by Paul R. Spitzzeri
A little over a month ago, on the day after Christmas, we shared in a post here a letter from that day in 1886 by Annie Silliman Field, a Los Angeles resident in her early twenties, writing to her younger brother, Benjamin, who’d recently left home for a lengthy trip to Ireland and Europe. In addition to the difficulty in seeing her sibling away for an extended period, Annie was also concerned about her aunt, Maria Hubbell, absent from home as she went to San Francisco for surgery on her eye.
That letter, of course, went into some major detail about the Fields’ holiday celebration, held at her uncle Frank’s house, which was at Second Street Park in what was then called Crown Hill, west of downtown, as well as at the First Presbyterian Church, while reference was also made to the new house, Daniel, the father of Annie and Benjamin, built, also at Crown Hill. She, however, did not send that letter for over a month, as she waited until 31 January 1887 to send it and three others she’d penned in the interim—that’s what this post is about.
On the 16th, a Sunday afternoon and presumably when there was more leisure time for the task, Annie wrote a missive that began with her seeing in one of the papers news of the deaths of Remi Nadeau and Mary A. Hodgkins. The latter was a teacher in the Angel City’s public schools for almost a decade and was lauded has having “a most lovable character” and “of a sweet and cheerful disposition,” while also “a natural born teacher and greatly beloved by her pupils.”
Nadeau was one of the most prominent Angelenos of the last few decades of the 19th century. Born near Quebec, Canada, he lived for years in Minnesota working as a miller before migrating, about 1860, west, including a stay at Salt Lake City, where be built a mill or two. He was best known in Los Angeles for his freight hauling business, thanks to a loan from fellow French Canadian, Prudent Beaudry, employing ox teams to carry goods as far as Nevada and Utah.
In the late 1860s, Nadeau settled permanently in town and, in ensuing years, became very successful transporting bullion from mines in Inyo County in eastern California (F.P.F. Temple and William Workman were heavily invested in this area during that time). After that mining boom went bust, Nadeau invested his proceeds in real estate, purchasing 3,600 acres south of town in what is now the Florence-Graham section, raising grain, unsuccessfully trying sugar beets, but doing quite well with 2,400 acres of vineyards, irrigated from the Los Angeles River on the east side of his property. In 1882, he constructed the Nadeau Block, costing him some $165,000 and, at his death, left an estate said to be worth a million dollars to his four children.
Returning to the letter, Annie lamented the continued absence of Aunt Maria and noted the illness of younger brother, Almer, with a doctor diagnosing pleurisy (lung lining inflammation). As for their father, who long served as a deputy sheriff, part of patronage for Daniel’s political involvement, the election of James C. Kays, who Annie snidely reported “reigns supreme” (as, of course, all sheriffs do in their department!), meant the loss of that position.
What she didn’t say directly, however, was that Daniel won election as the city tax collector, as William H. Workman, nephew of Homestead founders William Workman and Nicolasa Urioste, took office as mayor, though she did relate,
Papa and Fred [the fourth Field child] are in their new office, and I think they enjoy it, they don’t have much to do . . . some times Papa stays around the house until noon.
Work continued on the Field family house, including a bookcase and hat rack, while Daniel’s brother Ahmer was in town for a winter respite and lived with Frank, superintendent of that Second Street Park. There was also reference to someone named Ed closing his business and moving to the recently-founded San Gabriel Valley foothill town of Monrovia, which was one of the more successful towns of that period, with the Boom of the Eighties well underway.
Another notable bit of news was that,
Mr. Witmer and the rest of the Co[mpany] have sold out their interest in the Cable road to Mr. McLaughlin, a young millionaire from New York, for $130000, the road is going to be extended and a great many improvements made, he is going to put in the park a swimming pond, a nine-pin alley, a law-tennis and croquet ground and is going to supply music for dancing on the platform, it will all be very fine and noisy.
A previous post here covered some Crown Hill history, based on a stock certificate in the Museum’s collection from the Los Angeles Improvement Company, the developer of that subdivision and which was incorporated early in 1885. Later that year, when the first auction of lots was held for the development, it took place at the Nadeau Block, which happened to be in front of the terminus of the Second Street Cable Railway, which was built to provide transport to and from the new tract and traversed Bunker Hill to get to Crown Hill.
The newly arrived Witmer, formerly a Wisconsin banker, was a core figure with San Francisco resident, Edward A. Hall, a cousin of Annie and Benjamin through their late mother Jane Hall Field, who sold the Field family the lot on which their new house was constructed, in both the Crown Hill project, set on 900 acres, and the Second Street Cable Railroad, as well as the new California Bank.
Moreover, Hall’s father (the brother of the late Jane Field) was a San Francisco auctioneer who hired Henry Mayo Newhall, later a major property owner in what is now Santa Clarita, north of Los Angeles and who soon took over the business and made a significant fortune with it. The elder Hall’s name was Almer, which, as we have seen was in the Field family and was used by Newhall in naming one of his sons. To add to the close ties, a Hall daughter had the middle name of Silliman, which was also that of Annie Field. Lastly, Newhall’s son, Walter, was an officer with both the LAIC and the cable railroad.
The buyer of the line was James G. McLoughlin (misspelled by the press, as well as Annie, as James M. McLaughlin), with the Los Angeles Times of 13 January titling its report “A Big Deal” and beginning with “one of the most remarkably successful new enterprises in Los Angeles is the Second-street cable road,” which, in a year-and-a-half since its October 1885 opening, traveled “over the tremendous hills west of Fort street [renamed Broadway in 1890] and a ran a mile through lands as desolate as the desert—untenanted save by the ground-squirrel and the cotton-tail [rabbits].”
