by Paul R. Spitzzeri
As we wrap up this post on early flour mills in greater Los Angeles, specifically during the 1850s, as more growing of corn and wheat was being undertaken in the region, even as the cattle industry reigned supreme as the prime industry, we note that, in the extreme north of Los Angeles County, before the establishment in 1866 of Kern County, the Tejon area had a grist mill operated as part of an Indian reservation there. This was in operation by summer 1854, as reported by the Southern Californian of 31 August, and expanded as farming increased in an effort to turn indigenous people into farmers.
Two months later, there was mention in the paper of a plan by a Mr. Moody, who “has secured the right of [some] streams, and designs uniting them,” though exactly how was not stated, “and conveying the water in a flue to the banks of the Coyote [Creek], where he intends erecting a flour mill.” That watercourse comes out of what is now northwestern Orange County and, in 1854, continued to the Pacific where it emptied, though, in the winter of 1867-1868, during which there was flooding, the San Gabriel River coming into Whittier Narrows took a new course to the east following an irrigation ditch of ex-Governor Pío Pico and then overtook Coyote Creek to the ocean terminus.
Three years later, a colony of Germans established in San Francisco, acquired a large property to the east and formed the town of Anaheim, combining the German word for home with “Santa Ana.” This included the nearby river, which the residents tapped for irrigating their vineyards, a staple of the new community.
One of the first in-depth articles about Anaheim, which appeared in the 30 January 1858 edition of the Los Angeles Star, discussed the one-and-a-half by one-and-a-quarter mile tract being fully fenced and covered the irrigating scheme in significant detail. After observing that the town “is a busy place” where “all is life, industry and activity,” the paper added that “hundreds of acres of grain have been sown in soil never before furrowed” while “a grist mill is also in course of erection on the Santa Ana river—a novelty in that section of country.”
At El Monte, founded mostly by Southerners in the early Fifties, there was also a substantial amount of agriculture practiced in what the Star of 27 December 1856 termed the “Monte Valley.” There, “everything grows in profusion” including fruits and vegetables as well as field crops like barley, corn and wheat, all without irrigation” and the paper remarked,
So much can be said of this locality, that it is entirely useless to do anything more, except to add, that there is a grist mill in the south-east part of the valley in course of construction, which will be of immense importance to the valley. Mr. Squires is the proprietor.
Located on the Rancho Potrero de Felipe Lugo along the Río Hondo, the older course of the San Gabriel River that changed its direction as noted above, the mill was built and operated by Elmore W. Squires, who later resided in Orange County. It seems likely that the moribund economic conditions following the end, by mid-decade, of the Gold Rush and then the Depression of 1857 affected Squires, as it probably did for Theodore Bors, mentioned in part two with his Los Angeles mill.
Whatever the situation, a foreclosure suit was filed against him by the firm of Corbitt and Barker, who with Albert Dibblee of San Francisco, acquired the Rancho Santa Anita from Joseph Rowe, who got the ranch by foreclosure on a mortgage to Henry Dalton, also discussed in part two concerning the Azusa Mills. A sheriff’s sale was held in June 1860, but, by the end of the year, a delinquent tax assessment on Richard Chapman, who apparently bought it from Corbitt and Barker and then died very quickly, so it was purchased by F.P.F. Temple, whose Rancho La Merced residence was just to the south.
Another San Gabriel Valley flouring mill was near the Mission San Gabriel and built by Andrew J. Courtney, whose wife Paula was the daughter of Michael White, an early arrival in Mexican-era Los Angeles who spent some time in Taos, New Mexico, including at William Workman’s store, and came back with the Rowland and Workman Expedition of 1841.
White’s adobe house still stands on the grounds of San Marino High School and maps at the nearby Huntington Library show it and, just to the east, in an unincorporated county area with a San Gabriel zip-code, the Courtney mill. This was all on former Mission San Gabriel land at the border with Santa Anita and the mill was located below a dam called La Presa.
As a post by Michael Ackerman on this blog discussed, the Courtney mill, south of Huntington Drive and east of San Gabriel Boulevard, was built by early 1857, but, within several years was acquired by Leonard J. Rose as part of what became his famous Sunny Slope Ranch and the Rose residence is off La Presa Drive with Eaton Wash just to the east about where the mill was situated.
Returning to Los Angeles, the main source of water for the residents of the town from its earliest years under Spanish rule and then for decades following, was the Zanja Madre, or mother ditch, which was dug from the Los Angeles River to the north and then directed to the pueblo. After we hosted staff from Los Angeles State Historic Park this spring, the Homestead’s staff took a tour in August and we saw a segment of the Zanja when it was recently unearthed for the creation of the park.
