by Paul R. Spitzzeri
The life and career of Charles Clarke Chapman (1853-1944) after he left Chicago in 1894 in the aftermath of a failed hotel project and, with a brother, acquired a pair of orange groves in Covina and Fullerton and a house in Los Angeles, is nothing short of remarkable on multiple levels. Without any prior background or knowledge of citrus raising, he embarked on something of a crash course in the industry and rose to be the “Orange King,” celebrated for the high quality of his fruit, especially under the “Old Mission” banner at his Santa Ysabel Ranch.
Chapman, however, also made a memorable mark in real estate, developing a pair of subdivisions in the Westlake district and with commercial structures in downtown Los Angeles, including his September 1920 purchase of the Los Angeles Investment Company building that still stands and is known now as The Chapman Flats.
Moreover, he was a powerful figure in the Republican Party, particularly in Orange County, while he was one of the key personages in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), providing fund and property for at least two churches in the Westlake area and in Fullerton, while also serving as the latter’s assistant pastor, and heading the regional conference for many years.
As we move into the last half of the 1910s, his efforts in citriculture continued to be notable. For example, the Anaheim Gazette of 24 February 1916 reported that, at the California Fruit Growers convention held during the National Orange Show, in its sixth year at San Bernardino, Chapman presented a resolution from the association advocating for “state control of the distribution of the citrus fruits of California” in order to “prevent the glutting of the citrus markets of the East” and the decline of prices.
A little more than a month later, in its issue of 23 March, the paper published Chapman’s remarks on the vital question of branding, with the grower observing,
Many of our brands are not only artistic and beautiful, as portrayed by the box labels [which have been collectors’ items], making the package attractive, but are significant and have become household words in many sections of the country. They have contributed to the industry by stimulating the packer to a certain commendable pride in methods of handling and packing his fruit, that he may create and maintain a reputation for his special brand; by attracting the interest of the trade to certain brands, giving occasion and opportunity to advertise them, and through them, the whole California product, and by focussing [sic] in a special way the attention of the consumer on the beauty and superior quality of California oranges.
He related how, in 1895, he and brother Frank, who took the Covina grove, known as the Palmetto Ranch, developed their brand concept that involved “more than a mere trade-mark or box decoration,” despite naysayers who insisted that “an orange was an orange” and that the idea was absurd.
For the Chapmans, the goal was that a brand “could be made to stand for honest, careful and perhaps intelligent work in handling and packing” as well as for “uniformity in quality” so that buyers could acquire fruit from them “with full confidence that a standard was fixed.” Naturally, the idea entailed the belief that there would be “a willingness to pay a higher price for our fruit.”
The success of the Old Mission and the Golden Eagle (of only slightly lesser quality) brands was such that the orator told his hearers that “for some time [consumers] regarded the name of the brand as indicating a distinct variety of orange,” this applying to the more famous brand in the industry as Chapman related how an Eastern guest to his house told him that her family only ate Sunkist oranges, but, when he followed with “don’t you think the Valencias are the best oranges?” her reply was “no we prefer the Sunkist.”
He did, however, express concern that branding was becoming problematic because of those who were less concerned about quality than appearances, especially those artistic box labels and what they conveyed. Chapman cited one distributor who said, “some brands have represented real value . . . while others only seem to represent the growers’ or packers’ imagination of what a grade ought to be” and concluded “while orange brands are becoming more numerous, dependable ones are becoming rare.”
Notably, Chapman began selling groves in 1917, disposing in the spring of a 23-acre grove, planted to 12-year old Valencia oranges, on Valencia Avenue in Placentia (where there is also a Valencia High School) for the substantial sum of $71,000. At the end of that season, he unloaded another Valencia orchard of 20 acres for $65,000, demonstrating just how valuable his particular properties were, beyond the general prices fetched for mature groves.
