by Paul R. Spitzzeri
As briefly noted earlier in this post, the gravel, rock and sand industry in Irwindale essentially began in the early years of the 20th century, not long after the establishment of the community, including when a member of the long-standing Fraijo family sent three cars filled with rock from a wash to a Los Angeles rock company called Pacific.
In July 1909, Pacific Rock and Gravel acquired a 10-year lease on a royalty basis from the estate of banker Jonathan R. Slauson, who owned much of the Azusa area, and located along the route of the Pacific Electric Railway a mile west of Azusa. The company constructed a $40,000 plant to crush the abundant rock that gathered near the mouth of Azusa Canyon over the millenia.
The firm’s founder was Walter L. Hodges, a native of Vermont (famed for its marble) who settled in the San Gabriel Valley with his parents in 1900 after previously living in Iowa and worked in his father’s lumber business. Hodges got into the rock and gravel business, starting with a plant at the Arroyo Seco, at just the right time as Los Angeles and its environs grew exponentially in the early years of the 20th century and cement and concrete increasingly being used for commercial buildings, roads, sidewalks, bridges and other aspects of our burgeoning infrastructure.
The vice-president and general manager was Alfred G. Wessling, who hailed from Chicago and worked as a butter manufacturer and produce company manager in Kenton, Ohio, northwest of Columbus before setting with his wife and daughter in Monrovia in 1913. He then joined Hodges at Pacific Rock and Gravel, which kept its headquarters in the Pacific Electric [Railway] Building in downtown Los Angeles. The firm’s secretary, appropriately enough, was H.C. Stone.
An early reference to Pacific’s work was its switch in hauling material for paving on San Bernardino Road to Citrus Avenue in Covina. The firm previously loaded onto Pacific Electric streetcars (the transportation giant, beyond passenger service did a good deal of freight hauling, this being a core revenue source) and, at the Covina depot, used horse-drawn wagons to drop off at construction sites. New Mack trucks, however, were purchased by the company and this was said by the Argus of 9 November 1912 to be more cost-effective.
Reflecting the burgeoning use of concrete in a rapidly growing downtown Los Angeles, the Monrovia News of 18 March 1913, remarked that,
For the first ten days of March the Pacific Rock and Gravel Company, formerly the San Gabriel River Rock and Gravel Company, shipped 440 cars of gravel and crushed rock, a large part of the output going to the company’s yard in Los Angeles, there to be retailed to the big concrete contractors for use in the giant cement skyscrapers which are now springing up in all parts of the city.
Hodges told the paper that a new, larger crusher, the largest in the western United States, was to be installed and significantly increase the output from the current 25 tons daily. Before that project could be undertaken, reported the Argus of 1 November, “a spectacular fire, that had the appearance from Covina as if the whole city of Azusa was burning up, occurred . . . resulting in the crippling of the plant . . . one of the largest stone-crushing companies in the state.”
The destruction was near-total, though Hodges told the paper that the loss was not as significant as it looked, especially as he was preparing for the new crusher and other improvements, including a conversion from steam to electric power generation, even though there was no insurance on the destroyed property. His main concern was delay to a major contract to supply material for roads in Orange County paid for by a $2 million bond issue, though the firm had another plant a mile to the west and some work could be shifted there.
The other major threat to the plant was from flooding of the San Gabriel River, especially with the massive flows coming out of the three forks in the canyon to the north. There were references earlier in this post to damage done to Irwindale agriculture, mainly from the San Dimas Wash coming in from the east, in deluges in 1914 and 1916, but overflow from the river put Pacific’s plant at risk, as well.
The 21 February 1914 edition of the Los Angeles Tribune reported that the river breached the banks just north of the Santa Fe Railroad bridge, this being where today’s Metro A (formerly Gold) Line crosses, and returned the water to an older channel for two miles to the west of the existing bed. Notably, the account remarked that “about fifty colored and Mexican families live directly in the path of the new torrent, at what is known as Rocktown. All of these escaped to safety, but what few possessions they had were destroyed in the flood.”
Rocktown was a community, identified as early as December 1911, of Latino and Black families that is now a section of Duarte, identified on maps as Butler because of a rail station there where the City of Hope A Line stop is today—the Pacific plant was sometimes identified as being at this location, at the southwest of where interstates 210 and 605 meet and adjacent to the western boundaries of Irwindale. As with Stringtown, or Sonoratown, in Irwindale, which was the Latino neighborhood, most references to Rocktown were about crimes being committed there, including illicit alcohol making in “blind pigs” and reported or actual acts of violence.
In 1916, Rocktown was again threatened, with all of its denizens fleeing to higher ground, as floodwaters threatened to again overwhelm the settlement. The Monrovia paper of 19 January noted that “the efforts of all Pacific Rock and Gravel company’s employes [sic] are today concentrated in the work of keeping the San Gabriel river from devouring the Butler plant of the concern.” While waters reached the crusher, they receded for the time being, but further deluges ravaged the facility. Wessling, while directing efforts to protect the plant, lost his truck to the roiling waters.
On the last day of November, reported the Los Angeles Times of the following day,
The Pacific Rock and Gravel Company commenced operations at its new plant on the Santa Fe line in Azusa [Irwindale] this week . . . It replaces the one formerly operated at Butler . . . which was put out of commission by the floods last year . . . Fifty-five cars of crushed rock per day is the capacity. The company now has an output of 150 cars a day, approximating 7500 tons of crushed rock, gravel and sand.
