by Paul R. Spitzzeri
A 2009 donation of Workman and Temple family documents by Jeannine Raymond has proved to be of immense help over the last fifteen or so years in helping us to better understand many aspects of their history. Jeannine, whose father Carl was married to Gabriela Quiroz, the widow of Thomas W. Temple II, sent us a treasure trove which we’ve mined in multiple ways including posts under the “Read All About It” series dealing with family letters and this “Making a Statement” series relating to financial documents, specifically those of Thomas’ father, Walter, owner of the Homestead from 1917-1932.
This post looks at the “Report of receipts and expenditures March 19th to April 17, 1921,” typed on Walter’s letterhead, stating his address as El Monte, though he was a resident of Alhambra. In any case, there are two pages detailing spending, while the receipts, starting with not quite $11,000 in cash on hand, consist of eight transactions. These include royalties received from General Petroleum Company from the lease arranged with Julia Davis Cruz (1851-1917), who was the daughter of Joseph Davis, a half-American, half New Mexican employee of the Temple family in the 19th century and his indigenous wife, Venancia Peña, who was a Luiseño from the area around the Mission San Luis Rey in northern San Diego County.
Julia helped raise the younger Temple children, including Walter, and was something of a member of the family, appearing in photographs with them. In the 1870s, Walter’s father, F.P.F. Temple, sold Julia’s mother Venancia a tract of eight acres on the north side of San Gabriel Boulevard very close to the Temple family house and the Davises occupied that property for some four decades before Julia signed a lease agreement with General. She died shortly afterward, however, and her several heirs became beneficiaries of royalties, though these were small. The total monthly return was just over $93, split eight ways, with Walter, as administrator taking his cut.
He also received just under $400 in interest, this likely from personal loans he made to a great many people. He’d also recently acquired commercial buildings in San Gabriel, directly across from the old Mission and had $225 in rentals, while there was also a $25 monthly rental for his Temple Oil Station, located at the southeast corner of San Gabriel Boulevard and Lincoln Avenue, at the northeastern corner of Montebello and on his ranch. A small amount of $73 was from “payments received on principal,” while he also had some $525 from interest on Liberty Bonds, sold to pay for America’s entry into World War I.
His income was almost completely from the royalties on oil and gas generated from that Montebello ranch, where four years before drilling began by Standard Oil Company, which arranged a lease in 1915, the year after Thomas Temple, age 9, stumbled upon crude seepages on a hillside not far from the family house, situated very close to the Temple Oil Station. The first well was brought into production at the end of June 1917 and another eleven were drilled by early 1921, several of them gushers and high producers, bringing the Temple family a small fortune.
The gas receipts were not far under $1,700—the IRS reported for 1921 that the greatest number of Americans, some 2.44 million filed tax returns for yearly income between $1,000 and $2,000 and another 2.22 million were in the $2,000 to $3,000 bracket. But, Walter also pulled in just shy of $33,400 for the month and only slightly more than 12,000 Americans filed a tax return declaring their income for the year to be between $30,000 and $40,000. We don’t know his 1921 income, but it was probably somewhere around $350,000 and only 98 people filed a return for the $300,000 o $400,000 bracket.
The discovery by Thomas was staggering enough, but so was the sheer luck in what the deposits under ground yielded for the family in the first several years, with the first nine wells all being producers, including some substantial ones. Well number 9, brought in during April 1919, was such a gusher, coming in at some 30,000 barrels a day for a short period, that it was called America’s largest producing well.
The tenth was the first to come up dry and, with production at Montebello generally declining, including with dozens of wells drilled for the heirs of “Lucky” Baldwin, who acquired the hill property by an 1879 foreclosure on a loan to Walter’s father, F.P.F., and grandfather, William Workman, as their Temple and Workman bank was collapsing, there was a concern that the shallow field was already starting to play out.