The 19 June 1852 edition of the Star, covering the proceedings of a Common (City) Council meeting held four days before, noted that “a petition was received from Messrs. Caffri & Poulain praying for leave to erect a mill on the sanja below the city,” though this actually was above, or north. The project was approved and José (Joseph) Maffre and Auguste Poulain, both natives of France and who acquired the property at the time of the petition from Ramón Orduño and his wife Ascensión Féliz, erected their mill on what looks to be the southern end of the state park.
Poulain was a Gold Rush ’49er who settled in San Jose before migrating to Los Angeles, where he resided for about a decade or so, including service on the Common (City) Council in 1862-1863, on which he was on the committees of police and streets. He returned to the northern city and operated the Orange Mill there from 1864 to 1874 before heading to Arizona to superintend mines and then, late in life, was a wine seller in San Jose, where he died in 1890. As to Maffre, he has proven to be elusive, though persons by that surname later resided in San Jose.
The Star of 8 July 1854 published an advertisement from Maffre and Poulain that, under the heading of “Notice to Sellers of Wheat,” remarked that,
The undersigned Proprietors of the Los Angeles Mill, situated north of the city, on the principal zanja, will give the highest price in the market for Wheat. All who wish to have good flour, are respectfully requested to give us a fair trial, as we shall use our best exertions to satisfy our customers.
Shortly afterward, in August 1855, the two men sold some of their property to three prominent figures, merchant Francis Mellus, attorney and judge Jonathan R. Scott and merchant and landowner Abel Stearns. Maffre then withdrew from the partnership and was briefly replaced by A. Glaize, though, after September 1856, Poulain ran the Los Angeles Mill on his own.
It also appears that, during this time, Poulain sued the three Americans over water rights from the zanja and prevailed, but he also vacated the property and, by the end of the Fifties, he was a partner with the well-known French-born vintner Jean-Louis Sainsevain in what was a prominent institution, the Aliso Mills, on the road of that name and near the landmark sycamore tree long sacred to the region’s indigenous population.
The Spanish-language newspaper, El Clamor Público, run by the young Francisco P. Ramirez, who was raised in that area and was a protégé of neighbor, Jean-Louis Vignes, briefly recorded in English in its 17 September 1859 edition,
We notice that our neighbor El Señor Don J. Louis Sainsevain and Mons[ieur] Poulain have completed a fine flour and grist mill, which is in good working order. The “Aliso Mill” now looms up magnificently, and presents a beautiful outside appearance, being newly painted, and sets off with great taste and artistic embellishment.
Ramirez’ newspaper, which closed down at the end of the year because of chronic financial problems during “hard times,” added that there was a water fall of 10 1/2 feet and “the interior rigging is of the most durable character” with a capacity of up to 3,000 pounds of flour per day. Commenting that “the flour is of a very superior quality,” the paper concluded “we hope the enterprising proprietors may be suitable patronized.”
With respect to Mellus, Scott and Stearns, their partnership yielded the Eagle Mills, adjacent on the south to that of Moffre and Poulain. Mellus (1824-1864) was a native of Massachusetts, as was Stearns and Jonathan Temple, and came to Mexican California in 1839 to join his merchant elder brother (not unlike F.P.F. Temple making the trip two years later to join Jonathan.) Henry Mellus (1816-1860), was on the same ship as Richard Henry Dana, author of Two Years Before the Mast, but settled in San Francisco, then Yerba Buena.
The Mellus brothers, who married sisters, came to Los Angeles at different times in the late 1840s and Francis specialized in sending cattle hides to New England while in the north. After he settled in Los Angeles, he partnered with David W. Alexander, a close friend of the Workman and Temple family, in a general merchandise business for about five years. Mellus also served on the town’s Common Council, briefly was city treasurer, was a Los Angeles County Supervisor and served a term in the state Assembly. Before his death, he was an agent of the Wells Fargo express company.
Jonathan R. Scott (1812-1864) was from New York and was admitted to the bar there, but abandoned a wife and three children and left with another woman for Missouri before migrating to Los Angeles with his second wife and young son in 1850, though both died shortly after arrival. Scott married a third time and had five more children, while also building up his law practice and serving as a justice of the peace.
