by Paul R. Spitzzeri
This weekend, the Homestead participated for the third consecutive year in Doors Open California, a program of the California Preservation Foundation and which works with dozens of historic buildings and sites throughout the Golden State to provide unusual access and experiences to attendees. Yesterday and today comprised the offerings in southern California and, as we’ve focused previously on La Casa Nueva and El Campo Santo Cemetery the prior two years, we turned our attention with this edition to the Workman House.
This included an in-depth look at the evolution of the structure from its humble origins as a three-room adobe dwelling in the 1840s to a dramatically remodeled and expanded edifice with a second floor and corner rooms of red brick as well as a diverse range of decorative elements by 1870. We also covered some of the later changes to the house, including work done by the Temple family in the late Teens and early Twenties, as well as when the Homestead was used by institutions (a private military school and convalescent home) from 1930 to about 1970.
We’ll share more of that in the next post, but an exciting addition to this year’s program was a collaboration with the La Puente Valley Historical Society so that guests visited the Homestead first for a slide presentation and tour of the Workman House and then drove the mile or so to the Rowland House for a look at the 1855 Greek Revival house that is the oldest surviving brick building in southern California.
My colleague, Beatriz Rivas, also produced a zine, one of several (including for those prior Doors Open program) that highlights the Rowland family and its connections to the Workmans. It will also be part of our second edition, this October, of our Tombstone Tales program, focusing on the final resting place of John Rowland at El Campo Santo, so be sure to check out that offering on our website and join us on Saturday, 18 October from 1 to 4 p.m. with free hourly visits, including a slide presentation and a tour by Jayden Faustinos, a Ramona Convent Secondary School senior, who spent much time this summer developing it.
This post culminates the “Bridges to Early San Gabriel Valley History: The Workman and Rowland House” program by sharing a recent addition to the Homestead’s collection of historic artifacts, a 21 March 1853 receipt presented to F.P.F. Temple by William Potter of Rowland’s grist mill. The Los Angeles Star of 21 October 1871 ran a feature called “Our Mills” in which it discussed the Aliso and Eagle mills in the Angel City and mentioned four others in the outlying section, with two of these being the Los Nietos, built the prior year by ex-Governor John G. Downey where the city of that name is now; the Henry Dalton mill on Rancho Azusa (see more below); and, as for the others:
the oldest is that of Mr. Wm. [John] Rowland, of San Jose [Township], built in 1847, and a first-class neighborhood grist mill, supplied by water from the San Jose creek, which lower down, also furnishes water power for the grist mill of Mr. Wm. Workman, at [Rancho] La Puente.
Both mills, including that of Workman, which was then about three years in operation, were on the La Puente ranch, with Rowland’s situated a short distance east of his house not too far west of today’s Azusa Avenue and north of Gale Avenue, while that of Workman was at the base of the northwest corner of the Puente Hills, near the intersection of Crossroads Parkway South and Workman Mill Road—both locations are in the City of Industry.
It is also noteworthy that San José Creek, which emanated in the Pomona area from water coming out of the San Gabriel Mountains and emptying into the San Gabriel River in the Whittier Narrows and is now a flood control channel as most such waterways in our region are, had enough water to not only provide adequate supply for these mills to operate their grinding stones, but for substantial ditches to irrigate vineyards and other agricultural crops raised on or near the Workman and Rowland home places.
Another reference to the Rowland Mill is from the Los Angeles newspaper, the Southern Californian of 27 July 1854, in which, after discussing Dalton’s project which was still in process, it observed,
Mr. Rowland is also building a large Mill on his rancho, La Puente, which is situated in the same neighborhood [meaning the eastern San Gabriel Valley]. When these Mills are in full operation, they will be able to supply a large amount of Flour, probably, with the San Bernardino Mills [see part two of this post tomorrow], sufficient for the consumption of Lower [presumably, Southern, not Baja in México] California.
Another interesting aspect to this is that, in the courtyard of the Temple family’s Spanish Colonial Revival house, La Casa Nueva, at the Homestead, there is a fountain in which are placed a pair of millstones. Before this was added during the latter stages of the dwelling’s construction, completed in 1927, these stones were placed against a pair of posts outside the still-existing Water Tower. We long thought these were from the Workman Mill, which made sense given that the house’s builder, Walter P. Temple, was the grandson of the mill’s owner. It turns out, however, that, during the La Casa Nueva project, one of the Rowland family was working a field for farming and unearthed the stones, which Temple purchased for use at his residence.
As for receipt, it is a simple, straightforward document. Written from “Puente, Rowland’s Mill,” it has, in ink, the names of Temple and William Potter, who was undoubtedly the miller. The services provided to Temple on 21 March 1853 including “grinding 2 1/2 F[anegas] Corn” into “2 1/2 Fanegas Bran” at a cost of “$1.87 1/2.” Potter acknowledged receipt of this payment and then wrote in pencil on 4 April, “Mr. Temple, Please pay the bearer J. Rowland [likely Rowland’s son, John, Jr.].” The document was folded and in one portion on the reverse is “F. Temple,” while, in his hand, is “William Potter / Bill & receipt / Apr 1853.”