Then came the completion of well number 11 in August 1920, it being called “something of a surprise” by the Los Angeles Express as it yielded some 800 barrels of oil a day, followed a month later by the twelfth, which the paper observed was such that “the Montebello field got another thrill and a new lease on life” when it was brought into production as a gusher producing 4,200 barrels daily.
So, as 1921 approached, well 13 was quickly sited and preparations for drilling undertaken. The 10 March edition of the Whittier News reported that drilling was down nearing 2,900 feet and it was “showing up with considerable promise.” A week later, as 3,000 feet was approached, oil sand was reached and drilling “has run unbroken for more than 900 feet,” leading the paper tor remark that the well “on completion should make another thousand barrel well.”
In its number of the 24th, the News added that 600 feet of oil sand was drilled through so that Temple 13 “should make a big well,” while the fourteenth well site was located. It took almost another month, but, by the end of April, well #13 got to 3,550 feet and came out as a 1200 barrel well, being “the biggest well of the year in the Montebello field.” Well 14, drilled to about the same depth, was brought into production at 800 barrels in mid-September.
With all of this success and all but one well a producer, it is small wonder that Walter pushed ahead so aggressively with his Walter P. Temple Oil Company and prospecting ventures throughout greater Los Angeles and elsewhere, as well as pursued real estate development through his Temple Estate Company and then the Temple Townsite Company handling his Town of Temple, renamed Temple City in 1928.
As for expenses, these totaled some $23,500 and, while there was a “Sundry Persons & Concerns,” an interesting catch-all for a report the purported to list so many other expenditures singly, totaling more than $2,600 with another at some $460, the largest itemized payments were to the First National Bank of Puente for $2,034.52 for a note and interest (though for what was left unexplained) and $2,000 for stock in the Talbert Oil Company, working wells in the new and exceptional field at Huntington Beach.
Two $1,000 payments to the Puente bank were for the “Workman Homestead” and likely were installments for the 1917 purchase of the ranch, though there were three other payments totaling $1,000 and with the same reference. Another grand went to Barker Brothers, the well-known Los Angeles furniture store, though whether this was for the family residence in Alhambra or the Homestead is not known.
The Pioneer Nursery in Monrovia was paid $1,336.15 for the Homestead and this might well have been for landscaping at El Campo Santo Cemetery, where, at the beginning of March, the Walter P. Temple Memorial Mausoleum, a priority for the Temples after acquiring the ranch being the renovation of the largely ruined burial ground, was highlighted for the interment there of Don Pío Pico, the last governor of Mexican California and his wife, Doña Maria Ignacia Alvarado, moved from the old Calvary Cemetery in Los Angeles. A pair of other small expenses including for gold lettering for one of the crypts inside the mausoleum, perhaps that of the Picos, and for “canvass on monument,” though it is not known what this meant.
Eusebius Pollard, Jr., from an El Monte family dating back to the mid-19th century and who had a South Pasadena, was paid nearly $600, perhaps for walnut trees that were raised commercially at the Homestead. More than $500 was paid out to the San Gabriel Valley Lumber Company for Victor Torres of San Gabriel, though what this was for is unknown.
Over $600 was paid to the Los Angeles Military Academy and, since the two younger sons of Walter and his wife Laura González, Walter, Jr. and Edgar, were attending the Pasadena Military Academy, it seems this expenditure was for Charles P. Temple, Jr., the only child of Walter’s late brother, Charles. In fact, Walter continued to pay for his nephew’s education, including at the dental school at the University of Southern California and then helped him get established with his office in Ventura.
An interesting reference was $250 remitted to James D. Cleminson, from another El Monte family with roots back to the early 1850s, and for “Contribution to Sanannah Cem,” this being Savannah Cemetery, the oldest burying ground in that area and still in existence today where Mission Drive meets Valley Boulevard in Rosemead. Temple’s donation may have been another expression of his deep interest in regional history, even though he had no kin buried there. A $10 contribution was made to the San Gabriel Settlement House, which worked with recent immigrants, mostly from México, in that city.
