by Paul R. Spitzzeri
Our mining through letters, amid much other interesting and valuable information, in “Loose Leaves from the Family Tree,” a binder of material compiled from 1937 to 1966 by various members of the “Los Angeles branch” of the Workman family, has yielded important content for our better understanding of not just that part of the tree, but the rest of it, as well. As we continue with this ninth part, we return to letters from the 1950s, beginning with one from 21 August 1955 from Mary Julia Workman to her niece, Mary Workman Dugan.
After acknowledging receipt of a letter the prior day, the 84-year old daughter of Maria Boyle and William H. Workman, expressed her pleasure that Mary Dugan, whose father was William H. Workman, Jr., liked a recent photo of the Workman residence in Clifton, England, where their ancestor David, brother of Homestead founder William, lived for much of his younger years. Mary Julia added that Edmund Lowthian, the dwelling’s then-owner, “has made good use of the original house” and renovated it, under the name of the “White House” in a way that was “very charming.”
Requested for more about the history of the edifice, she replied that it was best to do so by recollecting her visit with her parents in July 1912, when they were shown the house by Christopher Fairer, a lawyer who long handled the Workman family’s financial affairs. She informed Mary that “there can be no doubt that we saw the real house here they [their ancestors] lived.” After a tangent concerning other parts of Clifton, Mary Julia remembered that, entering the village, and seeing houses on either side of the main street,
The first one on the right was the Workman house. It looked like a double house with two porticoes and two entrances, there was a low stone fence in front and a space for a garden with some shrubs and trees. There was a small outhouse near the gate.
It was added that “we did not go into the half of the house w[h]ere the other entrance was” and “this makes me think that it was a double house and that when the family was smaller,” meaning a few of the Workmans left in the 1840s and onward, “they rented part of it.” Moreover, “we saw the rear where the house was L shaped, quite different from the front” and “in the rear, was quite a garden with large trees, shrubs and vines,” while,
We were told by Mr. Fairer that some of the trees had been sent as seedlings from the Puente Rancho by William Workman . . . [then, related Fairer] William Workman sent a cask of wine to his brother, Thomas, in Clifton. Thomas put it in the outhouse and invited the neighbors to come to see it, but Thomas never tasted the wine. One day, after much delay, Thomas decided to taste the contents of the flask, but the worms had beat him to it, and the wine had all seeped out, so no one ever got a drop of it.
We’ve seen that, after Thomas, the last of the Workman children died in 1884, the estate was settled by his nephew Elijah, to whom real estate passed by the English law of primogeniture involving the eldest surviving male of a family line, though this did not apply to personal property, which was to be shared with any siblings, of which there was one, William H. To this point, Mary Julia remarked that “Father felt hurt that Uncle Lige did not make a full report of the property, its sale and other details,” though “Father did not seem to have any enmity in the matter.” After all, she noted, “poor Uncle Lige had so much sorrow in his life [losses of three wives and a son] and there was a bond between them to the end.”
What was given to William H. by Elijah included a silver tankard, Mary Workman’s gold watch, and a book that she illustrated, that were passed down to Mary Julia, though she noted that there may have been other items brought back to Los Angeles from Clifton. The tankard, said to be from the mid-18th century was given to a nephew, David A. (whose father, Thomas Edgar, was Mary Julia’s youngest sibling), the watch to David Furman (whose mother, Gertrude, was a sister). In an previous letter, it was mentioned that the illustrated book was to go to Mary Dugan.
Four days later, Mary Julia sent another missive with the remark that the pastor, Rev. C.M.L. Bouch, at St. Cuthbert’s Church in Clifton sent information regarding Workman family gravestones in the church burying ground a short distance to north of the family house. This included the names of two children not previously known to Mary Julia, specifically a son, Harrison, who died in 1810 at age 15, while he was attending school in Durham to the east, and John, who was eight years old when he passed away in 1814.
She added David and William, even though they were buried, in 1855 and 1876, respectively, at our El Campo Santo Cemetery at the Homestead, while Agnes, who died at Baltimore in 1848, is listed because she was added to the large stone commissioned by William when he returned home in 1851-1852 for his sole visit. Her short letter ended with the observation that her nephew (and Mary’s cousin) David wrote a letter to Gertrude “that is so fine that I asked him to send you a copy,” including his research on the tankard she presented to him.