We find that, in the 1860 census, Potter resided in Los Angeles, with the 52-year old native of Pennsylvania’s occupation listed as “millwright.” Seven households above him on the sheet is John Turner, a 47-year old miller from Maryland, and his 20-year old son William. Later, both Turners were employed by William Workman at his mill, with William working and living at the Workman Mill from about 1868 to 1874, when a notorious incident ended his tenure and his father briefly replaced him.
John was known to have operated the Eagle Mills, where the Capitol Milling Company later was situated in Sonoratown, now Chinatown, north of the Plaza and near Elysian Park, and Potter worked there, as well. In fact, the 22 March 1856 edition of the Star informed its readers that,
Mr. Wm. Potter, an employee in the Flouring Mill of Messrs. [Jonathan R.] Scott & [Francis] Mellus, about 8 o’clock on Tuesday evening last, was shot at through the window by some bold villain. The ball lodged near the shoulder of Mr. Potter, without doing serious injury to the bones or muscles of his arm. This is one of the boldest attempts at assassination that it has been our unpleasant duty to record for many months. No clue has been yet obtained to detect the miscreant.
It appears the shooting was never solved and it should be observed that this was a period in which the Angel City was wracked with deviltry of many sorts when it came to violent crime, including a very high murder rate, many instances of gun battles, frequent burglaries and robberies and mob law and lynching.
Not much else is known about Potter, although he was an active member, as a county delegate, in the Democratic Party, which dominated local politics during this period, and he was also a high-ranking officer in the International Order of Odd Fellows (Vice-Grand, a sort of vice-president) and Free and Associated Masons lodges in town, of which he was treasurer and which included Turner, Temple, William Workman and his nephew, William H. Workman, as members as well.
In a special election in January 1861 following the death of Mayor Henry Mellus, Potter, a resident of an area near today’s Union Station and very close to the Eagle Mills who served on the county grand jury that fall, mounted an unsuccessful campaign for the office, finishing a distant second behind Damien Marchessault, who’d recently served in that position and then did so subsequently before committing suicide in the city’s council chambers in 1868.
In 1862, Potter ran for Los Angeles city treasurer, the office which F.P.F. Temple held, as the second holder of it, from 1850 to 1852, but fell short in that effort, as well. At the end of the year, however he died at age 54, with F.&A.M. Lodge 42—the original building of which still stands on Main Street just south of the Plaza and adjacent to the Merced Theatre and Pico House hotel edifices—paying this tribute:
Whereas, it has pleased the All-wise Grand Master to call from this world the soul of our beloved brother, William Potter; and as it is fitting that, while we lay to heart the lesson read to us in his sudden death, we should bear witness to our appreciation of the virtues of one so marked by honesty and uprightness, and that this Lodge, especially, should express its sense and recollection of the services and high standing of the deceased during his connection with it, both as member and officer.
That in the death of Brother Potter the fraternity laments one conspicuous in the practice of the integrity which the precepts of our order inculcate, and whose sterling honesty has been a bright example; and the community has lost a worthy, esteemed, and useful citizen.
With regard to the construction of John Rowland’s grist mill, other than reminding that he practiced that profession in New Mexico for much of the period of his residence there, spanning from 1823 to 1841, the growth in these enterprises in Los Angeles at the end of the Mexican period and into the early American period is reflective of a gradual change in the region’s economic realm.
The backbone of the economy was long in the raising of cattle, specifically for their hides and tallow, so the region’s ranches were filled with many thousands of head of the animals, while any farming was done for family subsistence and some local trade, but on a comparatively small scale. Moreover, the Californios or Spanish-speaking population either born or largely raised in the “Siberia of México” that was the far-flung department of Alta California, focused mainly on cattle for their livelihood, even as kitchen gardens, orchards and vineyards were the basis of making a living for those who lived in Los Angeles and its immediate outlying areas.
The widespread and larger scale use of farming grain was principally practiced by Americans and Europeans, even as they, too, mostly dealt with livestock on their ranches in the hinterlands, though, again, those who resided in town and its adjacent tracts practiced the same raising of oranges, grapes and other crops.
So, on Rancho La Puente, for example, Rowland and Workman were principally raising cattle and horses on its nearly 49,000 acres, but devoted some space near their houses for agriculture. This largely involved orchards and vineyards, irrigated from San José Creek as mentioned above, though field crops were planted from the beginning of their 1842 settlement on the ranch.
Workman planted corn and beans once he established his residence and Rowland likely did much of the same in terms of subsistence for the family, though the building of the mill clearly allowed for Workman, Temple and others, including a large community of New Mexicans, who came with Rowland and Workman in late 1841, residing in what is now the Walnut area at the eastern end of Rancho La Puente, to grind their corn and wheat into flour. It was a commercial endeavor of a sort, but hardly likely to be a major source of income and, perhaps, more of a convenience for local farmers.
With the 1846-1847 American seizure of Mexican California, the ferment of the Gold Rush that very quickly followed and the migration of mainly Americans and Europeans to greater Los Angeles that took place in the late Forties and early Fifties, more attention to agriculture was given, even if cattle reigned supreme until the floods and droughts of the first half of the 1860s. As more people, then, engaged in farming, including with field crops that required mills for processing flour, it is no surprise to see that grist mills began to operate in the years after Rowland opened his modest enterprise.
We’ll return tomorrow with part two and share some history of the early flouring mills of Los Angeles and environs, so be sure to join us then!