As for Temple’s propensity to loan money to family and friends, there were more than $2,200 in these during the month. Incidental expenses included $400 to a shirt company and $300 to clothier Harris and Frank, a railroad ticket for eldest child Thomas, who was attending the preparatory high school at the University of Santa Clara in the Bay Area, automobile expenses, utility bills for the Alhambra residence, ice, cigars, and monies paid to a drug store and a fuel and feed business.
Temple also provided $50 to his brother John and paid doctor’s fees and hospital bills of over $360 for Laura’s brother, Frank, and for Manuel Zuñiga, the husband of Walter’s sister. There were also several expenditures for his business manager, Milton Kauffman, who was not paid a regular salary, but was compensated by having a variety of bills paid for him, the total being $2,400 and including payments for his car, life insurance and a $100 expense to attorney George H. Woodruff, soon to become a business partner of Temple and Kauffman in those real estate development projects mentioned above.
Another expense to note concerned Walter Temple’s commissioning of a family history, with Johnstone Jones and Luther Ingersoll both paid for work on the project, though, later in the year, J. Perry Worden, best known for editing and essentially putting into narrative form the memoir of Los Angeles merchant Harris Newmark called Sixty Years in Southern California, was hired to take on the endeavor. This, however, went unrealized even as Worden was on the payroll for the rest of the decade, while also given a variety of other tasks over the years.
There were some people on salary for the Temples, including Therese Corbin, who may have been something of an office assistant; Walter’s brother-in-law Zuñiga, who was listed in the 1920 census as being the gardener at the Alhambra house; E.G. Seely, who was the Temple family chauffeur and who was also given a $20 bonus; and Elmer Potter, who long managed affairs related to the real estate business, including when the Temple Estate Company was formally established in 1923. A few office expenses were listed, as well.
Obviously, expending more than $23,000 on monthly expenses was significant, especially for that time, but this sum was half of cash on hand and receipts, so the Temples likely rested assured that their economic position was more than strong. The recent successes, surprising as they were to industry observers, with recent oil wells no doubt buoyed these feelings. It was probably assumed that more was to come from Montebello and Walter’s other petroleum prospecting projects.
Then there was his burgeoning real estate development endeavors, with his first construction project, the Temple Theatre in Alhambra to be completed at the end of 1921. With the latest boom underway in greater Los Angeles, Walter rushed forward with projects in downtown Los Angeles, San Gabriel, El Monte and Alhambra, before he launched Temple City, created as the boom hit its peak in 1923.
At the Homestead, the Workman House was recently remodeled for weekend residence and El Campo Santo’s renovation, including the erection of the mausoleum, was completed, as were many other improvements, including remodeling of 1860s wineries built by the Workmans, the addition of a reservoir/swimming pool and more. Not even in contemplation, however, was La Casa Nueva, which the Temple decided to build more than a year later and which became a five-year project at great expense.
That, in fact, would become a disturbing trend through the remainder of the Roaring Twenties. As Montebello proved to be a rather short-lived major oil field and new wells ceased coming, production on the existing Temple wells began to decline after 1921 and all of the intensive capital investment in other oil projects did not reproduce the staggering success at the Temple lease.
Simply put, receipts declined and expenditures climbed and this, of course, proved unsustainable over the next several years. Taking out bonds for Temple City and the Temple Estate in early 1926 was a way to deal with cash flow issues, though personal expenses continued with La Casa Nueva, continuing to send the four Temple children to private schools, and much else.
By the time the 1920s came to an end and the Great Depression burst forth, the Temples’ lucky streak was an increasingly distant memory and reality. Less than a decade after this report was issued and only about 2 1/2 years after La Casa Nueva was completed, the Temples vacated the Homestead, after Walter disposed of virtually every other asset and he hoped to save his ranch by leasing it to a military school. This, however, was futile as the depression worsened significantly in 1932 and he lost the property that July.
Financial reports like these are important documents for tracing the Temples’ trajectory financially and we’re thankful for donors like Jeannine as well as descendants for their donations as we continue to improve and refine our interpretation of the site’s remarkable history.