by Paul R. Spitzzeri
Continuing on with this post, featuring an August 1929 photograph of the Consolidated Rock Products Company’s gravel, rock and sand plant in the San Gabriel Valley city of Irwindale, we head into the 1910s as the community was still better known for its oranges than its rock crushing, though the latter was growing in that section.
Actually, as we’ve seen in earlier parts, Irwindale was widely recognized for a diversified agricultural landscape that included some field crops like alfalfa, vegetables and potatoes, and deciduous fruits and berries. The Pasadena Star-News of 21 July 1914 noted that Irwindale, along with Bassett and Puente to the south, was part of an increase of 50% in potato yields with up to 450 carloads expected for the year. There seems no doubt, however, that, because of the higher profit, citrus, especially navel oranges, took greater precedence as the 20th century advanced.
The Irwindale Citrus Association was a dominant entity in this scene and the Covina Argus of 24 February 1912 pointed out that a record high price was realized for a car of fruit sent to London, while “several other cars are now being exported to England.” Two years later, a few new citrus organizations incorporated at Irwindale, including the Golden State Orange Growers Association, Irwindale Citrus Growers Incorporated and the Irwindale Orange Growers Association.
The Los Angeles Times of 30 April 1916 published a chart showing shipments from the broader Covina Valley, with two Covina associations topping the list at about 93,000 and 73,000 boxes and 234 and 184 carloads, respectively, while Irwindale was third at over 63,000 boxes and 160 cars.
The Argus of 9 November 1917 reported that the ICA had a successful year with 135,000 boxes of fruit sent out, though there was some damage from June weather that was offset to an extent by expanding acreage in the Association’s area. The paper’s edition of 16 May 1919 offered a chart of railroad shipments of fruit, much like the one from the Times three years prior, and the Covina organizations ranked high, but behind the Charter Oak Citrus Association which sent out nearly 150,000 boxes and 324 cars of fruit, while its neighbors to the west each had just over 100,000 boxes and 220 cars.
In the “Azusa Avenue and Irwindale” section, there were four listed associations, led by the Riley Fruit Company which sent 119 cars and 14 that were transported to Los Angeles by truck and about 55,000 boxes. The ICA sent out much less fruit than in 1916 with totals of 60 cars and not quite 28,000 boxes. Still, the Argus of 3 October 1919 observed that the organization acquired land “to give it more room, extended the railroad switch, and is planning to remodel and enlarge its packing house.”
For irrigating the growing acreage devoted to citrus, water companies obviously continued to increase capacity, including the Azusa Irrigating Company and the Covina Irrigating Company, which both had Irwindale plants (the former having absorbed three early local ones). As the decade came to an end, an effort was discussed by which the ICA and other local associations would engage in “cooperative fumigation” of trees to reduce cost and improve efficiency.
Walnuts were gradually assuming a greater importance in eastern San Gabriel Valley agriculture during this period, with most trees planted around 1905 by Elias J. “Lucky” Baldwin, who took possession of well above 10,000 acres of William Workman’s portion of Rancho La Puente. While it is unclear how much of the nut was grown in Irwindale, the 10 October 1911 edition of the Monrovia News included the report that “the market for walnuts is bettering each year and the demand is increasing, as the people in the east are learning of the great nutritive value” of the crop.
The account observed that growers in Bassett, Puente, West Covina (this a new name for a section nearby), Walnut Center (this later part of West Covina) and Irwindale “have formed a pool of all the nuts grown on their ranches for the season of 1911,” this thought to be around 70 tons and processed at Puente and sold to a Santa Ana company.
It was expected that there would soon be a growers’ association for up to 10,000 acres and including construction of a packing house. In 1912, the La Puente Valley Walnut Growers’ Association was formed and the house was completed at Puente the next year, though its 1920 successor became the largest of its kind in the world.
It is generally challenging to find much reporting and detail about the laborers in these groves and orchards, though earlier in this post some information was given, including the terrible forced eviction of Chinese labor at the Irwindale citrus packing house early in the century. Meanwhile, there was a growing contingent of Mexican immigrants, who headed north because of the chaos of the revolution taking place in México after 1910, working in this area.
In the virulently pro-business and anti-union Los Angeles Times of 16 October 1914, attention was given to an effort to stamp out a proposed eight-hour workday for farmworkers, this denounced as socialism. At Azusa, the paper reported, an organization was formed by farmers “aroused by the threatened ruin of the fruit industry in the attempt to pass the eight-hour law” and it was added,
The entire valley will be covered in a personal canvass and the country will be flooded with literature in an educational campaign to defeat the proposition.
The 3 November election featured Proposition 45 (these were only introduced along with initiatives and recalls three years prior among a wave of Progressive political reforms in California) known as a “Work Schedule Initiative,” that would have limited work to six days and no more than 48 hours, but it was roundly defeated by 22 percentage points, with close to 460,000 no votes to a little more than 290,000 in favor.
