by Paul R. Spitzzeri
When the Homestead was restored in the late 1970s and very early 1980s, El Campo Santo Cemetery was among the heavy investments made by the City of Industry during that project, which was the City’s contribution to the American Bicentennial (next year marks the 250th anniversary, so look for Museum programming tied to that). One of the earliest artifacts entered into our artifact collection was a fragment of a tombstone found lying in weeds in the burial ground and which remained a mystery for years as to the identity of the person interred under it.
Close to three decades ago, the president of the Temple City Historical Society visited the Museum and told me that he was looking into whether a great-aunt of his was buried at El Campo Santo. When I asked her name and he told me, I took him to our main storage area in La Casa Nueva, the 1920s Spanish Colonial Revival house that is a centerpiece of the Homestead, and showed him the box in which the fragment has long reposed.
Sure enough, Walter Drown was able to immediately identify it as part of the tombstone of Martha (Mattie) Drown, the daughter of Walt’s ancestors, Walter Drown and Isabella Kelly, and who died and was buried at El Campo Santo in 1878. These moments, when people find personal connections to the Museum and its history, interpretation and programs, are most certainly the ones that feel the most affirming for what we do.
The fragment also happens to have part of the inscription of the stone’s manufacturer, William Déclez, who followed Jacob Miller, subject of our last two posts here, as a marble works owner in Los Angeles, starting in the last half of the 1870s. This post looks at some of the history of Déclez, most covering the last quarter of the 19th century, and his enterprises in marble and stone work in the burgeoning city and region.
Guillaume Déclez was born on 1 May 1848 in Millery, a town southwest of the French city of Lyon, situated in the southeastern part of the country near the Swiss border. His birth year was a fateful one for France with a revolution, a few months prior to Déclez’ birth, toppling the monarchy and establishing the Second French Republic. He remained in his hometown until he was in his early Twenties and migrated to the United States in 1872, residing in Chicago, where he had a partner in a marble works establishment, for a couple of years and then briefly in Denver, plying his trade as a sculptor, before coming to Los Angeles just as its first boom, which started in the late 1860s, came to an end in 1875.
The earliest located mention of Déclez in Los Angeles is from the Los Angeles Herald of 23 May 1876, by which time a financial crash took place in California, emanating from the bursting of Nevada silver mine stock bubble the prior summer, and which, reaching Los Angeles involved the failure of the Temple and Workman bank. This panic took place after an 1873 crash in the east that fomented what has been termed the Long Depression, continuing through the rest of the decade. The paper informed readers that,
The Asbestine Stone Company has been fortunate in securing the services of Mr. Wm. Declez, sculptor and dealer in statuary, marble fountains, monuments, &c., of 58 Spring street, to design the models for their establishment. Mr. Declez is an accomplished artist, and our citizens can be sure that hereafter the highest excellence in patterns can be obtained for architectural designs and ornamentations . . . Mr. Declez is well known at the East as a superior artist, and has made his mark in Chicago and other cities in the States. He deserved liberal patronage.
What differentiated Déclez from Miller was his artistic background (he would, as we’ll see, refer to himself as a sculptor by vocation) as opposed to coming from a marble or stone cutting training. The Asbestine Stone Company was established at the end of 1875 by a pair of recent arrivals who established works in East Los Angeles (Lincoln Heights) for the use of artificial stone, made of magnesium silicate (which is talc when hydrated), for all kinds of architectural and public works projects.
By fall 1877, Déclez, who was naturalized as an American citizen earlier in the year, opened his Los Angeles Marble Works, in competition with Miller’s Pioneer firm, and operated it at Spring Street just north of 1st Street (he resided just south and across the street on the former), advertising his work with brackets, centerpieces, cornices, mantles, monuments and statuary—this latter distinguished him from his rival—as well as “stone work done to order” along with “a large and beautiful stock always on hand.” In November, he was listed among instructors for a proposed, but unrealized, industrial school, for which he was to teach modeling and wood sawing.
When the 1880 federal census was take, Déclez and his wife, Philomene (also known as Josephine) lived on 6th Street, truly in the suburbs of Los Angeles, while the marble works relocated to 1st Street just east of Main. The manufactures worksheet revealed that he had $2,000 invested in his business, with up to seven employees, though four was typical, and he paid an average of $2 daily. The value of the material in his shop was $2,500, while he produced $6,000 worth of goods. In 1882-1883, he had a partner, known only as H. [Henri?] Gillbert, but mostly ran the business on his own.
As the Seventies came to a close, Déclez became an adherent of the Workingmen labor movement, formed in 1877 and known for its virulent anti-Chinese stance, while he also was an advocate of the Greenback Labor Party, which also fought to exclude the Chinese in California and pushed for the use of greenback, or paper, currency, an 8-hour work day, prohibiting child labor, and breaking up monopolies. His support of Chinese exclusion continued well into the 1880s, including an appearance in late February 1886 at a “citizens’ mass meeting,” during which he was to speak, but was prevented from doing so by the length of the confab.
