by Paul R. Spitzzeri
With the 1922 sale of Union Rock Company, formed three years earlier from a merger of Pacific Rock and Gravel, the earliest of the firms mining the deep quarries of granitic material accumulated for millenia in Irwindale, the company passed from the control of Monrovia capitalists Walter L. Hodges and Alfred G. Wessling (who later married Josephine M. Workman, granddaughter of Homestead founders William Workman and Nicolasa Urioste and who was a major film star under the stage name of Princess Mona Darkfeather) to a syndicate that included such prominent Angelenos as Los Angeles Times publisher Harry Chandler.
As media accounts noted, Union had control of up to 80% of all the gravel, rock and sand generated in the region and four of its five plants were in the Irwindale area, with the only exception being Brush Canyon adjacent to Griffith Park. Other firms, however, did exist or were soon established, such as the Builders Crushed Rock Company, which launched in early fall 1923. The 18 February 1924 edition of the Monrovia News reported the Builders’ vice-president, Hyrum Ricks, Jr., told the Azusa Chamber of Commerce that,
his company . . . had secured forty acres ideally located here and will at once begin the construction of a plant for supplying crushed rock and gravel which will have a capacity of 150 tons an hour and will give employment at the plant to from 30 to 40 men in addition to truck drivers making the total between 40 and 50 to have regular employment.
What was also mentioned at the Chamber confab was the early bedrock testing was favorable in San Gabriel Canyon for the massive dam project undertaken by Los Angeles County as part of an ambitious flood control program established after major deluges in 1914 and 1916, which affected Irwindale’s agriculture and rock and gravel industries. Obviously, with all the concrete needed for the enormous structure, the quarries in and around Irwindale were essential and only to grow in scale and scope, beyond the burgeoning growth in the region involving buildings, roads, sidewalks and more.
At the end of April 1924, Reliance Rock Company, a Delaware corporation, was established. While the Builders plant was to cost a quarter million dollars, the Reliance facility was originally announced to cost double that amount, but it ended up being more around $750,000. When Union built a fifth crushing plant in the area, that boosted its investment to a cool $5 million, according to the Pasadena Star-News of 28 November 1924.
Another important enterprise was what began as the Sycamore Canyon Gravel Company, established by Augustus H. Gregg. Gregg, whose family migrated from Texas and settled in the Whittier area, had walnut and citrus groves, was a founder of Rose Hills Memorial Park and developed his rock and gravel business in Sycamore Canyon at the west edge of the Puente Hills and which the indigenous people of our region regarded as a sacred place, likely because of hot mineral water springs there.
Sycamore Canyon Gravel’s facilities there were on Workman Mill Road, the route running east of the San Gabriel River and west of the hills from the mill constructed by William Workman in the 1860s southward to Los Nietos, the general name for what became Whittier, La Mirada, Santa Fe Springs and surrounding locales. The firm, which soon included Gregg’s son John as a key figure, expanded by building a crushing mill in what it identified as Baldwin Park, but which was in the Irwindale area.
The Whittier News of the last day of 1923, the year that the latest building boom in greater Los Angeles peaked (and when Walter P. Temple, a Sycamore Canyon customer, established his Town of Temple, now Temple City), reported that the company incorporated with capital of $750,000 and the assets held by Augustus Gregg were transferred to the new entity. Joining the Greggs as directors was Frank F. Pellissier, whose dairy was adjacent to the Sycamore Canyon facility.
The 27 August 1927 edition of the paper reported that
California Materials Incorporated is the name of the new corporation which has bought the property and business of the Sycamore Canyon Gravel Company, a concern which has operated under that name for a number of years in Whittier. The new company has a capitalization of $2,000,000 . . . The change in organization was effected for a two-fold purpose; first, the new firm name was desired because it indicated the diversified type of service it would give, and second, larger working capital will be used to handle the growing business.
Two weeks later, the Times of 13 September remarked that “acquisition . . . of 100 acres of land in the San Gabriel [River] district and plans for the construction of one of the largest rock and gravel plants in Southern California, were announced today coincidentally [?] with the offering for today of $350,000 California Materials, Inc., first mortgage 7 per cent sinking fund bonds by a syndicate of local investment houses headed by M.H. Lewis & Co.”
The account continued that “upon completion of present plans, the new company will constitute a complete unit in the industry with producing facilities of the most modern type.” It added that the main property securing the mortgage was the newly purchased “acreage on the San Gabriel cone near Baldwin Park on which the company’s new plant of 2500 tons capacity will be immediately erected.”
The 23 October issue of the paper specified that the 100 acres was “south of Bonita Avenue [now Arrow Highway] on Irwindale Avenue where it already has under way an up-to-date rock-crushing plant with a daily capacity of 2500 tons.” The $1 million plant opened in early March 1928 with the location specified as being in Irwindale. It was added that a steel furniture plant and a tool-making facility were also in the area, which was referred to as Keeney Grove and which was a precursor to the primarily industrial areas of the San Gabriel Valley, particularly the nearby City of Industry.