A copy of a missive from Edmund Lothian to Gertrude and her husband, Walter Furman, and dated 27 July 1955 is also present and he mentioned their recent visit to Clifton, as well as having a quintet of color photos taken of the Workman house showing the remodeling he’d undertaken as well as the beauty of the garden.
With respect to David A. Workman’s letter to his aunt Gertrude, he wrote that material provided by the Rev. Bouch served to “provide the probable answer to the family’s greatest mystery; the monogram on the tankard,” given to him by Mary Julia. The initials of “DJH” were for “David John Harrison” and, while he added that Gertrude’s husband, Walter, would disagree because “it utterly deflates his fantastic notion that our family came into possession of the tankard by mans that were something less than honest, he laid out his case for the identification.
Noting that three sons of Thomas Workman and Lucy Cook were named David, John and Harrison, David A. Workman observed that David Harrison’s sister, Agnes, married his friend, Thomas Workman in the early 1760s and, while later research revealed a different interpretation than David gave in his letter, it proved to be the case that Harrison’s wealth, including the house and lands in Clifton, was the basis for the Workman family’s rise in social class through inheritance because he did not have children.
The tankard was described as a memento of the esteem held for David Harrison as it was passed down through the Workman family—in fact, though not mentioned in this letter, William Workman’s daughter, Margarita, and her husband, F.P.F. Temple, had two children named David Harrison Temple, though both died very young, while their fifth son was christened John Harrison Temple. David, confident in his assertions, joked that his uncle Walter should “apologize for [his] slanderous theories concerning our family honor” because the meaning behind the tankard showed that “everything was really quite legitimate and proper—all on the up and up.”
Gertrude wrote a pair of letters to her niece Mary Dugan at this time, with one of 23 August, with reference to the recent trip she and Walter took to Clifton and observing that a photo that Mary Julia gave to her that appeared to be from the 1890s showed the Workman house as two dwellings, with the pair of doorways, but also a large number of people gathered in the front yard and that the edifice was “so converted after most of the Workman[s] had died or departed.”
On arrival to Clifton, the Furmans looked at the houses comprising the estate of the Earl of Lonsdale and “Mr. Lowthian’s was the only one that looked at all like the old photograph, in fact is is like it in so many ways that I think there is no doubt of its being the old homestead.” The roof and windows were obvious, though the first floor had a garage and bay windows that were added and, of four original chimneys, two remained though in the same places as in the photo.
Gertrude went on to note that the edifice was built of stone and had thick walls and many changes had been effected since Mary Dugan’s father was there just over a half-century before, including a garden on one side that was replaced by stables when the Earl of Lonsdale owned the property. The current owner, Lowthian, bought the dwelling in the late 1940s and told Gertrude that it was used by the Earl’s agent as a gate house, including when Mary Julia, Maria and William H. were there in 1912.
Six days later, Gertrude wrote another missive to answer some questions from her niece, including about Elijah Workman, who, she remarked, “was an unhandsome bearded man (I think that my Father was a handsome one), and he never smiled and seldom spoke.” She remembered her uncle walking into the family’s Boyle Heights house, Elijah living nearby, and paying attention to no one else.
From there on, Father would carry on a one-sided conversation, until Uncle Lige would suddenly arise and stalk right out in the middle of one Father[‘s] sentences and every time, without fail, Father would say to the retreating back, “What’s your hurry, Lige, What’s your hurry?” The narrative continued that “this morose character” had three marriages, the first to Julia Benedict, who “was very beautiful,” but died giving birth to a daughter, who died in infancy, while the other child, son Walter died of typhoid fever at age 15.
The second wife, Gilla Corum, had tuberculosis and died when their two daughters, Gilleta and Laura, were young, though there was a son who died young. Anna Webb, a widow, was the last wife and “was an efficient woman and pulled the family together” with the two girls fond of her, though she died in 1900, six years before Elijah. Gertrude observed,
So, you see, he did have an unhappy life, but Father was devoted to him and did all he could for him and I still think he was shabbily treated in the matter of the [English Workmans] estate. All he got were the tankard, the Mary Workman book and a gold watch.
After some more discussion about Clifton and the Workman house there, mention was made of concern from Mary Julia about Mary Dugan knowing of “Uncle Lige’s goings-on and the facts of life about the William Workmans.” A missive from the Rev. Bouch went into some early references to Workmans living in the Clifton area as far back as around 1540, though with no links to the family that eventually migrated to Los Angeles, and he also offered that “Weerc” or “Wyrc” was an Anglian name and that a “Weerc’s man” was likely how the surname “Workman” came to be.