The News of 2 December added that the new facility, with 20 workers was located at Kincaid, where the Irwindale station of the A Line is now off Irwindale Avenue just south of the 210 and where the Irwindale Brew Yard is a very visible landmark from the interstate, and that “all the latest modern equipment and improvements have been installed both to safeguard the lives of the employees and make for efficiency of the plant.” In late spring 1915, another plant was erected next to Santa Anita Wash with new machinery that turned rock material to powder and which was “extensively used for ‘top dressing’ oiled streets” while reducing labor time and cost.
The account, however, observed that “the old plant on the Pacific Electric line between Monrovia and Azusa is now running” with fifty employees for all but one hour of the day and sending out up to 100 cars daily, with both facilities churning out 7500 tons of material a day. As for the new plant, it operated about half the day and could handle up to 55 rail cars. In May 1917, the News briefly observed that Pacific reopened its Santa Fe plant “to care for a tremendous increase in orders for crushed rock and gravel” after three weeks during which the Pacific Electric facility handled operations.
In its 14 December edition, the Catholic newspaper, The Tidings, provided a brief, but notable, description of Pacific and the importance of the rock, sand and gravel industry generally:
Some builder has said that the world would go back to the stone age and cave age were it not for the rock and gravel furnished to the contractor in his work. What he probably meant was that the world could not get along very well without the supply of rock and gravel as turned out by the huge companies engaged in this line of work. It is true that rock and gravel are the basis of the cement industry—the basis of the plasterer’s livelihood and the sole support of the man who produces the foundations for buildings, bridges, mine supports and even the roadways which these days have much to do with the cost of transportation. Among the concerns in Los Angeles that has made a success in the rock and gravel field is that of the Pacific Rock and Gravel Company with a suite of rooms in the Pacific Electric Building . . . It is their aim to produce the very best in quality and in conditions of both rock and gravel. Their method of delivery has won for them much praise in the past and it is through the most liberal means of business methods that they are enabled to give to all of their patrons the satisfaction which ensues following each order.
There was yet another flood threat in the winter of 1918 as the Times of 12 March stated that the river “has been cutting its west bank near the Pacific Rock and Gravel Company’s new plant” so that sandbags were piled against the crusher’s east side and this said to have placed the facility out of danger.
In June 1919, Pacific and Southern California Rock and Gravel, which formed in November 1916 and worked a pit next to the river (it was criticized in 1918 for potentially creating flooding problems for Duarte ranchers because of its work) merged and took on the moniker of Union Rock Company, with the plant and equipment turned over to the new firm and half of the stock received in exchange. Hodges retained a large portion of that stock, though, by the end of the decade, he pulled away from active work, doing the same with the National Bank of Monrovia of which he’d been president and spent more time on ranching, automobile interests in the Imperial Valley of southeastern California. In 1922, he retired from his business dealings—of this we’ll discuss more in part six—and lived for a time in Honolulu before raising horses in northwestern California. He died in July 1930 at San Francisco.
Wessling had assumed a greater role and financial stake in the rock and gravel company over the years, while he also shared interests with Hodges in dairying (something Wessling did in Illinois) in the Imperial Valley. He was listed as a rock company vice-president when the 1920 census was taken, but his emphasis soon shifted, as well. A notable tidbit is that, as a local Republican Party leader, Wessling had a prior connection in Ohio to presidential candidate Warren G. Harding, the two having met and become friends when they played for competing baseball teams in the Buckeye State.
This, in turn, may have helped him when, not long after Harding’s election, he secured a position as chief field deputy to Rex Goodcell of the regional division of the federal Internal Revenue Service. After Goodcell stepped down in 1926 to mount an unsuccessful run for California governor, Wessling was in the running to succeed him, though he was passed over and that led to his resignation.
Meanwhile, his first wife, Elizabeth, died in spring 1925 and he quickly wedded Oda Faulconer, a prominent attorney and later judge in Los Angeles as well as a major figure in the women’s club world. After about eight months, however, the marriage was annulled. Another surprise was in store for Wessling’s only child, whose husband was associated with Pacific, and other family members when, in October 1927, he married Mona Montgomery, who was born Josephine M. Workman, a granddaughter of Homestead founders William Workman and Nicolasa Urioste, and achieved film stardom during the first half of the 1910s as Princess Mona Darkfeather.
Recently divorced from her former director and producer, Frank Montgomery, Mona was residing in Pasadena when she met Wessling and then wed him in San Francisco. The couple settled in a home in Monrovia north of downtown and he served as president and general manager of the local branch of the People’s Thrift and Finance Company, while also on the advisory board of Monrovia’s branch of the Bank of Italy, later renamed the Bank of America, and was active in real estate locally and at such places as Hermosa Beach.
As the Great Depression ensued and then worsened, it appears that Wessling was, like so many Americans, deeply adversely affected, including the loss of property, such as his Hermosa Beach apartment house, in trustee’s sales, as well as a failed investment in a country club tract of 160 acres in the foothills of northeastern Monrovia. Wessling and Mona, whose film career was not publicly noted in any sources about her decade or so residing in Monrovia, divorced about 1936 and she remarried Montgomery the following year, living forty more years in Los Angeles. Wessling, who worked in real estate in his last years, died in Monrovia in 1941.
We’ll return with part six tomorrow with more Irwindale history during the Roaring Twenties, including the evolving rock, sand and gravel industry, so check in with us then!