Tombstone Tales: Even More History of John Rowland of Rancho La Puente, 1791-1873

by Paul R. Spitzzeri

This weekend, the Homestead held the second edition of its Tombstone Tales series, highlighting those resting in peace at El Campo Santo Cemetery. Last year’s inaugural program focused on Don Pío Pico, while this year we put a spotlight on John Rowland, though we had a collaboration with Jayden Faustinos, a senior at Ramona Convent Secondary School in Alhambra, as she did research and prepared and gave tours of the Cemetery, while I gave an introductory presentation on Rowland before those visits.

This post summarizes much of what was discussed with the slideshow and we’ll look at aspects of Rowland’s life not covered in a post from summer 2024. We go back to his origins in northeastern Maryland, where he was born, according to some accounts, in 1791, although there are other birth years assigned to him. Knowledge of his early years is limited, so we’ll have to content ourselves with the meager facts, including that he was from Cecil County, east of the Susquehanna River, and likely also lived in Pennsylvania just to the north.

As a young man, and early in the 19th century. Rowland moved with his family to Ohio, following a common migration route to that area designated as the west to folks on the eastern seaboard. Typically, emigrants headed through southern Pennsylvania and a portion of West Virginia and emerged in Ohio and his family settled in Morgan County, southeast of Columbus. This is where he resided until he was in his early Twenties.

By this period, there was another surge of migration further west, often along the Ohio River past Cincinnati, Louisville, and Evansville, Indiana, until that watercourse emptied into the mighty Mississippi. Rowland may well have took this route or, at least, parts of it, as he ended up at St. Louis and then into central Missouri, where the town of Franklin, which was about at the end of the United States in this era and which counted the brothers David and William Workman as residents.

After México declared independence from Spain in 1821 after ten years of war, its willingness to open its northern territories to foreign trade and settlement, which it would later come to regret, led to the establishment of the Santa Fé Trail, which began at Franklin and terminated at the New Mexico pueblo. It is not known if Rowland met William Workman in the Missouri town, as he took the trail, but he settled in Taos in 1823, engaged in some fur trapping and then opened a grist mill.

A copy of a document shared in today’s presentation was the 14 June 1829 naturalization record, which was issued a year after Rowland’s conversion to Roman Catholicism, a precursor to his becoming a naturalized Mexican citizen. He also married Encarnación Martinez and the couple had six children who lived into adulthood, all but the youngest, William, were born in New Mexico.

William Workman arrived in New Mexico from Missouri in 1825 and settled in Taos, also working as a fur trapper before opening a store. He and Rowland also distilled a whisky called Taos Lightning as their partnership in business and the two families resided in the southern part of Taos called San Francisco del Rancho. Political problems included the two men being forced, in 1837, to swear loyalty to rebels from Taos when they overthrew the governor and executed him, but a counter-revolt led by Manuel Armijo succeeded and Rowland and Workman were arrested on charges of smuggling, which was largely practiced with impunity, so the act appeared to have been because of the turmoil.

In 1840, when the independent Republic of Texas developed plans to push its western boundary to the Río Grande, which would have included the principal New Mexican pueblos of Albuquerque, Santa Fé and Taos as part of Texas, Rowland and Workman, apparently without their knowledge or approval, were named agents of that nation to help pave the way for an invasion. They quickly discountenanced involvement and were replaced, but were also under suspicion, especially Workman, who was accused of being involved in a plot to assassinate Governor Armijo.

When the two, along with other Anglos, decided to leave, it was decided to take the Old Spanish Trail and head for Los Angeles. This was in September 1841 and, once the group, which we denote as the Rowland and Workman Expedition, got to Abiquiu, a cadre of about 25 genizaros, or Christianized indigenous people, joined, with one of them having experience on the trail. Apparently, one man, Ignacio Salazar, was entrusted with a letter by Armijo warning Alta California authorities of what the governor said would be attempts by Rowland and Workman to “seduce and confuse” folks in Los Angeles.

The expedition, recalled Workman, reached this region on 5 November, or Guy Fawkes Day, a British holiday. Rowland presented a list of expedition members to officials and then went to Monterey to secure a land grant, with only him as an official owner (Workman was, for unknown reasons, excluded, but he may have had to keep a low profile because of what transpired, or was rumored to have, in New Mexico) for Rancho La Puente—he knew the ranch already because, in 1834, he purchased horses from the former mission property using an agent for the transaction. He then returned to New Mexico to retrieve Encarnación and their children, with the second trip ending at the end of 1842—shortly afterward an adobe house was constructed about a half-mile east of that of the Workmans.

Rowland, like Workman, became a cattle rancher, with the trading of hides and tallow being the backbone of the local economy, though some agriculture was practiced. When Don Pío Pico became governor early in 1845 by defeating the incumbent, Manuel Micheltorena, in a lightly fought battle at Cahuenga Pass, he did so with Workman as captain and Rowland as lieutenant of extranjero (foreign) volunteers. Months later, Governor Pico issued a second grant for La Puente, nearly tripling its size from under 18,000 to nearly 49,000 acres, while officially adding Workman as co-owner.

A little more than a year later, the American invasion of California took place during the Mexican-American War and Rowland gathered with other Americans and Europeans at the nearby Rancho Santa Ana del Chino. A Californio force learned of this and besieged the adobe house of Isaac Williams, setting fire to the tar-covered roof and forcing its inhabitants out to be captured. After a few months of imprisonment, the captives, including Benjamin D. Wilson, who came with Rowland and Workman in 1841, were freed thanks to the intercession of Workman and adjoining ranchero Ygnacio Palomares.