Chapman also was cited in Orange County papers like the Gazette, the Orange County Plain Dealer and the Santa Ana Register for reports on how annual yields were compared to the previous year, while it is also significant that the 13 February 1919 edition of the Gazette reported that he was among many ranchers “removing vigorous, profitable walnut trees to plant citrus fruits.” The paper recounted that,
A notable example of removal of a walnut orchard to make way for Valencia oranges is on the C.C. Chapman ranch, near Fullerton. A twenty-acre walnut grove, which has been a great producer, is being routed by the advance of the Valencia orange. The owner of this ranch believes that the great demand for oranges will rise in direct ratio to the number of states ratifying the prohibition amendment.
The 18th Amendment was ratified that year and became effective in 1920 and Chapman was a prominent and public advocate of temperance, though whether his prediction came true is an interesting question. When frozen orange juice concentrate was introduced during the Great Depression, however, there was a notable boom in consumption.
As the decade came to a close, Chapman served as a director of the California Citrus Institute, while, amid concerns, early in 1920, that there was an undesirable glut of surplus oranges on the market, he told the Plain Dealer of 29 March that when he went east “and see the vast hordes of people who must be fed, I say we can never produce enough oranges for the millions who really demand our product.” To him, the problem was about “proper distribution,” but “this is being looked after splendidly by the California Fruit Growers’ Exchange, which also must have credit for generously advertising the California orange.”
With the real estate aspect, Chapman was reported by the Register of 7 June 1916 as preparing for a two or three story hotel in downtown Fullerton facing the First Christian Church and this motivated by assertions that the Pacific Electric would built a streetcar to town or that the San Pedro, Los Angeles and Salt Lake would construct a railroad line there, though the latter didn’t happen while the former did in the following year. As for the hotel, we’ll discuss this in a future post (likely in June) as we take Chapman’s life into the Roaring Twenties.
In April, the Register noted that Chapman conducted a property exchange by which a three-story warehouse he owned on 3rd Street west of Central Avenue in downtown Los Angeles (this mentioned earlier in this post) went to R.W. Richardson in a $90,000 deal, in which he was given a 40-acre orange grove next to his Santa Ysabel property. A $20,000 mortgage was taken into account with the transaction, as well, while the paper noted that “Chapman . . . will make extensive improvements to the latest addition to his Fullerton ranch.”
Another exchange was consummated in September 1917 in which the Exchange Building on 3rd and Hill in the Angel City, which he purchased a couple of years before, was traded with the Red Mountain Fruit Company, which assumed an existing $200,000 mortgage, but also gave Chapman a 1,705-acre ranch called the Tinnemaha near Bishop in eastern California and said to be worth $230,000. The Register of the 7th remarked that Chapman planned to improve the water system and cultivate large sections of the ranch, which had alfalfa and corn fields as well as was stocked with cattle.
In April 1919, Chapman, who was part of a group called the Fullerton Home Builders during this period, and Edward K. Benchley, who moved to Fullerton in 1893 and succeeded Chapman as mayor a little over a decade later while developing much property in town with his son William taking over much of that work and another Frank, an architect, designing various structures, acquired the southeast corner of Spadra Road (Harbor Boulevard) and Whiting Avenue for what was described as another hotel project. Again, we’ll pick up this thread later, but, at the dawn of 1920, a company was formed to build a Spanish Colonial Revival hotel there and included Benchley, Chapman and several other Fullerton luminaries.
We’ve made some mention of Chapman’s budding interest in oil in this post and the Register of 11 August 1916 informed readers that,
Indicating that the Standard Oil Company [of California, now Chevron] is contemplating extending its oil operation closer into the city of Fullerton is the apparently well founded report that the Standard is dickering to renew its lease on property owned by C.C. Chapman in the northern part of the city and that it is preparing to renew operations on an abandoned lease within a quarter of a mile of the city water reservoir [this within what became Hillcrest Park].
Though some prospecting was conducted by the oil giant, the work was suspended, though the latest news raised hopes among those living near both sites. The 22 May 1917 number of the paper reported that Union Oil Company, another major firm, sent a field manager and head of the geological and land department to “set a stake on new territory which is leased from C.C. Chapman at Richfield, the stake marking the location for a test well.
