“One Can Almost Imagine One’s Self in the Tropics”: Jacob Miller and his Nichols Canyon Ranch, Hollywood, 1880-1920

by Paul R. Spitzzeri

Jacob Miller’s seemingly abrupt transition from a marble works owner in Los Angeles to a farmer in Cahuenga, northwest of the city, in the early 1880s might not been a clean a break as it might appear on the surface. For about a half-decade, he operated his business as the Angel City and its environs were in the midst of the region’s first boom, with the population more than doubling and construction significantly increased. He very likely had a thriving enterprise, especially as he was the only marble cutter in town.

Then came the economic collapse, starting in late summer 1875, that included Los Angeles’ first large-scale business failure, that of the bank of Temple and Workman, and which took place in what was, nationally, known as the Long Depression. The financial malaise continued through the remainder of the decade and could easily explain much of Miller’s decision to ultimately sell his Pioneer Marble Works. Another key probable factor was the arrival in the city of William Declez and the opening of his Los Angeles Marble Works, of which we’ll look at in our next post.

We do know that Miller experienced economic turmoil, as well, including the foreclosure of his property, situated on 9th Street (now James Wood Boulevard) just west of Pearl Street (soon renamed Figueroa). Not surprisingly, this was in the vicinity of where the “American Cemetery,” also north of 9th and west of Pearl, was established in 1858, though this was long before Miller came to town and the burying ground was short-lived (!), so it may have just been coincidence that he resided there.

As part one noted, Miller acquired, in an agreement from October 1880 recorded the following May, property in what was then called Cahuenga, near the pass of that name, from John G. Nichols, Jr., son of a former mayor and generally known during his lifetime as, purportedly, the first Anglo child born in American-era Los Angeles. The deal included $50 up front with a $150 payment due on 1 November 1880, $300 on 1 May 1881 and $400 a year from the transaction date. These kinds of arrangements were common, but also may reflect the lack of ready cash Miller had because of his financial circumstances, including that foreclosure on his residence in town.

In any case, the purchase of up to 110 acres at the base of the Santa Monica Mountains was for, at the age of 50, a move from marble working to farming and Miller jumped right in, raising a plethora of crops such that he became known in his sparsely populated community and in the Angel City for his experimentation, especially with a panoply of tropical fruits. The location of his property was in and below a canyon often given his name, but known more broadly and permanently as Nichols Canyon, deriving, of course, from the family that sold Miller his domain.

Entering into the agriculture business, particularly with previously uncultivated, if that was the case with Miller’s property, land, requires, of course, not inconsiderable capital investment for purchasing root stock, seed and trees, as well as equipment and supplies, not to mention labor. This might at least partially explain why mortgages of not far south of $4,000 were taken out during the 1880s. One was with Edward Schieffelin, who made a mint in mining at Tombstone, Arizona, where a partner was Richard Gird, soon to be well-known as the owner of the Chino Ranch and founder of the town of that name. Another was from Dietrich Mahlstedt, operator of the Philadelphia Brewery and then the Hillside Winery.

The maturity of Miller’s endeavor at Cahuenga was such that he became widely known for the diversity of his products and his interest in sharing these at exhibits and fairs. An early example was at the Los Angeles Flower Festival, with the Los Angeles Times of 9 April 1886 listing Miller as a contributor of a “basket of assorted flowers and one-half dozen Pepinas, or melon fruit,” this latter meaning cucumbers. A week later, the paper, discussing regional entries at a citrus fair in Chicago (these displays at such events throughout the nation significantly helped promote Los Angeles agriculture and the region broadly), observed that “great attention is drawn by the pepinos, or melon fruit, of Jacob Miller, Cahuenga.”

When the Times discussed greater Los Angeles in its New Year’s Day edition of 1887, it remarked that, in the Cahuenga Valley,

During the past year many vines and trees have been planted, and the acreage will be largely increased this winter. Ex-Senator [Cornelius] Cole, who has resided in this valley a number of years has upon his ranch, 70 acres of choice three and four year old [grape] vines, the remarkably thrifty growth of which has attracted much attention. Jacob Miller, a resident of the foothills, is successfully cultivating many rare fruits and flowers of Central America, including the banana and peppino [sic], or melon shrub.

Cole, a Gold Rush ’49er from New York who served in the House of Representatives and the United States Senate, came to Los Angeles in the 1870s and practiced law until he retired to his ranch, with the area around it long known as Colegrove, which happened to be the maiden name of his wife. As for Miller, the reference to Central America is notable as this was an obvious origin of the tropical fruits he and others raised (Elijah H. Workman, for example, tried cultivating bananas at his ranch south of downtown Los Angeles) and was apparently due, in his case, to a brother-in-law providing samples.

