Set in Stone: Jacob Miller and the Pioneer Marble Works, Los Angeles, 1870-1880

by Paul R. Spitzzeri

The Homestead is working on elevating the interpretation of the history of El Campo Santo Cemetery in multiple ways, including the recent second annual Tombstone Tales event, in which we featured the impressive tombstone of John Rowland, which has had a prominent place in a corner of a cast-iron fenced plot for 150 years. In fact, it was intended in October to publish a post on the maker of the memorial, Jacob Miller (1830-1920), but that was forgotten.

But, my colleagues are now working on enhancing our displays in the Workman House (come check out what has been done so far with free tours this Saturday and Sunday at Noon and 2 p.m.) including about the Cemetery. So, here we are putting a spotlight on greater Los Angeles’ first marble cutter, who did far more than create grave markers and then went on to become much better known as an experimental farmer during his long life.

Obituaries and a later feature on Miller vary in their accounts of aspects of his early life with the former suggesting he was born in Alsace-Lorraine, an oft-disputed region that frequently was ruled over by the French and Germans, and that he spent much of his youth in New Orleans, while the latter, which included some detailed information from artifacts handed down to his family, stated that he was from Koblenz (Coblentz), which is part of that contested territory, but added that he migrated to the Crescent City in his later teens. Moreover, the account added that Miller spent some time in St. Louis, where he learned the stonecutter’s trade.

Miller was in New Orleans when news reached the vital port city that gold was discovered in California, so he joined the hordes of ’49ers seeking their fortunes in the territory recent seized by the United States from México during the Mexican-American War. He then spent about a dozen or so years in the mining regions before moving to San Francisco in 1862 and remained there until near the end of the decade when a relocation to Los Angeles was undertaken. It was stated in those accounts that he was among the first white persons to see the astounding Yosemite Valley.

The earliest located documentation of Miller in the Angel City was an advertisement taken out in the Los Angeles News the first week of 1870, as the town and region were in the early stages of its first significant and sustained period of growth (modest as it was compared to the successive waves of booms that took place in the area). Readers were informed that “the undersigned has opened a Marble business” in the Downey Block, located where Main, Spring and Temple streets merged and on property formerly owned by the late Jonathan Temple.

This new enterprise, indicated as being on Main Street (the federal courthouse is in this location today) included the furnishing by Miller of “Mantles, Grates, Monuments, Headstones, Washstand[s], Bureau[s], and Table Tops, at reasonable rates. By August, ads added that Miller undertook “all kinds of Marble Cutting finished to order” at “the only Marble working establishment in Los Angeles,” while jobs could be contracted from adjoining counties, as well. The business moved, as well, to the Temple Street side of the Downey Block.

Given that the Workman House was radically remodeled during this time and that it has two surviving marble fireplace mantels, as well as the fact that Miller was the only person in Los Angeles who could do such work, it stands to reason that he likely created these decorative pieces that reflected, along with much else undertaken in the remodeling, the Workman family’s continued rise in wealth during this first boom. While it is possible that the mantelpieces were imported, such as from San Francisco, it is intriguing to ponder that Miller was their creator.

The enumeration of the federal census on 25 August 1870 showed Miller counted after nearly 70 Chinese residents indicating that he lived adjacent to the small, but growing Chinatown centered in the Calle de los Negros, often called Negro, or N—-r, Alley, named in the Mexican period for a dark-skinned Latino, and which is now part of Los Angeles Street to the southeast of the Plaza and where the horrific Chinese Massacre of eighteen men and a teenage boy took place a little over a year later. Residing with Miller was a Thomas Smith, a 46-year old native of Ireland identified as a “laborer,” a common general term in the census, though it seems certain he was working in the marble works.

The 24 August 1871 edition of the Los Angeles Star recorded that Miller was one of nine persons admitted to United States citizenship, but, when he was added to the “Great Register of Los Angeles County” voters with a registration date of 27 June, it was stated that he was naturalized in Mariposa County, in the state’s gold country, the prior March. He may have applied for citizenship in that northern locale and then traveled there for his admission, though why a separate proceeding was held in Los Angeles is unknown, unless a certificate was mailed from Mariposa and he received it in the local court.

The News of 22 July included in its summary of the proceedings of the prior day’s Common (City) Council meeting that “the petition of Jacob Miller to sell him a piece of land within the [pueblo or city] limits for a stone quarry, containing four and nine tenths acres” was referred to a council committee. Though the matter was revived again later in the year, it appears that the request was denied. As for the requested location, it may have been among 550 acres of what was later called Quarry, or Stone Quarry, Hill, which was set aside for park land in 1886, as the next and much greater Boom of the Eighties was underway. This name was then replaced by the current moniker: Elysian Park.