Keeney Grove was the name of a 160-acre property settled in 1870 by Nelson Williamson, who worked for Henry Dalton, owner of the Rancho de Azusa that embraced the Irwindale area, along with Azusa and other adjoining sections, and it was planted to pepper and citrus trees at that time. Louisa Hutchison, daughter of Nelson and Gertrudis Romana, a Latina from New Mexico, had 10 acres of the family domain and spent years building a house of stones from the gravel deposits near the San Gabriel River. She was evicted, however, through eminent domain because of a flood control project that became the Santa Fe Dam, though this was not built until the late 1940s after the Great Depression and Second World War.
The 17 April 1925 edition of the Argus identified Keeney Grove as along Irwindale Avenue a mile north of San Bernardino Road (often called Covina Road in those days), while the Monrovia News of 6 June added that the location was a mile south of Huntington Drive (becoming Foothill Boulevard at the north end of Irwindale) and it cited promoters of the development as stating that firms expected to build there included a law book publisher, carpet mill, hosiery manufacturer and clothing maker.
A week later, it commented that the tract was “the new subdivision for industrial purposes” and a speaker at the Covina Chamber of Commerce reported how the Los Angeles chamber commissioned him to study potential industrial areas in the hinterlands surrounding the Angel City. A reference to Orange Avenue as one of the streets embraced within Keeney Grove means today’s Azusa Canyon Road heading north from San Bernardino Road, at which Orange terminates after coming up from West Covina.
While Keeney Grove was described as being for manufacturing, including some accounts stating it was to be one devoted principally for textiles, the News added that,
The home conditions in this new industrial city is [sic] far superior to the ordinary construction of building as usually built in industrial communities and the construction of at least twenty-five to fifty homes will commence at once so to give the employees modern and up to date new homes which they are in position to purchase on a monthly basis equal to rental payments . . . Ample provision is being made to provide swimming pools, baseball grounds, tennis grounds and [a] community center by means of which the employees and residents may have at all time desirable recreation.
Also mentioned were macadamized roads and the bringing in of electricity, gas and water and, while 120 acres were devoted to industry, the paper remarked that, “the whole of Keeney Grove consists of a beautiful 160 acre lemon and orange grove and the homes will nestle among the full grown trees” on the 40 acres set aside for residences.
The combination of residences and industrial development are somewhat reminiscent of what took place during this period at Montebello Park, a much larger project that was built adjacent to what became the City of Commerce, as a recent multi-part post here detailed. A key figure in the Montebello section was Fred T. Beaty and, when he challenged incumbent Preston Cogswell for the 1st District seat on the county Board of Supervisors, they sparred about campaign issues related to the rock and gravel industry.
Beaty, for example, denied, in a 29 October 1926 Argus article just before the election, that he was given campaign contributions of $50,000 by Union Rock Company’s president, George A. Rogers, as a group of Cogswell’s supporters claimed. Beaty then produced a flyer issued by Reliance Rock Company of San Francisco “to which the Union Rock company is a small and insignificant affair” and he noted that it had his opponent’s portrait on it.
The candidate continued by assuring voters that the county’s purchasing agent dealt with the rock and gravel companies, not the supervisors, and Beaty promised “I have never bowed my neck to any man, company, corporation or any other power in the United States and do not expect to. I shall be no man’s man and shall give all a square deal.” While he won the seat and was reelected in 1928, Beaty ended up in poverty, and, with just 52 cents in his pocket, deliberately was arrested for disturbing the peace and got a short jail term so that he could be confined to the county hospital to get health care for rheumatism three years before his death from pneumonia at just 50 in 1937.
Previously in this post the matter of the Los Angeles City Council dealing with a so-called “rock trust” was discussed and a similar situation arose in late September 1928. The Times of the 28th remarked that,
Charges that the members of the Southern California Rock Products Association have entered into an unlawful agreement to control the sale and distribution of rock, sand and gravel in Los Angeles are made in a suit filed yesterday in Superior Court against the association by Blue Diamond Company, dealers in building materials . . . According to the complaint, the defendants [including the Builders, California Materials, Consumers, Reliance and Union firms] control 75 per cent of the rock, sand and gravel production in Los Angeles and it is necessary for the plaintiff to purchase large amounts of its materials from members of the association. The plaintiff corporation states it has at all times refused to become a party to the asserted agreement, which, it charges, is in restraint of trade.
Blue Diamond sought $50,000 in damages and a restraining order concerning the carrying out of the agreement. It also alleged that, by labeling it as a dealer, the rock and gravel companies refused to sell it material for building and street work and essentially placed a boycott on it. Nothing further was located about the matter, however, so a settlement may well have been reached between the parties.
