by Paul R. Spitzzeri
Alfred Beck Chapman’s prominence as an orange grower, which looks to have begun when he lived in East Los Angeles, now the Lincoln Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles, but ramped up significantly when he moved to his portion of the Rancho Santa Anita at the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains in the San Gabriel Valley.
As we saw in part four, the first half of the 1880s was when Chapman rose to be the largest citrus orchardist in the region and the state of California, becoming a recognized authority with leadership positions in agricultural organizations, as well as among the first in his industry to ship large volumes of fruit by rail as far as New York City.
Another important element of his rise in success was the onset of the Boom of the Eighties, which was largely manifested by the completion of a direct transcontinental railroad line, by the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe, from the east. Not only was the shipment of agricultural products more easily effected, but competition, with the Southern Pacific dominating regional railroading from the previous decade, was developed.
Before we delve more deeply into Chapman’s agricultural ascendancy, a few other items are worth nothing. One has to do with his continuing interest in real estate during the decade, including a sheriff’s sale in spring 1881 following a May 1879 foreclosure on a loan he made to Don Pío Pico, the last governor of Mexican California and whose remains are in the Walter P. Temple Memorial Mausoleum in El Campo Santo Cemetery at the Homestead.
The sale comprised a half-dozen properties, including more than 200 acres south of Los Angeles along San Pedro Street near Jefferson and Washington streets and which Pico acquired from María Francisca Mendez de Fraijo; portions of the Rancho San Rafael, one of California’s first land grants, dating to 1784, and in what is now the City of Glendale; nearly 2,100 acres of the Rancho ex-Mission San Fernando called the “Pico Reservation” and including orchard and vineyard land adjacent to that mission; a lot in the town of San Fernando, founded in 1874 from the rancho lands; and any interest from Pico’s late brother, Andrés (who also had interests in the ex-mission properties) in the Rancho El Encino, also in the San Fernando Valley.
Two years later, Chapman and his sisters, Anne and Mary, sold a valuable lot at the southwest corner of Spring and 5th streets in downtown Los Angeles, which would expand greatly during the subsequent boom, for $5,000 to Isaac N. Van Nuys (who, in 1869 with Isaac Lankershim, bought Pico lands in the San Fernando Valley, which they developed as valuable wheat-growing property). Two decades later, the lot was developed into the Angel City’s most luxurious hotel, the Alexandria, the building still with us today.
It was briefly mentioned in part four that Chapman, merchant Benjamin F. Coulter and others purchased the Arrowhead Springs resort property in San Bernardino, following the burning of the hotel built there in the mid-1860s, and the company they formed undertook the erecting of a new hostelry there.
In August 1887, Chapman joined four others in creating the Barton Land and Water Company, which established the town of Barton on the ranch of that name. Benjamin Barton and his family settled in El Monte in 1854 after coming overland from El Paso, Texas, and then purchased land on the Rancho San Bernardino from the Mormons after a recall of Latter Day Saints by Church President Brigham Young.
Barton’s son Hiram, recently elected to the California Assembly and later mayor of San Bernardino, was a director while Chapman assumed the presidency of the development firm. The “Celebrated Barton Ranch” was the site of a “choice investment” with the 1,150 acres “conceded by all to be the cream of the orange growing section of Southern California.”
The town of Barton was immediately north of Redlands, where Ben Barton’s 1860s brick house still stands, and west of “beautiful Lugonia.” As with many Boom of the Eighties towns, however, it came to nothing, though, aside from the house, there is a Barton Road running east to west from Redlands to Grand Terrace, several miles to the west.
Some other items of note includes Chapman’s participation in a mid-January 1884 meeting at the Sierra Madre Villa hotel, located near his Santa Anita property, as Abbot Kinney, or nearby Kinneloa and later founder of the seaside town of Venice, Charles C. Hastings (the northeast Pasadena neighborhood of Hastings Ranch was his property), and others discussed the founding of “an institution of learning of a high order, to be located somewhere in Los Angeles county.”
Asserting that it was to be “on the highest plane of scientific and classical learning, affording a full scope for physical, mental and moral culture, and free from any peculiar ecclesiasticism,” it appears that the college concept was to be Presbyterian. In 1887, Occidental College was established in what was called Boyle Heights, but was just east of the Los Angeles city boundary in what would later be Belvedere and then East Los Angeles.