At 6’4″ tall, he towered over almost everyone in Los Angeles and was described in 1889 county history intellectually “greater than physically” as well as “a tornado” in court. Joseph Lancaster Brent, who was the guiding force of the dominant Democratic Party in 1850s Los Angeles called Scott “one of the most remarkable men I ever met” and added that “his mental gifts were very great . . . and his ability as a trial lawyer unrivalled.” Brent, however, added that Scott was too easily given to vigilantism, which was common in the Angel City during that era.
Scott, who served a single term in 1857 as a county supervisor, also owned some large tracts of area real estate, including a tract in south Burbank that, after his death, became the property of William Workman for several years. When he died, the Free and Associated Masons, Lodge 42 (the lodge building of which still stands next to the Merced Theatre and Pico House structures south of the Plaza), lionized him as among Los Angeles’ “most prominent and useful citizens, ever forward and zealous in the suppression of wrong and the advancement of the public good,” while “genial and kind-hearted” and one of [the legal profession’s] brightest lights.”
Abel Stearns (1799-1871) was another Massachusetts native who came to Mexican Los Angeles shortly after Jonathan Temple and, like him, operated a successful store. Stearns, who built El Palacio, a large adobe dwelling on the east side of Main Street where U.S. 101 runs through downtown now, amassed an enormous amount of land, including Rancho Los Alamitos in eastern Long Beach and huge swaths of today’s Orange County.
With the floods and droughts of the first half of the 1860s, however, he became, as the old saying goes, “land rich and cash poor,” and got into severe debt. Advisors, however, established a land trust that managed his properties, selling much of it as greater Los Angeles entered its first significant and sustained growth period towards the end of the 1860s. When Stearns died, great wealth flowed into his estate, which was left to his wife Arcadia Bandini, who became the wealthiest woman in the Angel City and region.
The Star of 3 December 1853 ran an advertisement addressed “To Wheat Growers” from Scott and Mellus announcing,
The undersigned have commenced the erection of a Flouring Mill in this city, and wish to purchase Wheat, to be delivered at the mill immediately after the ensuing harvest. Farmers desiring to enter into contracts for the deliver of good wheat, at the rate of one dollar and eight cents per bushel, or four dollars per fanega of 133 1/3 pounds [this was the measurement used in the F.P.F. Temple invoice/receipt from the Rowland Mill featured in this post], will please apply to [Mellus or Scott].
In its 29 September 1855 edition, the paper touted “City Improvements” as it observed that “in spite of the hard times,” including the end of the Gold Rush and a glut in the cattle market, “many valuable stores, dwellings and improvements will be made during the season.” It added that brick manufacturing was superseding the use of adobe bricks, while such enterprises as stores, a carriage warehouse, and houses were mentioned including the fact that “Don Juan Ramirez is building a large brick block, designed for stores and a printing office,” this latter for his son’s new El Clamor Público, the first Spanish-language newspaper in Los Angeles.
The paper also remarked that, apparently replacing the Mellus and Scott enterprise,
Hon. Abel Stearns and J.R. Scott, Esq., have nearly completed a Brick Flouring Mill, which will far surpass anything of the kind in the southern section of the State.
Mellus stayed on, but perhaps as something of a junior partner, because, when the Star of 27 December 1856 ran an ad that offered “fresh FLOUR from [the] Los Angeles Eagle Flour Mills” at “cheap for cash,” he was listed as the facility’s agent. The 5 June 1858 issue briefly remarked that “last Saturday a parcel of new wheat was purchased for Scott’s mill” and highlighted that it was earlier than the previous two harvests so “this exhibits the fact that the present has been the most propitious season for the three last years.”
As the 1850s came to a close, the Star of 3 March 1860 noted something significant with respect to the military presence in greater Los Angeles just a year prior to the outbreak of the Civil War as it reported that Army Quartermaster Winfield Scott Hancock, stationed in this area since November 1858, “has given a contract for crushing corn to the Eagle Mills of this city, which will have the effect of circulating a little of Uncle Sam’s money in this community, a thing not undesirable, especially at the present time of unparalleled stagnation of business.”
Aside from the end of the Gold Rush, a national depression burst forth in 1857, among other factors regarding the financial downturn in the region. Meanwhile, Hancock went on to distinction as a Union Army general during the Civil War, achieving renown for his leadership at the Battle of Gettysburg in his home state of Pennsylvania.
He also was the supervisor of the execution of the conspirators in the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln and continued his Army service in Indian territory, the South and the Northeast. In 1880, he was the Democratic candidate for president, but was somewhat narrowly defeated by another Union Army general, James Garfield.