Meanwhile, in late April 1928, as reported by the Times of the 29th, California Materials and Consumers’ Rock and Gravel merged with combined assets of some $6.5 million and estimated annual output of material expected to top 4 million tons. Consumers’ was basically a San Fernando Valley firm with its central crushing facility in Roscoe, now Sun Valley, at the eastern edge of that region, while California was centered in the Irwindale and Whittier sections along the San Gabriel River, including that new million dollar plant.
Then came a major announcement came at the end of February 1929, as reported in the Los Angeles Express of the 16th:
Lee A. Phillips announces that with the co-operation of three of the leading banking investment houses of Los Angeles one of the largest mergers in the history of Los Angeles has been consummated, This consolidation groups various companies supplying over 75 per cent of the basic construction materials, such as rock and gravel, used in road and railroad building, flood and irrigation control and major building construction of all kinds in Southern California. The territory served stretches from San Diego to Santa Barbara, the greatest consuming area in the world, greater even than metropolitan New York. The merged company, to be known as Consolidated Rock Products Company, will be the largest of its kind in the world. It brings together 23 separate producing plants and unites such companies as Union Rock Company and its subsidiaries, Consumers Rock and Gravel Company, Inc., and subsidiaries, Reliance Rock Company and others, the combined companies having annual sales in excess of 8,000,000 tons.
The directorate was dominated by banking and investment officials, with Phillips from the Pacific Mutual Life Insurance Company, for example, and others from trust and savings banks, finance firms, investment companies and other insurance entities. Rogers retained his position and there were directors from utilities, steel, the Gladding, McBean tile company and S.W. Burford, who became the president of Consolidated.
It was added that, beyond the producing plants, there were 18 distributing bunkers, more than 1,800 acres owned and above 2,600 leased and total rock and sand inventory at around a billion tons, said to be enough to supply the company for a century. Phillips told the press that the deal was “a forward step industrially in the history of Southern California” and “effects a constructive consolidation in a basic industry in the largest market for its products in the United States.”
As was said in previous mergers noted earlier in this post and echoing what is generally said when large conglomerates are formed, even as they edge toward or become monopolies, Phillips averred that,
As a result of this consolidation and the economies to be effected thereby it will be possible to supply materials of sound quality and greater quantity in less time and at lesser cost, with greater profit to the producing companies. The benefits of this merger are obvious and far-reaching.
In its discussion of the deal, the Times of the same day noted that “the Union Rock Company and the Consumers’ Rock and Gravel Company, Inc., are pioneers in this industry in this section of the country.” The former was capitalized at $2 million and net sales in 1927 topped $4 million, with net earnings over a million, while the latter was less than half the size with assets of just north of $3 million, while Union had more than $6.5 million. Two days later, the paper reported that $8 million was to be raised in stock sales for working capital, financing and other purposes and that the value of the new firm was well more than double that amount.
This finally leads us to the featured photo here on a Consolidated plant in Irwindale, though it is not known which of the former facilities it was. The date was 2 August, just over five months since the massive merger and it shows extensive machinery and some buildings, as well as a pit in the foreground.
Another image shared here is clearly next to a Pacific Electric Railway line, as one of the streetcars is parked on a spur, while a portion of the San Gabriel Mountains in the background makes it appear as if this is in northern Irwindale. Note the remarkable assembly of the track for carts descending from the top of the structure, as well as conveyor belts, tin sheds, machinery and other aspects.
With our interpretive time period ending at 1930, the great merger is an appropriate place to conclude, though it should be noted that the crash of the stock market in fall 1929 ushered in the early stages of the Great Depression, which continued through the next decade. Then came World War II and the rationing and conservation of material needed for the war. In the postwar period, however, a huge population and development boom ensued with the rock, sand and gravel plants furnishing enormous volumes of material.
In recent decades, however, the Irwindale plants have reduced their operations significantly, though several major sites are still very active, including two Vulcan plants on Foothill and Irwindale and off Los Angeles Street, United Rock north of Arrow Highway and west of Interstate 605 and Martin-Marietta off of Live Oak Avenue and also west of the 605. These remain very visible as was the recently closed Irwindale Speedway, which opened in 1999 atop the old Pacific Road Quarry and closed late last year as an industrial and commercial development is to come.
Also unforgettable for some, though time blurs memory, was the great debacle involving the late 1980s plan to relocate the Los Angeles Raiders to Irwindale, but the fanfare turned to abject silence when a $10 million non-refundable deposit and another $10 million in environmental reports, legal fees and other costs hit the city hard.
This early history, hopefully, provides some meaningful background to the San Gabriel Valley city, including its agricultural origins, residents (including people of color) and the industry that so long defined Irwindale.