Moreover, by the dawn of 1887, when Workman’s brother, William H., was just sworn in for the first of a pair of single-year terms as the Angel City’s mayor, the Angel City and the region were in the full ferment of a much bigger boom, knows usually as the Boom of the Eighties. This period of intense development, much of it, typically, comprising real estate bubbles, lasted for about two years before the inevitable bust. Not surprisingly, this was accompanied by lawsuits filed by Mahlstedt and Schieffelin for foreclosure of those mortgages, though Miller was able to retain his Cahuenga/Colegrove property.

In fall 1889, Miller, who’d committed to planting sugar beets, a growing crop in many areas of greater Los Angeles, though whether he did so is unknown, became a director of the Cahuenga Township Producers’ Union, which was established for “the mutual advantage of its members by providing ways and means for the disposal of the products of their several occupations.” This was during a time of great turmoil in American agriculture generally regarding prices for products and concern over rail shipping rates, as well as about two decades after the onset of the Grange movement to fight for farmers’ concerns. There was also the development of cooperatives and exchanges, notably for citrus and nut growers, in the region to brand and market crops for sale and distribution.

By the end of the Eighties and in the last decade of the 19th century, with the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce formed and rapidly becoming a powerful promoter of the region, including its agriculture, Miller routinely sent samples of his produce for exhibit in the Chamber’s downtown headquarters. This included displays during the La Fiesta de Los Angeles (later La Fiesta de los Flores) spring festival, while he also contributed to local fairs, as well as ones in Atlanta, Chicago and Omaha (where he earned a bronze medal for his cherimoyas), among some examples. The 14 March 1891 number of the Farmer and Labor Review observed that, at a regional citrus fair, “the Cahuenga locality is far to the front as usual, and the display attracts the attention of everyone” including those of bananas, breadfruit and persimmons from Miller and others “that speaks volumes for the Cahuenga neighborhood.”

The 6 February 1890 issue of the Los Angeles Tribune reported on Cahuenga agriculture that “cheromayes [cherimoyas, sometimes called a “custard apple”], alligator pears [avocados], and even coffee, are produced of excellent size and flavor,” while “the bread-fruit tree, grown nowhere else in California, may be seen in full bearing upon the ranch of Jacob Miller.” The remark then concluded, “and yet with all these possibilities of fruitfulness, this chosen section has, until the present time, failed to attract more than a passing glance.”

The most detailed description located of Miller’s property appeared in the Los Angeles Herald of 26 June 1890, which recorded that he was in the process of drying apricots and “has a vineyard, too, that looks well,” including some older ones, but whether these predated his ownership of the land was not stated, though it was observed that “Mr. Miller makes fine wine, which was duly and satisfactorily sampled.” The major crops mentioned were peas and tomatoes, the last raised year-round and of which it was claimed that he was “one of the pioneers in developing this industry” and that he earned $200 an acre. As to the former, Miller planted ten acres to it and harvested 42,000 pounds and took in nearly $1,700.

The Farmer and Labor Review of 3 December 1891 noted “a few months ago Jacob Miller, a farmer of an experimental turn of mind, planted coffee, and the plan worked so well that last week he planted considerable more seed.” It was added that “the coffee plants appear to prosper, and all the neighbors are watching the result with unabated interest,” though the Badillo (or Badilla) brothers, natives of Costa Rica tried, in the late Seventies, raising coffee on a much larger scale on the Rancho La Puente in Covina, but the enterprise, though the plants apparently did well, was not a success.

In its 7 July 1892 edition, the Los Angeles Express alluded to farming in Cahuenga by remarking:

Many strange species of vegetable life are found growing in this belt, and many new kinds of fruit trees, just being introduced into this country and destined to yield fruit for commerce, are here. Jacob Miller, who has about twenty acres of this land, has a coffee plant seven years old growing, its red berries just ripening into black. It came from Guatemala in South [sic] America, and it grows here with sufficient vigor and yield to indicate that the plant could be raised on a commercial scale. Here also is the Alligator pear [avocado] tree, the custard apple or Chemoia [sic], the cocota [carob?] tree and a beautiful French plum, a rare fruit in this country, yield a goldenish purple apple.

