by Paul R. Spitzzeri
On this day a half-dozen years ago, a post here featured a 6 April 1872 Temple and Workman bank check written by and made out to Frederick Lambourn, who served as a tutor and foreman for the Workman family at Rancho La Puente for roughly 15 years. While some of Lambourn’s history was related there, as well as in posts involving the June 1874 lynching of Jesús Romo near the Workman Mill and Lambourn’s receiving 40 acres on the ranch from his employer as recorded in a June 1870 map, there is more of his story to tell.
Lambourn (sometimes spelled Lambourne) was born the fourth of ten children to Levi and Anna Ellen Hunt on 7 January 1837 on a farm near Canterbury, the well-known city and UNESCO World Heritage Site in the county of Kent in the southeastern portion of England. Levi was a farmer to the north of the town, but decided to migrate the family to the United States and traveled first with Frederick (listed as Edward on the ship manifest) from Liverpool to New York City, arriving on 12 October 1849.
It may be that Levi had some connections to his new home, which was near the town of Wenona in Marshall County, Illinois, northeast about some 45 miles of Peoria, and in early May 1850, Anna and the rest of the children made their trip over. In September, ten days after California was admitted to the Union, the family was enumerated at their new home.
Tragedy soon struck, however, as a son, David, died at the end of August 1851 and Anna, in giving birth to a son, Benjamin, became ill and died early in 1852. Levi married Ireland native Mary Doyle in 1856, but, by that time, Frederick was pursuing an education. A biographical sketch from the early 20th century stated that his schooling began in England and continued in Illinois, but added that “the death of his mother . . . broke up the old home and he started out in the world for himself.”
This meant stints at Granville Academy, in the town of that name around 25 miles northwest of Wenona and then Judson College (we’ll see repetition of that name in Lambourn’s life) at Mount Palatine, some ten miles closer to his home. Lastly, Lambourn attended Eureka College, near Peoria and best known as the alma mater of President Ronald Reagan, with the biography remarking that “he had been a leader in debates and literary exercises.”
It is unclear if Lambourn graduated from Eureka, but the sketch stated that “within eight miles” of the campus, the young man “engaged in teaching school until failing health rendered a change imperative,” subsequently commenting that he’d been afflicted with typhoid fever. On 1 April 1859, the 22-year old traveled southwest on the Illinois River, which empties into the Mississippi River northwest of St. Louis, from where he traveled west and ended up at Atchison, Kansas (the birthplace of aviation legend Amelia Earhart).
Lambourn joined an emigrant party heading across the plains with it noted that “the objective point of the party was Pike’s Peak” in Colorado, where a gold rush (a decade after that in California) was in full ferment. As the group headed in that direction, however, they met many heading back east who related tales of “hardships, suffering and disappointment” in Colorado, so “these stories caused the party to decide to go to California via Salt Lake.” By then, Lambourn, who carried medicines with him because of his illness, was restored to health by “the fresh, pure, balmy air” along the route.
When the migrants reached Salt Lake City, they disbanded and Lambourn remained for some weeks “enjoying the civilization of that city” before he found another group heading southwest along the Mormon Trail, part of which was along the Old Spanish Trail that the Workmans utilized nearly two decades before when migrating from Taos, New Mexico to Los Angeles. Lambourn’s group made landfall at San Bernardino, but he went on to El Monte, founded earlier in the Fifties, by Americans largely from the South. The bio related,
He reached his destination with just ten cents, the price of postage in those days for a letter east, and he immediately forwarded to those at home the joyful news of his safe arrival in California. He at once secured employment at driving oxen, for which he was paid $1 per day and board. Next he ploughed with mules for thirty days. He then rented a tract of ground and planted it with corn. When the crop was laid by he filled out a term for a teacher in El Monte, in which way he secured a start.
The 1860 census, taken at the San Gabriel Valley town in mid-July, recorded Lambourn, as a farm laborer living in the household of William B. Lee, whom we have briefly discussed relating to his killing of a man over a property dispute and whose estate was auctioned off by William Workman in order to raise funds for legal fees (someday we’ll have to offer a post about Lee).
It may be that Lambourn completed the 1859-1860 school year as a temporary teacher and then returned to his farm work, with the biographical sketch continuing that “his next position was with William Workman, first as private tutor for his grandchildren and then as superintendent of his ranch.” One of Lambourn’s pupils was John H. Temple (1856-1926), who left a detailed description of his grandparents’ house, still with us at the Homestead, including mention of the school room in a long-gone wing of adobe rooms on the west side of the dwelling.