Lastly, the 30 June 1860 issue of the Star reported that
Flour from the new crop is already in market. J.R. Scott, Esq., has placed in the store of Mr. [Mathew] Keller, a quantity of flour manufactured at the Eagle Mills, from his new wheat, which within less than ten days ago stood in the field. It is spoken of as excellent in quality; and we would advise our citizens to patronize home industry by its purchase.
The Eagle Mills went on to become the Capitol Milling Company, the buildings of which have just recently been adaptively reused at that Chinatown site. With the immense damage done to the cattle industry from floods and droughts during the first half of the Sixties, ranch land previously devoted to livestock increasingly were converted to growing field crops, such as wheat, including thousands of acres by Lankershim and Van Nuys in the southern San Fernando Valley and large areas of Rancho La Puente by Workman and John Rowland, just as a couple of prominent examples.
Workman, in fact, quickly acted on his transformation from cattle ranching to wheat farming, most of the latter planted north of his surviving residence at the Homestead on some 5,000 acres in the La Puente Valley. He had a “wheat rancho” house erected on a raised section of hills in modern West Covina and, about 1868, built the Workman Mill at the southwest corner of the ranch close to where the 60 Freeway and Interstate 605.
This invoice to Workman’s son-in-law is a rare, early document related to the increase in agriculture in greater Los Angeles in the early years of the American period and we’re glad to have it in our collection to enhance our interpretation of regional history.
Michael White is a historical figure in California whom I was not familiar with prior to reading this post. However, based on my limited knowledge of him, I was trying to piece together some of his connections with the Workman and Temple families. His early experiences in Los Angeles and later employment at William Workman’s store in Taos, New Mexico, may have played a role in influencing and helping Workman’s migration to Los Angeles in 1841. It seemingly repeated Workman’s earlier relocation from Missouri to New Mexico in the 1820s, which may have been influenced by Kit Carson, who had worked at the Workman family’s store at Franklin, Missouri and left for New Mexico slightly before William Workman.
Moreover, Michael White lived in Hawaii (then called the Sandwich Islands), and as Paul noted in another post, he became acquainted with Jonathan Temple there. It seems quite possible that Jonathan Temple’s decision to migrate to California was connected to Michael White, especially since White himself returned to California around the same time. Given these interwoven ties, William Workman’s later close association with Jonathan Temple and F.P.F. Temple, including their eventual family relationship by marriage, can be seen as a natural outcome.
Despite these significant connections, Michael White himself appeared dissatisfied with his own accomplishments, perhaps reflecting Benjamin Wilson’s remark about his nomadic lifestyle, much like the saying, “A rolling stone gathers no moss.” By contrast, those he directly or indirectly influenced including William Workman, Jonathan Temple, F.P.F. Temple, Benjamin Wilson, and others went on to achieve remarkable success in Southern California. This pattern combining lives of his and others recalls an old Chinese proverb: “One may plant flowers with effort yet see no blossoms; but without intent, willows silently grow into deep shade.” (有心栽花花不開，無心栽柳柳成陰)
Hi Larry, thanks for the comment about Michael White, who is all but forgotten, although some dedicated folks in San Marino are trying to save his adobe house, located on the grounds of that city’s high school. As you posited, White may well have had some good information to pass on to Workman and Rowland about greater Los Angeles, though we know Rowland bought horses from Rancho La Puente in 1834, five years before White reached New Mexico, and the regular trade caravans on the Old Spanish Trail undoubtedly were useful, as well. White’s time in Hawaii did overlap for a few months, so he may have known Jonathan Temple and shared his knowledge of Los Angeles, though, again, regular trade between Mexican California and Honolulu, including with Temple’s store, would likely have been very helpful for Temple’s decision to go first to San Diego and then to Los Angeles. In any case, White was close to the Workman and Temple family, as were some of his descendants, with some friendly with Walter P. Temple, and these connections are well worth remembering.
One other note: Kit Carson migrated to New Mexico in 1826, over a year after William Workman, so the influence may have been from Workman to Carson, whose absence as apprentice from the saddlery of David Workman, William’s brothers, was not particularly problematic as David advertised the legal minimum of one cent for Carson’s return!
Thank you very much, Paul, for your opinions and correction on my comments. With your input, I can revise my earlier point about Michael White’s possible influence on William Workman’s migration to Los Angeles as follows: “This influence, in turn, echoed the consequence of William Workman’s early migration from Franklin, Missouri, to New Mexico, which may have led Kit Carson to follow a similar path a few years later when he left his apprenticeship at the Workman family’s harness shop and also moved to New Mexico.”