Richfield was an area just east of Placentia city limits, though now part of that burg, and the paper remarked that “the Union is showing its faith in the possibility of getting something good at Richfield and if successful will open up a new and vast oil area, extending the Fullerton field eastward [and south from Olinda, a part of the broader field] several miles.” This section, however, was considered “new and untried” at least until March 1919.
It was then, as we observed early in this post, that the stunning news came that, on 11 March, the Union hit it big with Chapman #1, considered the second major development in Orange County oil history after the opening of Olinda more than two decades prior. The Register of the following day gushed that “a great new oil territory was opened up in Orange County” with a “Wild Cat” well that tapped a deposit yielding from 3,000 to 6,000 barrels daily.
The site was thought to be inconsequential “as no oil has been found in the district before,” but, with the surprise find, “millionaires are in the making overnight,” though Chapman already was one before this latest bounty came. The paper provided the interesting little detail that “the well is practically in the old bed of the Santa Ana river, about midway between Richfield and Placentia,” the location being about where Alta Vista Street and Rose Drive meet near the Alta Vista Country Club, and it recorded,
The gusher created intense excitement. The roar could be heard for miles as the well came in, so strongly it blew the top off the drilling rig. People for miles around hastened to the place in automobiles, as eager to see the big oil show as they would be to see a circus. After blowing for several hours the well was capped, and it is now fully under control.
Obviously, Chapman “was an early arrival on the scene of action,” while neighboring landowner N. Frank Morse as well as Benchley and others sinking a well nearby were also on hand to see the wonder well. Significantly, the Union’s site manager remarked that “it may be that the country around our new well will bear oil, but there is always an element of doubt in anything connected with oil prospecting,” but there was a major Richfield oil yield in succeeding years and decades.
Chapman’s political presence was best manifested when he was elected to be a delegate to the Republican National Convention in Chicago, his former hometown, held from 7-10 June 1916. Just before the fall election, he introduced Governor Hiram Johnson, who was a candidate for the United States Senate, at a rally at Fullerton High School (such overt political events are now prohibited on school campuses), where support was also expressed for the G.O.P. presidential contender, former Supreme Court associate justice Charles Evans Hughes. Democratic incumbent Woodrow Wilson, however, narrowly secured reelection, while Johnson won his race and served 28 years in the Senate until his death in 1945.
In 1920, Chapman first lent his prestige for the candidacy of Herbert Hoover, who made his name nationally, though was widely known in California as the former president of Stanford University (and whose wife grew up in Whittier), for the Republican nomination for president. When, however, the efforts of Ohio Senator Warren Harding gained steam, Chapman switched his support.
The 14 June edition of the Register quoted the “Orange King” as stating that “I have been favorable to him all along, and now the thing to do is get in and elect him” while he added that, at the 1916 convention, he “was impressed with the bigness of the man then—he towered head and shoulders above any of the other men he introduced.” While Harding secured the nomination and stormed to victory in the fall election, no one was prepared for how scandal-ridden the administration was prior to Harding’s death in office in August 1923.
With America’s entry, in Spring 1917, in the First World War on the side of the Allies against Germany, Chapman became the chair of the local draft board district, with the first summonses issued early in August, while also speaking against the enemy and its propaganda about German superiority. A month later, at a draftee gathering, he opined that the meeting was one of the most important in county history and he praised Wilson for seeking to remain neutral “but he had to go into the conflict to protect our country and our ideals.”
Chapman, who purchased some $100,000 in Liberty Bonds sold to finance the American war mobilization while his wife Clara volunteered with the American Red Cross, cited the American Revolution, the Civil War (in which his brother Frank fought for the Union) and the Spanish-American War and told the drafted men “you are about to enter upon the most splendid experience of your life” and added that, while the German Army was “the most efficient enemy on earth,” it was to be understood that “the American soldier with Old Glory floating over him can never be successfully met.”