Unfortunately, we don’t have anything substantial about Lambourn’s teaching tenure at the Workman school, though we know he was the third instructor, following an unnamed woman and Thomas Scully, who went on to marry into the Yorba family of northeastern Orange County. In June 1867, Lambourn became an American citizen and the earliest located example acting in a managerial capacity for William Workman is from an advertisement taken out on the first day of 1869 in which he offered the same of 150,000 pounds of seed barley from La Puente.
It was during the last half of the Sixties that Workman, who survived the terrible conditions of floods and droughts during the first five years of the decade with losses of a few thousand cattle, pivoted toward agriculture. This included expanding his field crops of wheat and barley, adding to an existing vineyard, and the construction of a mill to grind the former and wineries to process the grapes into wine and brandy.
Lambourn’s value, both for his teaching and for supervising ranch activities, was readily apparent shortly afterward, as, in June 1870, as noted above, Workman had a map of a portion of his vast holdings of more than 24,000 acres at La Puente drawn up. In a section at the north end, probably bordering Big Dalton Wash, to which there was reliable access to water, and likely along part of the border of modern Baldwin Park and West Covina north of Interstate 10 and perhaps close to where Puente and Pacific avenues meet now, the aging ranchero deeded the 40 acres to Lambourn.
The gift was also mentioned in Workman’s will, which was drafted in October, though it is unclear how much use or development Lambourn undertook with his tract. Not mentioned in his biography, obituaries or virtually anywhere else was his relationship with María Claudio Duarte, whose father Andrés was owner of the Rancho Duarte de Azusa, a short distance northwest of La Puente, and whose mother was a Cahuilla Indian whose name has not been located thus far.
Fascinatingly, a descendant recorded in Lambourn’s Find-A-Grave listing that,
Maria met Frederick while working at a home for orphaned Indian children run by Mrs. Workman. Mrs. Workman hired her to do chores and look after the orphans. One of Maria’s granddaughters claimed Fred and Maria married in the Catholic church. However, Maria gave a sworn statement to the Los Angeles County court in 1890, that her daughter Margarita was the illegitimate offspring of Frederick Lambourn. No record of their marriage has been found. Between 1868 and 1874, Maria and Fred had 4 children – John, Frank, Victoria and Margarita – but they separated after Margarita was born. Fred gave Maria his ranch farmhouse as well as 120 acres of land to keep her and his children together. Maria continued the cooking, washing and caring for Indian children on the La Puente ranch . . . According to Maria’s granddaughter, every week or so Fred brought wagonloads of supplies, included sacks of potatoes, beans, flour, sugar, and coffee, from his business to Maria Claudio and the children. This support stopped when Maria Claudio met Francisco Martinez and became pregnant with Nicolasa, Francisco’s child . . . DNA matches to descendants of Fred Lambourn and Maria Claudio prove this history.
Nicolasa Urioste Workman (1802-1892), William’s wife, was born in Taos, New Mexico and the fact that she baptized their children, Margarita and José, in the Roman Catholic Church in the Indian pueblo there, whereas William, in converting from the Church of England, was baptized in the “European” church at the south end of town, close to where the family resided.
The reference to Nicolasa working with orphaned indigenous children and having María Claudio help with this is remarkable and, while it was kept virtually hidden, Lambourn’s relationship with her was anything but uncommon, including having the four children together. The statement mentioned that there was a farm house and it is significant to note that the Los Angeles Express of 15 November 1877, in its “Property Transfers” section, listed “F Lambourn to Maria Claudio—40 acres of Rancho La Puente; $2500.”
So, while there wasn’t a gift and the transaction was for the 40 acres deed by Workman, rather than 120, the timing of the 1877 sale corresponds with the account, especially as Margarita Lambourn was born on 23 February 1876. The other children, as listed in the 1880 census under Martinez, were Julian (Workman’s Spanish-language name), Francisco (perhaps named after F.P.F. Temple, husband of Margarita Workman), Victoria, and, of course, Margarita (who may have been named for the Workmans’ daughter). In a 1928 census of indigenous persons, Margarita and Victoria were listed as half-Cahuilla.
When a store was opened at the Workman Mill, the miller, William F. Turner, who’d been running that enterprise following his father, John, who took over management when the mill was constructed in the late 1860s, operated the mercantile establishment, as well. His partner was Lambourn, who continued, however, with his supervisory responsibilities for Workman’s portion of La Puente.