As for the “facts of life” about the Rancho La Puente branch of the Workman family, this concerned some lore that asserted that William Workman and his wife Nicolasa were not married, or at least not for a long while, and that this somehow was considered an issue for other members of the clan. Notably, Thomas E. Workman addressed this in a letter in the binder to Mary Dugan, citing that this was from gossip, but that there was evidence of a marriage, namely from Lenore Rowland’s work on her family’s Rancho La Puente history.
Later, it was learned that, while the Workmans lived in a common-law relationship, which was not at all uncommon in New Mexico during the 1820s and 1830s, they had a church wedding at Mission San Gabriel in 1844. Thomas’ statement that “due to frontier conditions a delay would not have been unusual” was made without that knowledge. He also, however, remarked that
The descendants of William Workman are refined and well educated men and women of about your age. Thomas Workman Temple II is a graduate of [the University of] Santa Clara and of Harvard University (law) and is considered an authority on the history of Southern California and particularly the San Gabriel Mission.
In a letter that Mary Dugan never sent to her uncle, she remarked “certainly I know that Tom Temple is a fine man” and added that “I have been trying to meet him ever since I was about fourteen.” Mary Julia Workman sent her niece a pair of letters that Temple wrote to her and her sister Gertrude, on 21 February 1956, with the first expressing his pleasure in meeting the two Workman sisters and Gertrude’s husband at his San Gabriel house.
Temple was happy to have been provided a copy of the Workman house in Clifton, while he shared family history with them. This included his locating of records of marriage, from December 1843 and February 1844, for William Workman and Nicolasa Urioste, with Temple adding, “I trust this record will serve to set at rest once and for all, whatever misinformation and misunderstanding, ignorance of its existence may well have caused in the past, and may they Rest in Peace.”
Moreover, Temple referred to a letter to David Workman from his brother William’s son Joseph and he noted that there was a missive from William to his son from 1846, but neither of these appears to have survived or at least have not surfaced for those of us at the Homestead—these would be remarkable to add to our growing store of knowledge.
To Gertrude and Walter Furman, Temple wrote of portions of William Workman’s will, dated 13 October 1870, in which it was recorded, two years after his sister Mary’s death, leaving only brother Thomas living at home in Clifton, England,
I desire that my brother Thomas Workman shall be maintained in the possession of the property where he now lives and of which is now possessed in the County of Westmoreland [sic] in the Empire of Great Britain; and that my executors shall furnish whatever means shall be required for that purpose, either in the way of defending suits brought against him for such property or otherwise—so long as my said brother shall live.
In a 21 November 1872 codicil, or amendment, to the will, William stated that “it is my will that my brother Thomas, shall not be disturbed in the possession and enjoyment” of any property that was determined to be William’s in Clifton “during his natural life, and thereafter that one half of it shall be disposed of, to the greatest advantage, for the benefit of the poor of the said town of Clifton, and that the other half shall belong to my said daughter, Antonia Margarita Workman de Temple.” It is notable that his son Joseph was not included in this bequest, there being evidence that their relationship was troubled.
Temple continued that he had “no idea what disposition was made of William’s share in England,” though, as we’ve seen, it was his nephew Elijah, the eldest surviving son of William’s older brother, the senior son in his family, who disposed of the England real and personal property in 1884, without providing much to his brother, William H, “nor whether the poor of Clifton ever benefited by his charitable thoughts and desires for them in far-off California, some 20 years after his visit there in 1852.”
Mary Julia wrote to Mary Dugan on 14 March 1956 of the visit with Thomas Temple, of whom she mention that, when he was attending Harvard in the late 1920s, he wrote to her about his English ancestry and presence in New England since 1636. She also remarked upon his sharing of the Workman marriage record and added, “I fear that in our family there have been some prejudices through the years, because of the differences in national origin, and gossip.” It was added that a photo of William and Nicolasa was seen on the visit to Temple’s house, but this was actually of their daughter, Margarita, and her husband, F.P.F. Temple, Thomas’ grandparents.
It’s been a remarkable tour through large portions of “Loose Leaves from the Family Tree” with respect to memoirs, letters and more that show the interest that Workman and Temple family members had about their ancestry. The Homestead appreciates the donation from Vincent Hurteau and his family as the gift lifts the Museum and its better understanding of the history we interpret and share with the public.