Speaking again of East Los Angeles, there were some late Eighties references, including a 3 November 1889 mention in the Los Angeles Times that “probably the oldest landmark” there was the farm house built by Hancock M. Johnston and that, when Chapman bought it at the end of 1875, “the house was improved and the grounds beautified.”
The same day’s number of the Los Angeles Herald covered some of this, as well, and added that Chapman’s sale of the house and 12 acres to Tombstone, Arizona copper mining magnate Edward Schieffelin was “a very large price” at $21,000. The latter, whose father occupied the place, however, “got the best of the bargain” because “within four years the Schieffelins cut the twelve acres into lots and sold a portion off for probably $50,000,” with the 70 lots in the tract, without improvements, said to be worth some $75,000 in late 1889, after the boom went bust.
Another look back that year was in the Herald of 4 March and which took readers back to the region’s first boom starting in the late 1860s. In discussing various developments throughout greater Los Angeles at that time, the paper recorded that “the Messrs. Andrew G. [sic] Glassell and A.B. Chapman bought from the Yorbas another large slice of the Santa Ana ranch, for which they paid somewhere between 62 1/2 cents and $1.50 an acre.” Land in the area in 1889, the year Orange County was carved out of the southeastern portion of Los Angeles County, might fetch from $30-60 an acre.
Chapman’s horticultural efforts during the boom included his taking part, in early 1887, in shipping fruit on a “Santa Fe Orange Train,” said to be “the first fast orange special train for this season” as a dozen cars carried citrus for him and five others, including the Santa Ana Fruit Company and Edwin T. Earl, who would go on to create a refrigerated box car that helped revolutionize agricultural rail shipments. The route was along the Santa Fe subsidiary California Southern’s rails to Barstow, another one called the Atlantic and Pacific to Albuquerque and the Santa Fe from that point east. The Times of 28 January remarked,
The managers [of the Santa Fe] seem to be fully alive to the importance of the fruit business in Southern California, and fruit growers and shippers are profuse in their expressions of gratitude for the energy displayed. It has much lessened the time to Kansas City via this route [which was 500 miles shorter than previous ones], and hence decreases liability to frost and heat. Only two years ago most of the fruit was transported in common box or combination cars, and losses by frost and heat were heavy and discouraging. Last season, fruit-cars for considerable over 50 per cent of the business were furnished. This year the entire crop can be handled in improved fruit or Tiffany cars . . . Therefore it will be readily seen that they have the advantage in regard to time and the jarring of fruit while in transit.
Chapman’s concerns about the cultivation of his citrus continued to lead him to emphasize materials and techniques that were at the forefront of horticulturists (though, as we saw in part four, his experiments with sulfur did not work out well). The 3 April edition of the Herald found him talking to a reporter and observing that, “I am not doing much to fight the scale [a condition caused by pests], except in the way of fertilizers.”
He added that “I am putting plenty of strength in the land [soil], which will go into the trees and support them in spite of the ravages of the destroying parasite.” The grower believed that the pests were vanishing as there were fewer than in recent seasons, although he acknowledged “there are still enough of them to make a very formidable and very dangerous enemy to this most profitable of our industries.”
Chapman continued by offering his view that the best means for dealing with scale was to find parasites that would kill the pests, noting that “we are pretty wide awake in matters of agriculture, but we are blind from an entomological point of view” and “one open eye will not do.” A massive investment in propagating the parasite was required and he felt there should be a half-dozen experts in California and more than one in Australia to help develop a plan, concluding “if this were done vigorously, it would not require much time to rid us of the pest.”
The state of California did increasingly invest in experimental agricultural stations, with the University of California a major factor, in all manner of study and programs to aid farmers and growers in following decades. A week later, the Times reported that Chapman was appointed to the state Board of Horticulture to replace a member who’d resigned.
In July, Chapman was involved, perhaps because of his service on the board, in a notable project related to the use of gas fumigation, with the Herald of the 11th informing readers,
The experiment was made upon trees in the orchard of Mr. A.B. Chapman at San Gabriel. It did not work satisfactorily on the first trial. Professor Morse returned to the university, and after further study concluded that he would try his method again. He is now making additional experiments on Mr. Chapman’s place, and this time he seems to have mastered the difficulties he before encountered.
The process involved tenting of trees and saturation of leaves with a combination of chemicals and “it is found that the scales have all been killed,” though it was unclear whether all of the eggs were destroyed, so it was thought the retreatment at the time when these were hatching would be crucial.