Thwarted in his effort to have a nearby quarry from which to get the materials for what was likely a growing business as the Angel City and environs continued its accelerated development, Miller found an area some 50 miles east. The 3 May 1873 edition of the Star reported,

Mr. Jacob Miller, who owns the Marble Works in this city, is satisfied that the quarry he is now opening in San Bernardino county will turn out to be a valuable property, and will ultimately supply all our wants in this exquisite material. The deposit is located very near the Cajon Pass road, and is within six miles of the [future line of the] Southern Pacific Railroad. It could not have been situated more eligibly for facilities of transportation. He has already worked up some of the marble from this quarry, and finds that it has a grain which is very responsive to the chisel . . . Specimens which he has worked upon show that it is susceptible of the finest polish—the lustre producing an almost mirror-like reflection, so clear and transparent is its surface. Mr. Miller says there is enough marble in this quarry to supply the entire State for generations, even if it were used for the coarser purposes of marble utilization.

In its issue of the 27th, the paper reported that Miller left Los Angeles for the quarry, where several laborers were “getting out the marble for shipment to Los Angeles.” The location was here identified as on Lytle Creek at the eastern edge of what was then known as the Sierra Madre (now San Gabriel) Mountains and adjoining Cajon Pass. Notably, this was within the Rancho Cajon de los Negros, to which William Workman filed a land claim with the federal government in the 1850s, and quarrying operations have long since been conducted there.

At the end of 1871, Miller moved his business from the Downey Block, which underwent expansion, to near the southeast corner of Main and 1st streets, now the site of the city’s Department of Transportation and CalTrans District 7 headquarters. The enterprise soon took on the name of the “Pioneer Marble Works,” likely to distinguish it from a new marble works launched by recent arrival William Declez (we’ll offer a post on him very soon).

Presumably, having become fairly well-established (in the 1870 census, he declared no real property and just $200 in personal asserts) during the boom, Miller was married in October 1875 to Elise Grieck, also a native of Germany (which was unified five years earlier), and the couple set up their home near the corner Pearl Street (later renamed Figueroa) and 9th Street, which west of that intersection is now James M. Wood Boulevard. Tragedy, however, struck just two months later when Elise succumbed to fever.

In October 1877, Miller married Dora Borrman and the couple had five daughters (one was hers from a prior marriage) and a son. By this time, dramatic changes took place in greater Los Angeles as its long-running boom suddenly and starkly went bust just after Miller’s first marriage. While the nation descended into an economic depression in 1873, California rode a silver mine wave in Virginia City, Nevada, with most of the financial activity handled in San Francisco, but when a stock bubble burst and the state’s largest bank, The Bank of California, failed, the panic traveled down telegraph wires to the Angel City.

The biggest local casualty by far was the bank of Temple and Workman, which had inadequate reserves and a long list of questionable debtors and, therefore, not nearly enough capital to compensate creditors when a series of loans from Elias J. “Lucky” Baldwin (whose sale of silver mine stock to great profit helped precipitate the aforementioned panic) failed to stanch the flow of withdrawn funds by early 1876.

The Long Depression, as the national downturn was generally known, lasted through the rest of the Seventies and it can readily be imagined that Miller’s business, largely one built on luxury spending when times were good, but susceptible to severe contraction when the economy went south, suffered significantly. It comes as little surprise that, as reported in the Star (which soon failed after about a quarter-century of operation) of 23 January 1879 that Miller sold the Pioneer Marble Works.

Yet, when the 1880 census was taken early in June, Miller’s occupation as “marble works,” so he may have been operating separately from the Pioneer business. The manufactures schedule for the census, though, which recorded $1,800 in capital invested during the year, stated that he had six persons employed at some point during that period, though only three over 16 years of age and one as a child or youth. Material was valued at $3,000 and the products at double that amount, while it was stipulated that the business was open 10 hours a day and paid $3 for skilled and $2 for ordinary labor on a daily basis.

On 9 October 1880, though, Miller executed a deal with John G. Nichols, Jr., son of an early mayor of Los Angeles and who was widely known as the first white child born in the Angel City, for property northwest of town in what was known as the Cahuenga section of the Los Angeles township. The transaction, not recorded until May 1881, included two tracts, totaling some 60 acres, with only $50 cash upfront and payments of $150, $300, and $400 due at intervals for a year. Another listing about a week later recorded the payment price as $1,100, but, either way, the price per acre was basically under $20.

Meanwhile, there was also a foreclosure action filed by the Commercial Bank of Los Angeles against the Miller place on Figueroa and 9th streets, another indication of the troubled economic times in the region and for the family, as it took out a mortgage against the property. The last located reference to Miller working in the marble business is from September 1882 when it was briefly recorded that he did $1,100 (the same price as the purchase of his new farmland) worth of work for a new hotel in the Nadeau Block in downtown.

Miller’s transformations from a marble worker to a farmer and from the urban to rural settings are notable and that’s where we’ll pick up the story with a part two. Look for that soon and best wishes for the Thanksgiving holiday!