Déclez was also active in the French community in the Angel City, including a Workingmen’s club comprised of men from his home country and his participation in Bastille Day celebrations each July. In 1881, he acquired a house and lot on Sand/California Street on Fort Moore Hill where U.S. 101 runs through downtown today and this remained his residence into the 20th century. The next year, he purchased a property on the east side of Los Angeles Street just north of 1st and moved the marble works there.
The aforementioned Long Depression finally eased slowly as the 1880s ensued and Déclez’ financial outlook looks to have improved accordingly. At the end of 1884, he co-founded the American Kiosk Company, formed to “manufacture, erect, sell and rent kiosks, booths and stalls, and to sell and let the advertising space therein, and to place them in streets, alleys, parks and other places in the various cities of the United States of America.” It is not known how successful the firm was, but one of the partners was former mayor and developer of Bunker Hill, Prudent Beaudry, a French-Canadian, who would later join with Déclez in another business endeavor.
In summer 1885, Déclez became a member of the Los Angeles Manufacturers’ Association, which predated the Chamber of Commerce, while not quite two years later he was one of five men, including railroad figure William B. King, in the creation of the Los Angeles Granite and Brown-Stone Company, which was “to acquire and operate certain granite, brown-stone and other quarries.” During the Eighties, some major cemetery-related projects of his were mentioned in the Angel City press.
This included the 29 August 1882 edition of the recently launched Los Angeles Times, which visited the 75-acre Evergreen Cemetery, opened five years prior in Boyle Heights, and reported that Déclez and Gillbert completed a Gothic-style receiving house, a place to temporarily store coffins before burial. The 20-foot high, 320 square foot structure, no longer extant, was noted for an “elaborately ornamented arch over the entrance” under which, atop cut stone columns, were “sculpted figures displaying great artistic merit,” while inside were a dozen depositories of marble. The paper concluded that “the building is a handsome one, and the work executed on it is highly creditable to the contractors, especially Mr. Wm. Declez, under whose supervision it was built.”
In fall 1884, the Times chronicled the construction by Déclez of a mausoleum, said to be the finest in California and made of Vermont marble and granite quarried from Santa Anita Canyon in the San Gabriel Mountains, commissioned by John Bryson, who became the Angel City’s mayor four years later, succeeding William H. Workman, and erected at a cost of $20,000 at the recently established Rosedale (now Angelus Rosedale) Cemetery in the new section of town called Pico Heights. Remarkably, in 1908, the mausoleum was moved to and remodeled at Inglewood Park Cemetery amid considerable controversy among the Bryson family and estate.
Early in 1888, Déclez undertook another impressive memorial for Phineas Banning, the “Port Admiral” of Wilmington, where the Port of Los Angeles is one of the busiest in America. The Los Angeles Tribune of 17 February remarked that the 25-foot tall monument “is a plain but massive and elegant piece of work” and such that “the maker . . . may be justly proud of his work.”
The 26 August issue of the Times reported that a railroad car in town held granite intended for “the coping for the superb vault which Beaudry & Declez are now building in the Roman Catholic [Calvary, at the base of the Elysian Hills, where Cathedral High School is now] cemetery for Richard Garvey.” Garvey, an Irish native, came to Los Angeles at the end of 1859 and was an active miner in Arizona, Nevada and the San Bernardino Mountains, which is where he met Elias J. “Lucky” Baldwin and became his local agent, including handling messy real estate issues concerning Baldwin’s foreclosure of a loan to the Temple and Workman bank and working with Workman and Temple family members.
The article noted that the massive pieces of stone were of granite called “New Westerly” and said by Déclez to be “the largest dressed granite blocks ever handled in the State,” being 20 feet long, 2 feet tall and a foot wide,” while a piece of coping for the front of the vault was seven feet long, 2 1/2 feet high and two feet wide. The roof was of two large stone pieces, each of seven tons and measuring 12 1/2 feet long, five feet wide and 14 inches thick. It was added that the car was to stay in place for a time, so “the stone will pay for inspection by architects and builders, or others interested in such matters.”
The newly founded Los Angeles Marble and Granite Works replaced the Los Angeles Marble Works as Prudent Beaudry reestablished business ties with Déclez. The 28 February 1889 edition of the San Bernardino Times-Index recorded that, among the real estate listings, was a transaction involving the Southern Pacific Railroad Company, the main line of which extended east from Los Angeles towards San Gorgonio Pass and then southeast to Yuma, Arizona, and Déclez, with an unstated amount of land sold to him for $1,720. He, in turn, deeded a half-interest to Beaudry for $500.
Just as Miller did earlier at Lytle Canyon, Déclez decided that his best option for a reliable supply of stone was to establish his own quarry, so he and Beaudry partnered in acquiring this land, with convenient access to the Southern Pacific line, in this location that is now part of the southern section of Fontana. This is where we’ll pick up the story for the concluding second part of this post tomorrow in what was christened Declezville, so be sure to join us then.