Speaking of floods, a pair of deluges struck greater Los Angeles in 1914 and 1916 and wreaked havoc throughout the region. The Monrovia paper of 31 January 1914 reported,
The San Dimas wash is a scene of devastation. Three miles above Charter Oak [northeast of Covina] it became a river 150 feet wide. It brought down setcions [sic] of the spur tracks of the Santa Fe [rail]road . . . The same wash gouged out a number of groves in Irwindale and destroyed entirely the bridge of the Southern Pacific Railroad at this point.
More was to come as the 22 February edition of the Los Angeles Tribune remarked that the San Dimas Wash, “which rarely carries enough water to reach the San Gabriel river, is a flood and only the hard work of 300 orange growers and their employees prevented the waters from turning south through very valuable orange groves.”
Among the stated damage was that “Irwindale, two miles west [of Covina], is being swept by roaring torrents, running in washes and draws that are ordinarily dry,” though “these have been broken in upon at their upper ends by storm waters from other courses and making themselves into channels.”
The torrent of 1916 included the Times report of 18 January that bridges were washed out all over the eastern San Gabriel Valley so that communities were “marooned” while the San Dimas Wash was again a roaring, frothing river and it continued that,
The fear of a repetition of the damage done in Irwindale two years ago has caused the ranches to be very outspoken in condemnation of the bridge construction in that district. Fifty acres of valuable citrus orchard is half-buried in silt at the point over the Covina boulevard where the culvert proved inadequate. This is the bridge which Irwindale ranchers petitioned the [county] Supervisors to have enlarged. Many new bridges and culverts constructed in this end of the county have proved inadequate.
Important as the need for better bridges, culverts and other items were, the dual deluges forced the county to form a flood control system that engaged in significant planning and construction efforts including dams and reservoirs, though later, the federal Army Corps of Engineers took on the task of the bigger and costlier projects.
Another major threat to the area and, in fact, worldwide was the so-called “Spanish Flu” pandemic of 1918-1919, which likely burst forth from United States Army posts in this country and then spread as the First World War was nearing its conclusion. Two weeks after the conflict ended on 11 November 1918, there were local reports from the county’s health officer, Dr. John L. Pomeroy that, while most schools were experiencing fewer flu cases, this was not the case in Azusa and Irwindale.
The 23 November edition of the Los Angeles Record commented that,
A novel plan for handling the influenza effectively while still permitting the schools to remain in session was under consideration today by Dr. Pomeroy. If the county health officer can obtain permission from the Presbyterian church at Irwindale to use its building as a dormitory, the plan will be tried first in the Irwindale school [Merwin], which has an enrollment of 69 pupils.
In this instance the idea of the county health officer is to isolate, not the sick, but the well. Healthy pupils will be kept away from homes where members of the family are suffering from influenza. They will attend school during the day and will be served warm meals by the Red Cross in the church.
Specific to the Latino community of Irwindale, and there is an distinction to be made between long-residing families like the Aguayos, Fraijos and others and recent Mexican migrants, there were at least two cases during the Teens, following smallpox reports in the first decade of the century, of reports of highly contagious diseases, including that of the Times of 7 February 1918 under the headline of “Quarantine Whole Town” and “Mexican Settlement of Irwindale Cut Off By Diphtheria.”
The article remarked that “a whole town dependent upon itself for support is the novel condition” found there after Pomeroy’s office learned of an outbreak of the bacterial infection, found first at a school, likely Merwin, which was also known as the “Spanish school” and where Latino pupils were segregated from Lark Ellen School, and then at houses so that there were some 30 cases.
Noting that one store was tasked with providing food, the paper observed that,
The population is entirely Mexican and it was deemed advisable to segregate all of the people from the outside world rather than try to control the disease under the conditions in which the people live. Today Constable Hamblin of Azusa has stationed armed guards at the principal roads leading into the town and no one is permitted to pass either way.
While there has been discussion of tactics used in Los Angeles in 1924 during an outbreak of bubonic plague, the forced quarantine of entire neighborhoods, comprised entirely or almost so of Latinos had precedence such as this situation in Irwindale a half-dozen years before.
The Argus of 15 September 1919 reported on Dr. Pomeroy’s response to a typhoid outbreak among Latinos three years prior with a statement made about “the backwardness of our Spanish speaking people in hygiene” and the fact that “the death rate among the Spanish speaking people of infants was four times that among our native whites.”
The account continued that,
After the campaign against typhus fever was completed, the experiment was tried of placing a nurse in a district for permanent work. Owing to local co-operation, the first station was at Irwindale near Covina. During the fall of 1916, a nurse was stationed in this district for several months, and a great improvement in cleanliness and hygiene, as well as reduction in contagious disease was effected, through the efforts of the nurse co-operating with the school and local authorities.
This reference to schools also brings to the fore what was done at the Merwin “Spanish School” (now located on the west edge of Covina next to Irwindale’s Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church) as reported in the Times of 23 September 1917 as something of a follow-up to the efforts noted above a year prior. Pomeroy set up “The Little Mother’s Classes,” which involved three nurses who went “to the homes of the foreign born, note conditions, and subsequently at rural centers, preferably school-houses, lecture and give demonstrations on the art of cleanliness, proper sustenance and health hints generally.”