For the next quarter-century or so, Rowland mainly confined himself to his ranching and farming enterprises at La Puente, though Pico granted him a large ranch south of San Jose in the north and Rowland also owned a vineyard and orchard in Los Angeles between Alameda Street and the river and across from his friend William Wolfskill. The first American census taken in the region, that of 1850, but actually conducted early the next year, recorded John, Encarnación, their four children and others at La Puente, with his self-declared wealth at $2,000. The agricultural sheet for that count showed Rowland claiming about 8,700 acres, raising some 1,000 cattle and other livestock, at the ranch.

Encarnación died later in 1851 and, the following year, Rowland married widow Charlotte Gray, who had three children. The sole California state census, taken in mid-1852, recorded the newlyweds with their blended family and many others in the household. After a few years, the couple moved into a new two-story, with basement and attic, brick dwelling that is the oldest structure of that material in southern California. During the remainder of the 1850s, Rowland ran twice, unsuccessfully, for county supervisor, contended with squatters and cattle and horse thieves and expanded his vineyards and orchards, especially after the lucrative years of the Gold Rush ended by mid-decade.

The 1860 census included two of John’s sons with Encarnación, two of Charlotte’s children from her prior marriage, their two young ones (named Albert and Victoria in honor of England’s queen and her consort) and ranch workers, including many indigenous persons. Notably, there were occasionally Black women and children of whom the Rowlands were guardians, a reflection of Charlotte’s years in the southern United States. John’s property was valued at $42,000, a handsome sum for the period, while he ran a grist mill built in 1847 and his La Puente holdings totaled nearly 10,000 acres and continued substantial livestock raising and farming activities.

During what was called “Noah’s Flood” at the end of 1861 and early the next year, when an estimated 50 inches of rain hit the region, an account in the Los Angeles Star from mid-February 1862 recorded moderate damage to Rowland’s mill, a bridge and some fencing, while his namesake son nearly lost his vineyard and son-in-law John Reed experienced the death of lambs from cold weather. What followed were two years of punishing drought that severely impacted the cattle industry, although Wolfskill found grass and water in, of all places, the north side of the San Bernardino Mountains near modern Apple Valley and invited Rowland, Workman and the latter’s son-in-law, F.P.F. Temple, to pasture their animals there, minimizing otherwise devastating losses.

After more than a dozen years of filing claims, paying for surveys, getting legal representation in court cases, and waiting through interminable bureaucratic delays, Rowland decided to take action to get his land claim for La Puente patented by the federal government. In spring 1865, just as the Civil War was concluding, he wrote to General Henry W. Halleck, who’d lived in California and had experience with the land claims process before joining the Union Army, serving earlier in the war as the chief-of-staff under President Abraham Lincoln, soliciting advice. Halleck simply told Rowland: “hire and agent & give him plenty of money.” This was done, as a Washington, D.C., lawyer, Henry Beard succeeded in his task and, presumably, was well compensated.

With the patent received, the aging Rowland and Workman officially partitioned La Puente, but they continued to devote significant attention to increasing the ranch’s agricultural resources, including widespread planting of field crops like wheat and barley as the Sixties came to an end and the Seventies ensued. Perhaps because of the turbulent economic scene in the years prior, the 1870 census, showing John and Charlotte living with their children together and his older so, William, soon to be the county sheriff, revealed his wealth to be almost unchanged from a decade before, though there was a modest 10% increase to nearly $45,000 by 1872.

When the Star provided the list of “Rich Men of Los Angeles County” and revealing that amount in August, Rowland was 25th of 71 individuals and companies, with Workman at nearly $70,000 and F.P.F. Temple at more than $150,000, the most of any individual. Moreover, the Temple and Workman bank, which opened the previous fall after the two had an earlier institution with Isaias W. Hellman, was worth about $75,000. Yet, four years later, when an economic disaster hit, Workman and Temple were all but financially ruined when their bank failed.

Rowland, meanwhile, began to distribute much of his La Puente land to children and retained not much more than half, about 13,500 acres, when a list of “Large Land Holders” was issued by the Star in April 1873. Notably, the assessed value of that substantial holding was all of a dollar an acre! Still, Rowland’s conservatism when it came to business served him and his descendants very well. When he died that October, with his age given as 82, he left a substantial amount of land to his heirs, a small portion of which, amazingly, is still in family hands and consists of leased commercial and retail property in the City of Industry.

He was interred at El Campo Santo at the southeast corner of the a cast-iron fenced plot, with the marble shaft and vault cover ordered from the east and installed about a year-and-a-half after his death. After Workman’s shocking suicide in May 1876, following the collapse of the Temple and Workman bank, he was laid to rest near his friend of almost a half-century. In the early 1920s, Walter P. Temple moved the remains of his grandfather and grandmother Workman into a mausoleum he built on the site of a long-razed chapel, though Rowland’s son-in-law, John Reed, is still buried near Rowland.

One little tidbit included in this weekend’s tours is that, in the mid-1920s, a Rowland descendant was plowing a field for farming when he hit a pair of stones from John Rowland’s late 1840s grist mill that were long buried near that long-gone site. Temple, being an enthusiast for historical memorabilia, purchased the stones and set them against some gate posts next to the Water Tower that still stands south of the Workman House. A few years later, when he was nearing completion of his La Casa Nueva residence, Temple had the stones incorporated into a fountain in the courtyard (it was long thought the stones came from William Workman’s mill) and this remains a very visible connection between these families.

We were very happy to highlight John Rowland at this year’s Tombstone Tales and will continue to find ways to feature him and his family in the Homestead’s historical interpretation. In the meantime, check in with the La Puente Valley Historical Society, the owner and steward of the Rowland House, about its work preserving its history including tours and events.