres of land, formerly held by his father, F.P.F., before the 1876 failure of the Temple and Workman bank and lost to “Lucky” Baldwin, including property along the bank of the watercourse and in the adjoining hills. He acquired the tract from Baldwin’s estate and it was uncertain whether there was any inkling of what was to come within a year-and-a-half.
In April 1914, Thomas, the nine-year-old son of Walter and Laura, rushed home from the hills where he and playmates stumbled upon indications of oil. A year later, a lease was executed with Standard Oil Company of California, which did the same with Baldwin’s two daughters, who owned hundreds of acres in the Montebello Hills. A successful test well on the latter holdings came in at the end of 1916 and work immediately began on Temple Well #1, which came into production at the latter part of June 1917.
Thomas, Agnes and their younger brothers, Walter, Jr. and Edgar were all educated to varying degrees at La Puente School, but that immediately changed when the royalties came in from wells that included some gushers brought in on the lease. The family moved briefly to Monterey Park and then settled in Alhambra, while also purchasing the Workman Homestead, where the Museum is now.
The oil bonanza had a stunning effect on the La Puente School District, as well. The Covina Argus of 12 September 1919 reported that,
The success in securing oil in the Walter P. Temple hills, three and a half miles southwest of El Monte city, has added millions of dollars of assessed valuation to the La Puente grammar school district and to the El Monte union high school district.
This included an astounding $11 million in the latter, which allowed the El Monte trustees to lower the school tax and still have plenty of money for improvements at the high school from the current year’s revenues. Not quite two months later, the Pomona Bulletin, of 5 November quoted Frank Wheeler, the president of the Associated Chambers of Commerce of the San Gabriel Valley, as observing that the Valley’s assessed valuation doubled in the last five years.
The paper went on to comment that,
One of the most astonishing increases in valuation was due to the oil activity, which caused one of the smallest school districts in the Valley to increase in assessed valuation in three years’ time from only $500,000 to $14,300,000, or a larger valuation than that of Pomona, the hitherto wealthiest community and the largest. The district with such a phenomenal record was La Puente school district on the Pico road, with an area of only 4.7 [square] miles and a population of less than 800 people.
Obviously, this massive windfall for the tiny district allowed for the long-wished-for transformation of the school and we’ll pick up the tale on Friday with a concluding fourth part of this post.
Be sure to check back in with us then!