The account went on that, prior to that, “comparatively few people had the remotest idea that those hills would ever be inhabited; and the projectors of the road were laughed at” and viewed as “cranks.” As for Witmer, Hall and their compatriots, who subdivided some 1,400 lots, it was stated that they hoped that the road would be a paying proposition someday and they pursued the work, involving the excavation and removal of 75,000 cubic yards of earth from those hills, in addition to the track, engine house and more.
In its period of operation, the Times continued, the road was providing good returns and, in December 1886, average ridership was more than 1,350 persons daily and the account continued that,
This was the pioneer cable road of Southern California, the first on the coast outside of San Francisco. It made Los Angeles the fourth city in the United States to have a cable road. It has run every day for 14 months, and has never had an accident. To it is due the upbuilding of what is already a large and fast-growing community on the hills west of Bunker Hill avenue and south of First street. As it proved a brilliant success, the Temple-street cable road was built and several others were franchised and assured.
The paper noted that McLoughlin, whose father and uncle owned a very successful publishing and game company in New York City (later acquired by Milton Bradley was a stockholder for a year, but the deal gave him all but 56 of the 5,000 shares and included the Second Street Park—hence Annie’s references to his proposed improvements there. It was added that the LAIC continued separately from the purchase, though only 52 of those 1,400 lots remained unsold.
The account continued that McLoughlin “will double-track the road, improve the park till it is the finest in Southern California, and stir up things in the line of general progress.” After the boom went bust in the late Eighties, however, McLoughlin ended up in serious financial distress because of his efforts with the road. As for Hall, it was said “he finds himself completely broken down in health, and will settle upon some fine property in the foothills where he can let business alone and give his health a chance.” Annie’s reference to “Ed” moving to Monrovia was undoubtedly Hall, who acquired land on the Rancho Azusa de Duarte, though he sold the property to Walter Newhall, returned to Los Angeles to join in the formation of California Bank and then died in October at just age 31.
Witmer turned from the sale of the cable road and the near-completed work of the LAIC to turn his attention to that financial institution, with the $80,000 business building led by him erected at the southwest corner of Broadway and 2nd Street and the Times remarked that the bank “will probably suffice to keep him from idleness, though he has other valuable irons in the fire.” It was stated that he sold the lot in the Crown Hill area on which Charles Canfield and Edward L. Doheny, in the early Nineties, drilled their oil well that opened the great Los Angeles field.
In the next letter, from the 23rd, Annie devoted much of it to her gushing about the appearance of the famed Spanish operatic soprano, Adelina Patti, telling Benjamin, “I was so delighted with it all, if you have a chance to hear here sing in Germany, don’t fail to do so, for she will never be in America again, and she is indeed wonderful, she was encored again and again.”
The highlight was when, after taking eight curtain calls, “finally she sang ‘Home, Sweet Home,’ I simply never heard anything like it, and I hope I shall never hear anyone sing.” Annie called this performance “the sweetest thing I ever heard . . . and a great many in the room were very much affected.” She concluded this passage with “but I must stop, I could write her praises for an hour.” Most of the rest of the missive was devoted to plans for a dinner party to replace a picnic cancelled because of light rain.
The last of the correspondence, from 31 January, noted that “we had our dinner and had a good time too, only I had a splitting headache, but the others had a very jolly time.” She added that brother Fred also was given a City position collecting delinquent licenses and paying $85 monthly, which she adjudged “pretty good pay, I think.” After noting the Field residence being isolated, Annie informed her brother than a house was being built two lots away. She then concluded,
I guess I must seal this up and go out and concoct some supper. O, Benjamin, I want to see you, I want to know where you are and how you are, but I cannot. We must wait until April at least, two and a half months and perhaps longer.
Well, I will end this very entertaining epistle, and begin another one.
If there were other letters, which is possible given that the envelope in which these were contained has a 14 February postmark, they presumably have been lost.
Benjamin, whose shipboard letter as he neared Ireland was published by the Times in April, also made a trip to South America in 1888, attended the state normal school for teacher education (this where the Central Public Library now stands), enlisted during the Spanish-American War, and later became a real estate and mining broker. His first marriage to May Adams, which yielded a son who died from complications involving his military service during the First World War, ended in a very acrimonious and bitter divorce.
While he continued his work in real estate, Benjamin also worked as writer about the opera, was a published poet and moved into literature and the arts by the 1920s. His second wife, Rowena Blincoe, was a dramatic reader of some note in New York City and then Los Angeles, and during the Roaring Twenties, they were a prominent team, with Benjamin an officer in the League of Western Writers, Verse Writers’ Club of Southern California and the Gamut Club, among others.
Later in life, Benjamin pursued his avid interest in exoteric philosophy and spiritualism, wrote a book called Beauty in the Bible and was a founder of the Temple of Universal Truth, also known as the Rowena Field Memorial with an annual service held in her memory. Benjamin joined the church’s pastor, the Rev. Vincent M. Wilson, for these memorials and the building is now used as a Korean Presbyterian church.
Annie married Joseph C. Crickmore, a railroad station agent, in 1893, but the marriage ended in divorce a half-decade later. She and their two children, a son and a daughter, moved in with Daniel in his house near Westlake (now MacArthur) Park. Daniel, who’d remarried, died in 1910 in Hollywood, having followed his stint as tax collector with two terms as Los Angeles County public administrator and five years as president of the Board of Building and Loan Commissions for the State of California.
Annie died in December 1914 at age 51, leaving her children Almer and Ruth, while Benjamin survived her by close to a half-century, dying in December 1960 at age 92. These letters from him to her are notable for several reasons, especially their father’s relative prominence in Los Angeles and their connection to Crown Hill and its developers.
Having missives like these and others in our collection from this period also better helps us understand our regional history from a very personal perspective and we look forward to sharing more like them as part of our “Reading Between the Lines” series.