by Paul R. Spitzzeri
This latest post in our “No Place Like Home” series concerning houses takes us to an area of greater Los Angeles we haven’t often visited on The Homestead Blog. On this day in 1908, a real photo postcard from our collection was sent to Boston from a visitor to La Crescenta Valley, enjoying our balmier winter and sending their holiday greetings. The photo, taken by Bradford D. Jackson, is an impressive view from the lower slopes of the San Gabriel Mountains looking south toward the Verdugo Mountains and, at the center, is what is identified as “Castle La Crescenta.”
Jackson (1853-1937) was from Ohio and began his photography career in the 1870s, working in Paris and Grand Rapids, Michigan, from which he and his family migrated west as the 20th century dawned. He practiced his profession in Pomona, Glendora, Hollywood and Glendale over more than three decades in greater Los Angeles and the Homestead has several of his images in its collection, all of these being real photo postcards.
This photo is taken from a distance and only a portion of the structure, including its distinctive turret, from which a commanding panoramic view of the Valley could be had, is visible because of the dense landscaping around the edifice. A second image in the Museum’s holdings, with Jackson’s copyright date of 1908, shows, amid the lushness of the gardens in evidence, more of the dwelling, with its abundant use of granite and stone.
A landmark of La Crescenta for about 60 years, “The Castle” has been gone since the mid-1950s, but the history of the edifice, which has also been referred to as “Gould’s Folly,” is an interesting one, so let’s take a look at some of that story. The building was constructed in 1891-1892, not quite a decade after the subdivision of some 2,500 acres of the Rancho La Cañada, which was not far under 6,000 acres when it was granted in 1843 by Governor Manuel Micheltorena to Ignacio Coronel, though the Verdugo family contested the grant, claiming the land was part of its Rancho San Rafael, one of Spanish California’s first land grants when issued in 1784, but the government evidently determined the Verdugos were not using the land as required by law.
Coronel was part of the Hijar-Padres colony that came to Los Angeles a half-dozen years earlier and he was joined by his prominent sons and nephew, these being Ignacio and Manuel Coronel and Agustín Olvera. It was said that he built an adobe house in the vicinity of Glendale College, but moved back to Los Angeles around the time the United States seized Mexican California. In 1852, he sold La Cañada to law partners, Benjamin I. Hayes (best known as Los Angeles District Judge from 1852-1864 and for his accumulation of much regional history) and Jonathan R. Scott, who then traded the ranch, which the Verdugos wanted for water coming out of the San Gabriels, for portions of San Rafael in modern Burbank, that, after his death, were briefly owned by William Workman of the Homestead.
After a so-called “great partition” in 1871 involving much court wrangling over more than 30 sections of land claimed by almost as many people, the La Cañada ended up in the hands of attorneys Alfred B. Chapman and Andrew Glassell (who represented the Workman and Temple family during that era). The law partners were able to use their skills to acquire land, such as in lieu of payment for services rendered, including in what became the town of Orange that they founded.
In 1875, as the region’s first boom was coming to a close, La Cañada was sold to two Michigan migrants seeking to improve their health—this came to be a motivation for ever larger numbers of arrivals in subsequent years—Adolphus Williams and Jacob L. Lanterman. Though the two partnered in surveying the land for future development, a legal dispute broke out among them, this ended after Williams’ death with a deal cut between his heirs and Lanterman. La Cañada was divided into nearly 50 lots on either side of a new thoroughfare, Michigan Avenue (named for obvious reasons), later renamed Foothill Boulevard.
While greater Los Angeles’ first boom went bust in fall 1875 (with the Temple and Workman bank as the largest business failure to date) and the Long Depression experienced nationally continued through the rest of the decade, a slow recovery ensued as the Eighties dawned. At the end of October 1883, Lanterman sold nine lots for almost $13,000, on a two-year payment plant, to Dr. Benjamin B. Briggs and his nephew Asahel E. Briggs, son of the late Abiel Briggs, while Benjamin acquired land from Theodor Pickens, an early settler in his self-named canyon holding valuable water rights, for a home he called “Briggs Terrace.”
Benjamin Briggs (1827-1893) hailed from Bristol, New York, located in the upper Finger Lakes region southeast of Rochester, though the family moved to Sharon, Ohio, east of Columbus and not far from where John Rowland of Rancho La Puente lived a generation or so prior. When news of the California Gold Rush reached that area, Benjamin, his brothers George and John, and a friend made their way overland along with thousands of other ’49ers. When they reached El Dorado, however, only John decided to pursue mining, while Benjamin and George took up farming near Marysville, starting with watermelons and then planting peaches.
Benjamin returned to Ohio, married and farmed at Sharon. Apparently because of his wife’s lung trouble, to which she succumbed in 1862, he decided to pursue the study of medicine, specifically in that discipline, and traveled to Europe as the Civil War ended and the studied at the University of Michigan in 1868-1869 and at the Bellevue Hospital Medical College in New York, where he completed his education in 1869.
He married his late wife’s younger sister, also a widow, adopted her children from her prior marriage and moved to Crawfordsville, Indiana, northwest of Indianapolis, to practice his new profession. While it is said he returned to California during the Seventies and lived in San Jose, Benjamin was back in Crawfordsville when the 1880 census was conducted, though, of course, he soon ended up buying that land at La Cañada from Lanterman.