The county health department stated that infantile death rates, for children under a year of age, was 56.5 per 1,000 whites, 63.4 for the Japanese and 208 for Mexicans. The article continued that “the largest school” for the program “is near Covina,” this being “the Merwin school, with an attendance of 69 Mexican children.” The paper commented that “it was a weird experience at first for the parents of these children to be told how to care for their offspring” but instruction on bathing, hygiene and laundry were provided, leading the paper to report,
The effect was astonishing. With dusty streets as their playground, dirt would become incrusted on the “kids,” and in this dirt were microbes which fattened on the boys and girls. Microbes at length became something real to the Mexican mothers.
Allowing for the likelihood that many of the settlers in what was sometimes called “Stringtown,” a common name for communities that sprung up in rows along, say, railroad lines, rivers and roads, came from poor areas of México where there was little, if any, infrastructure in the ways of sewers, piped water or much education, the Times did make a notable observation, though in a way that, typically, put the onus on the Latino farm laborers and their families, while also including an opening statement that is obviously applicable now:
Mexicans are the solution of the labor problems in the citrus belts. The ranchers could not now do without them. These laborers must become more effective, and this is attained by bringing up their children into healthy boys and girls. Given the knowledge how to care for themselves, these children work more intelligently in the orchards and fields and produce better results for the ranchers.
Of course, the goal was better crop yields for the farmers and ranchers, but nothing was said in terms of higher pay, better working conditions, more humane living standards and other factors far beyond the control of laborers. The Times, however, did not stop with discussing Mexicans, but also addressed the Japanese, the infant mortality rate of which was far less than that of Latinos while some 15% above that of whites.
The paper observed that
It is not common knowledge that 85 per cent. of the vegetables in Southern California are raised by the Japanese [the Homestead, for example, was then leased by a farmer named Yatsuda]. The little brown race is quick to learn. They realize that, by obeying the instructions of the county nurses, their children will have greater producing ability in their chosen field [meaning the family vegetable farm, which was only leased because the Japanese were forbidden by a 1913 state law from owning land].
The piece concluded with the report that “in the Mexican quarters the health officer found everything crude and primitive,” but added that “there was a decided improvement after the nurses got to work,” while it was mentioned, without explanation, that “the most promising camp is in El Monte.” Comparing the Japanese to Latinos without any discussion of any number of possible factors as to why there was a difference in conditions is, naturally, problematic.
The Argus of 17 October 1919 reported that Merwin School had a new assistant, who, with the principal, “will greatly enlarge the effective of the work which the school . . . has been doing among the children of the Mexican settlement.” Importantly, the new instructor had training in “domestic science and manual training work” because there was no expectation or desire that the Latino pupils could aspire to anything other than girls working at home and boys employed as laborers. In fact, the immediate effort was in “teaching sewing and cooking” while older female students “are deep in the mysteries [?!] of canning and preserving.”
The article continued this evocation of educational determinism by remarking that “every child in the school is being given practical training along some line, those who are too young for the manual training are given lessons in hand work, such as basketry and weaving.” It concluded with the note that there were 70 students, but the population “will be increased to at least eighty when the walnut harvest is over,” as children working to pick the nuts in local groves would then attend school—for how long and then where they and their families would go next was the unasked question.
By contrast, a mile east of Merwin, which still exists, Lark Ellen School, now the Covina-Valley Unified School District’s Health and Wellness Center, served the white student population of the Irwindale area. The school was first called Lower Azusa, but, in 1910, it was renamed in honor of Ellen Beach Yaw, the famed operatic colortura soprano who was known as “Lark Ellen” and whose home was just to the south at Lark Ellen Avenue (on which the school is located) and San Bernardino Road.
The original school was razed for a new building designed by the well-known Los Angeles architect John C. Austin and essentially a copy of Covina’s Reed School (which became Covina Grammar School, where Civic Center Park is now), and which was completed in 1920. This dualism of segregated and separate schools for whites and people of color were then the norm in the area and would remain so for a few more decades until the Mendez, et. al. v. Westminster School District case of 1947 ended the practice and paved the way for the national Brown v. Board of Education decision by the United States Supreme Court in 1954.
We’ll stop here and return with part four tomorrow, so please join us then!
As noted in this post, the superior work capabilities of Mexican laborers have earned recognition from regional rancheros and orchardists for more than a century. I believe this perception was not limited to Irwindale but was a common recognition throughout California. Even today, the Mexican workforce continues to play a vital, perhaps even greater role in the overall labor market.
For my part, I must admit an inherent preference for hiring Mexican workers, a view that has only grown stronger over the past seven months as I’ve overseen multiple projects on my properties, from interior remodeling to exterior landscaping. My confidence in their performance has deepened: they are not only physically “strong” but also “smart” to learn new trades, and highly “skilled” in a variety of professional tasks.
In contrast, I have encountered workers from other groups who often spend more time squatting on the ground to smoke than working, and who perform their jobs carelessly when unsupervised – for example, using crumpled newspaper as makeshift insulation to separate exposed electrical wires.