The store was robbed in early June 1874 and Turner wounded by the knife-wielding intruder, while his wife, Rebecca (née, Humphreys) was shot in the shoulder by the couple’s gun when she dropped it and the assailant seized the weapon, leading to her miscarrying the couple’s child. A manhunt ensued and Jesús Romo was found hiding along the banks of the nearby San Gabriel River. During the capture, he was shot and seriously wounded and, when a local constable began taking the prisoner to jail in Los Angeles, a trio of masked men seized Romo and lynched him from a tree.
If the identities of the lynchers was known at the time, it was kept out of the press, though the vigilantes did communicate with the media, even threatening former Governor Pío Pico, a close friend of Workman, when he protested the killing of his former employee. When Rebecca Turner wrote her memoirs about a half-century later and this published by a daughter in 1960, she revealed that those who extralegally hung Romo were El Monte merchant Jacob Schlessinger, Walter Drown (who was a ward of Workman and raised with the Temples), and Lambourn, who she said, growled that he wanted Romo to die quickly.
Very shortly afterward, Lambourn formed a legal partnership with Alejo Rendon, a barber who counted Workman as a long-time customer, to keep the mill store operating and with Rendon handling day-to-day duties. The enterprise did not last particularly long, as we’ll see, but Lambourn soon returned to the mercantile business, which we’ll explore in the next part of this post.
Around this time, Lambourn developed an interest in politics. While his father was a Whig, the party that collapsed after the 1852 presidential election and was replaced by the new Republican Party, Lambourn, at some point, became a Democrat, an affiliation he shared with his boss. In 1873, the La Puente foreman announced his candidacy for the California Assembly, but when the Democratic county convention was held toward the end of June, Lambourn was just one vote shy of securing the party’s nomination for one of the two district seats—the largest vote-getter was William H. Workman, nephew of Lambourn’s employer, though he lost in the general election in early September.
Two years later, though, Lambourn entered the lists again. When the Democrats held their county convention in early August 1875, among the delegates were William Workman’s son Joseph, from the El Monte contingent, and nephew Elijah (brother of William H.) from Los Angeles. There were a half-dozen names put forward as potential Assembly candidates, though declined to continue and the always-colorful former attorney, Edward J.C. Kewen, who resided at the Mission San Gabriel’s Old Mill in modern San Marino, a property once owned by William Workman, made some interesting and characteristically colorful comments, as paraphrased by the Los Angeles Herald of 5 August:
Col. Kewan [sic] said the candidates were here for the purposes of exhibition. It was a kind of menagerie. He had never failed to show himself before any crowd and certainly not before a Democratic convention. He had not been a candidate for the office, he had not announced or proclaimed his name, but his friends had for him . . . Though he had abandoned the law and politics, yet he was under so many obligations to the party that he could not decline any nomination. The Independent party [of which F.P.F. Temple was a repeat candidate for county treasurer, having narrowly lost in 1873] was only another name, a shadow, for Republicanism. If opportunity offered to draw the lion’s skin off the Independent party, he would expose the animal that brays beneath the skin. The Democratic party had done him so many favors that if elected he would be no sleeping sentinel, but do his duty to the party.
For his part, Lambourn was more sanguine and, apparently, safe, as the Herald merely reported that he told the conventioneers “he was a tyro in politics,” that is, a novice, “and had no burse of eloquence to give, but would accept the Democratic platform.” When the ballot was taken, Lambourn polled the highest of the four candidates, with John R. McConnell, California’s fourth attorney general—Kewen was the first—finishing just behind and securing a nomination. Kewen received the fewest votes of the quarter.
When the election was held on 1 September, the day the Temple and Workman bank suspended business following a run by depositors as a financial panic engulfed California and with the institution’s president, F.P.F. Temple, winning the county treasurer’s race as the only Independent/Republican to claim victory that day, McConnell and Lambourn outpolled their rivals by about 900 and 750 votes, respectively.
Having won election to the legislature, the biography noted, “after fourteen years with the same employer [Lambourn] resigned to accept a position as member of the state assembly, in 1875-76.” Unlike today, the California legislature only met biennially in that period, so Lambourn was part of the 21st session, which convened from 6 December 1875 to 3 April 1876. When we return with part two, we’ll pick up the story from there.
Thank you for a well written article.
Hi Teresa, we appreciate your interest and hope you enjoy the rest of the post.