As for his brothers, John continued gold and then silver mining in Marysville, but the combination of refuse from aggressive hydraulic mining, which replaced placer processes and did tremendous environmental damage, and the devastation of the fantastical flooding of the winter of 1861-1862 led him and George to leave that area. John ended up staying nearby at Yuba City and becoming a rancher and farmer on not far under 300 acres and worked this holdings until his death in 1877.
George migrated southwest to Davis, not far from Sacramento, while also acquiring land in Fresno County. With an avid interest in the prospects of irrigation in the Delta region, as well as the study of raising growing, he traveled to Spain to investigate the latter and this had a direct effect on the construction of The Castle at La Crescenta. In 1847, George married Emma Dinsmore, a native of Maine, and she joined him, along with first child, in California shortly after his Gold Rush migration. In 1856, they had a second daughter, May Isabel, followed by a third girl, these the only of seven to survive into adulthood.
Returning to La Cresecenta, Benjamin and Asahel Briggs, began to prepare their new Rancho La Cañada holdings for their use as well as development and the 16 November 1883 issue of the Los Angeles Times reported that,
Dr. B.B. Briggs, a brother of G.G. Briggs, one of the raising kings of the western world, has returned from the most recent one of his occasional visits to the East, to his new home at La Canyada [this spelling used to better pronounce the Spanish Cañada), with renewed impressions that neither in the rest of America, nor in all Europe, is three [sic] a region so attractive as California; that no part of California is so attractive as Southern California; that no part of Southern California is quite so much the little world of all the ends and aims of home seekers as Los Angeles, and that no part of Los Angeles is so much a marvel of salubrity and natural beauty as La Canyada. On all these points Dr. Briggs is uncommonly good authority, because an observer from the standpoint of a Central America [?] forty-niner, of residence and travel in Eastern America, of travel and sojourning in Europe, and of professional practice at widely apart latitudes and longitudes . . . [For Asahel Briggs] the attractions of La Canyada overpower those of raisin growing in Central California . . . [he] is more and more delighted with his change of residence as La Canyada grows less and less new to him.
The Los Angeles Herald of 22 January 1884, under the heading of “Another Enterprise,” briefly noted that uncle and nephew “are about to divide 2500 acres of valley land near the Verdugo, known as the Rancho La Cañada, in ten and twenty acre tracts, forty acres to be set apart for town lots and a handsome park.” The paper added that “the soil is equal to any in our county, and the neighboring orchards and vineyards show what can be done in a very short time,” being attractive to those wanting “cheap land, with plenty of water, on which to make their future home.”
Two days later, the Herald provided its readers with an update, remarking that the subdivision was to be called the “Briggs Cresenta Tract,” and it reiterated what virtually every other development in the region at the time (and at others, for that matter) typically proclaimed. Namely, “the climate is perfect . . . it is free from all storms . . . the air is balmy . . . and this is considered one of the healthiest places in our county.” Given this, it was concluded, “we have no doubt but that the land will find ready purchasers as soon as offered.”
When that offer was made in the form of the first advertisement, published in the Herald of 3 February, the name of the project was changed to “Crescenta Canyada” with Asahel Briggs handling the management from the office of Thomas E. Rowan, a longstanding Angeleno who ran a bakery with his father, was city and county treasurer (including hotly contested elections against F.P.F. Temple in 1873 and 1875) and who went on to be a county supervisor and Los Angeles mayor, as well as a real estate developer.
As per usual, the ad touted the “healthful and beautiful spot” as well as the stellar soil, congenial climate and “pure water and plenty of it.” Noting the location “near the base of the Sierra Madre Mountains,” as the San Gabriel range was then commonly known, and “above the Verdugo Cañon,” in what is now north Glendale, the piece assured potential buyers that the tract was “frostless, warm brushland.”
The 2,500 acres was “being subdivided into 10 acre lots, each of which will have a water right from a series of reservoirs now being made on the tract.” As to purchase, the “easy terms” included 25% down. The townsite was to have a park with a fountain, while it was highlighted that “as a situation for invalids it is one of the finest in the world,” this being said later for such towns as Duarte, Sierra Madre and Monrovia, located east at the base of the mountain range. It was assured that the Sierra Madres would protect the tract from winds coming from the north, while “Mount San Francisco Maria protects it from winds from the sea,” this almost certainly meaning Verdugo Peak, the highest in the mountain range of that name.
While it was been stated that Dr. Briggs long harbored a desire to build a health resort at La Crescenta, the ad noted that “special inducements will be given to parties who will put up a Hotel for Tourists and Invalids on the tract” and claimed that “a good hotel would be filled all the year.” This was likely mindful of the success of the Sierra Madre Villa to the east in what is now the northeast corner of Pasadena. Asahel Briggs concluded by informing readers he “will take pleasure in showing the land and giving all information about the same.”
At the end of 1885, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad completed a transcontinental rail line to San Bernardino and then leased trackage from the Southern Pacific to run trains to Los Angeles, this being a core element of what became the Boom of the Eighties, transpiring during the Angel City mayoral administration of William H. Workman from 1886 to 1888. The boom, of course, then went bust and, by the onset of the 1890s, the name Crescenta Canyada was superseded by La Crescenta.
It was on 1 January 1885 that George Griggs died at his Davis-area farm and ranch and left an estate reputedly valued at around a half million dollars, a substantial sum for the era. This means that his daughter May was left with a handsome nest egg which she and her husband, Eugene H. Gould, whom she married in 1881, would use for their future project of The Castle at La Crescenta.
This seems a good place to stop for now, so check back with us tomorrow for part two of this story of Gould’s Folly!