When confronting those requesting exemptions for service, often because they owned or worked on local groves, farms and orchards, Chapman could be pointed in his remarks, including suggesting that owners of such property hire help rather than seek to keep their sons at home. The Register of 12 February 1918 quoted him as telling one such applicant, “why would you want to stay on a farm when you can go to war, see the world and help kill the enemy.” Two weeks later, the paper published this commentary:
How will the boys who remained at home feel when the boys who went to war come home? If we don’t down Germany, our ranches won’t amount to much. We have all got to make sacrifices. I’d like mighty well to have my boy at home, just as your folks would like to have you at home, but my boy is in France, and he belongs in France, not at home.
Stanley Chapman tried to volunteer and secure an officer’s commission, but was rejected for an unstated physical condition. Undaunted, he worked his way into shape, even having an operation done to correct some issue, so that he enlisted, was admitted to an officer training camp and was given a second lieutenant commission; he mustered out in 1919 as a captain after two years in the American Expeditionary Force that decisively turned the tide in the war, which ended the prior November.
As the war neared its end, the elder Chapman took the opportunity, as the fall state and national midterm elections were also approaching, to push a long-held issue of protective tariffs for farmers, growers and ranchers and to rail against free trade, as he argued was promoted by the Democrats. The Register of 25 October cited the Riverside Press, which quoted him as positing that, in words that are of interest to us now almost 110 years later:
The only way that California can make her voice heard in favor of maintaining so far as possible American standards of living, by protecting our industries and our labor from injurious foreign competition, is at the ballot box. The election of the Republican state ticket headed by Governor [William D.] Stephens [Johnson’s successor], will proclaim to the world that California stands for the Republican principle of protection to American industries and homes.
Another brief mention earlier in this post concerned Chapman’s key role in getting the Berkeley Bible College, formed under another name in 1861 and under severe financial strain and some controversy, to move to Los Angeles and rechristened as the California Christian College for the education of ministers in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ.)
His $400,000 donation, subject to matching, in 1919 was, undoubtedly made much more possible by his new oil riches, and the campus opened on Vermont Avenue in Los Angeles across from the Southern Branch of the University of California, later U.C.L.A, though Fullerton lobbied to be the location.
As mentioned above, we’ll return in a couple of months to continue with more of Chapman’s life and work, featuring two 1927 issues of the college magazine from our collection, but we’ll close this post with the Plain Dealer of 30 September 1920, following Chapman’s deal to buy the Los Angeles Investment Company Building, and its editorial page piece, “An Orange County Fortune.”
The paper informed readers that “Mr. Chapman’s career in this county is a notable example of what may reasonably be expected from the application of good judgment and energy to the opportunity to be found in this county.” Yet, when interviewed by the Plain Dealer, Chapman stated that he came to this area a quarter century or so earlier “for family reasons, because of the impaired health of one of us.” While it was true his first wife, Elizabeth, died of tuberculosis months after they migrated here in 1894, nothing was said of the Vendome Club Hotel debacle, while Chapman mentioned he was “owner of a considerable job printing plant.”
The “Orange King” reviewed his California years and his citriculture success, while allowing that “in a way, that oil development just fell in on me of itself,” though he claimed he “suspected there might be oil there from the indications” as did the prior owner, Joseph Mesmer.” He succinctly summed up his experience by generalizing that, “opportunities are just as many in So. Calif. as ever—more so, though he added that he counseled friends to acquire real estate, even if meant encumbering debt, as “there is many a neighbor and friend of mine who followed that advice and is now living at ease with a garage full of motor cars.”
Chapman’s career is highly impressive, spanning a wide range of industries and businesses. What stands out most is not only the breadth of his endeavors, but also the depth of his working knowledge and the exceptional level of performance he achieved in each field.
Equally noteworthy is the branding power of “Sunkist,” which has represented quality oranges for over a century and continues to be well maintained today.