The paper’s edition of 14 March 1893 included the remark that “the Cahuenga country is peculiar for producing in perfection a most wonderful variety of the products of the soil, to an extent that is nowhere surpassed and is perhaps wholly unequaled.” It added that “at least one of the inhabitants, Mr. Jacob Miller, has for years been growing successfully in the open air many tropical products, as bananas, the cherimoya, coffee, alligator pears, [and] St. John’s bread [carob], the plants for which were originally brought from Guatemala.”

The 13 June edition of the Times briefly mentioned that “one of the finest show ranches in the country [region] is that of Mr. Jacob Miller, in the Cahuenga valley, near Colegrove, in the frostless belt.” It noted that Mr. Miller has a great variety of tropical and semi-tropical fruit and ornamental trees, all in splendid condition” and informed readers that “one of the things worth driving through the beautiful valley to see is a coffee tree in full bearing” on his property.

The Times of 15 September 1894 offered its opinion that “there is no more ideal section for a semi-rural home, such as city folks long for, than this Cahuenga Valley,” though it added that, for all the attention heaped on the San Gabriel Valley by its thousands of annual visitors, “there are probably not a dozen” who went to Cahuenga “or even know of the existence of such a place.” The paper commented that “it is only a little more than a dozen years since Jacob Miller, who was has one of the show places of the valley, was considered half-crazy” when he located there.

Notably, two months prior, the Times featured a brief report that was from Hollywood, which appeared as far back as early February 1887 when Harvey Wilcox’s subdivision of that name (suggested by his wife, Daeida, when she overheard someone using it) was filed with the county. The unidentified correspondent informed the paper that,

A trip to Jacob Miller’s ranch is a treat. One can almost imagine one’s self in the tropics, as one gazes on the matozanas [?] and bread-fruit trees from Guatemala, custard apple trees and coffee plants from South America, and alligator pear and plumaria [plumeria] trees from Peru, flourishing as well in California as in that of their native countries.

Miller did, however, grow more common crops on his ranch, as evidenced by his owning stock in the Cahuenga Valley Lemon Association and a report from fall 1892 that he shipped peas to Chicago using recently invented refrigerated railroad box cars. A year later, he joined a new, unnamed organization that was something of a community improvement organization to better advocate for the interests of area residents and was appointed to an “Exhibits of Cahuenga Products” committee.

The cherimoya may well have been the crop for which Miller was best known and the local Cahuenga Suburban of 1 March 1897, which included a photo of the ranch, recorded that “Mr. Miller is meeting with such success that he has propagated quite an orchard of this fruit. A rare early 20th century mention, from the Times of 21 June 1914, of Miller whose presence in news accounts dropped significantly after he passed into his seventies, noted that “the largest Cherimoya planting in the State, consisting of sixty trees in a single row” was “originally on the famous old Jacob Miller ‘place.'”

Miller died on 19 May 1920, a couple of months shy of his 90th birthday and was survived by his wife Dora, a son and four daughters. There were occasional mentions of him and his remarkable ranch after his death, including photos in the Times in 1921 and 1923 showing his cherimoya and avocado trees, this latter showing an aged Miller standing next to an “alligator pear” tree in what was called “Miller Canyon.” More than 35 years after he died, however, a remarkable article was published in the Monrovia News-Post of 2 June 1956, which inquired of readers if they’d seen a “simple white marble triple-topped tombstone set in a sizable granite boulder beside the mountain path” in Sawpit Canyon in Monrovia Canyon Park.

The memorial was for three teenaged children of the Rankins family, which resided in the canyon in the 1870s and, while the remains of the siblings, who died of typhoid fever within seven weeks of each other in spring 1877, were disinterred and now rest at Mountain View Cemetery in Altadena , the tombstone remained (and is there today). Recently, however, a family was walking through the park and came upon the triple stone when, suddenly, one of them “squatted down and fairly shouted: ‘My father made that!'”

This was William A. Miller, who showed his daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren the small inscription at the bottom right, “J. Miller.” Not only that, the family still possessed Jacob Miller’s daybook, which contained the entry of 17 August 1878 recording the order of the headstone, to be completed within three weeks, and the $45 payment received when the monument was delivered a little over a month later.

The two vocations, dramatically different from one another, of Jacob Miller as a marble works owner in downtown Los Angeles and experimental farmer in Hollywood (Cheremoya Elementary School is named for that fruit Miller propagated) are suggestive of the rapid transformations that took place in our region in the late 19th century and his work on the John Rowland tombstone at El Campo Santo Cemetery at the Homestead is one of visible reminders of the former. We’ll return next with a look at Miller’s contemporary and competitor, William Declez, and his remarkable life, so check back for that.

The featured image of the Miller Ranch is from the Security Pacific National Bank Collection at the Los Angeles Public Library.