The paper added that “Mr. Chapman is greatly impressed with the effective value of this method of eradication, and believes that it will prove successful.” Previous methods included washing trees with whale oil soap and other materials, the application of which was “laborious, irksome and disgusting,” while the cost was determined to be about fifty cents per tree and, if fumigation worked, “it will prove in the end much cheaper than the washing method.” More experimentation was in the works, however.
As noted above, Chapman was also a major proponent of intensive fertilization for his grove and the Herald of the 10th referred to this as it observed that “the deterioration in yield and in the quality of fruit of some of our old orange orchards has been the subject of surprise to a few superficial observers.” The use of “superficial” was because there was apparently some thinking that “the richest soil could not become exhausted by constant depletion,” even if “some of our orchards have been yielding large crops for twenty or thirty year[s]”—in the case of the Wolfskill grove in downtown Los Angeles, California’s first commercial orchard dated back to 1841.
Moreover, the paper remarked that “fertilization has never been considered necessary” even as some citrus growers learned that “nature, even here, has limits to her possibilities.” But, it noted, “the more advanced orchardists are renovating their impoverished lands with composts, and those who are wise enough to secure the most approved fertilizers are the ones who are raising the best quality of oranges and gathering in the largest crops,” adding,
Mr. A.B. Chapman, of San Gabriel, last year fertilized five acres of trees with imported bone-dust [bone meal], and he was well rewarded by the size of the yield and the improved quality of the fruit. His experience, and that of others, shows that we shall hereafter require to fertilize in order to make the old orchards keep up to their former standard.
The Herald concluded by calling for a local bone meal factory because much of these ground animal bones were being shipped to San Francisco and then to Hawaii for depleted sugar cane fields, so it was considered critical “to encourage the establishment here of an industry that is so necessary to the continued success of one of our leading interests,” this, of course, being the citrus industry.
The value of oranges was such that the 1 July number of the paper cited Chapman as telling another orchardist to not sell his property for $1,000 an acre because, after importing bone meal from the east for that five-acre section, “I cleaned the trees thoroughly, and kept them in the highest state of cultivation all the year.”
When he sold the fruit and calculated the expenses and revenues from those five acres, he found “the trees netted me $2500, or $500 an acre,” so that “that orchard so treated is worth $5000 per acre.” Allowing for $1,000 an acre to prepare an orchard as Chapman had done, the land was worth $4,000 an acre on a tract said to have the best soil, plenty of water and the region’s fabled climate.
Chapman was chair of a May 1888 gathering of the regional orange growers’ association, with about 30 persons present “and all took a deep interest in the discussions on pests.” There was a consensus on sending someone to Australia to research what was being done along these lines Down Under “and to arrange for the extermination of the pests, if such a thing is possible.”
Four growers, including John R. Dobbins and another lawyer, George Patton, also of the San Gabriel district were appointed to look into the matter, while Chapman was tasked with developing questions for Europeans in orange-raising areas through State Department officials “for a report as to the remedies for the destruction of insect pests.” Also discussed was a promising “preparation for sprinkling trees,” presumably with a chemical concoction, though no details were provided.
The 14 October number of the Herald reported that,
Mr. A.B. Chapman, the well known orange grower, made a test two seasons ago which is significant. He selected five acres in one of his orchards and he gave especial attention to them. He enriched the ground with lime dust, kept it well cultivated, and did everything his experience suggested to keep his trees in the healthiest possible condition. At the end of the season he realized from five to six hundred dollars an acre from the orange crop of those five acres!
What the takeaway was, the paper commented, was that prior practice of large-scale cultivation was not the best financially, as “the smaller the orchard to each individual proprietor (within reasonable limits, of course,) the greater will be the returns.” What mattered most was proper care and a grower with 10-20 acres would do far better than one with a much larger orchard, but who “cannot possibly give it his undivided attention.” Not mentioned was that Chapman had the largest grove in California, however.
At the end of March 1889, reported the Herald of the 26th, “perhaps never in the history of Los Angeles county has there been planted anything like so many trees as during this Spring,” this including apples, apricots, pears and plums. It was added that, “the planting of orange trees has been resumed on a gigantic scale” so that every tree that could be purchased was in the ground.
The paper suggested that “those who have proper soil, a good climate and plenty of water, can make no mistake in planting orange trees.” What would be a problem was growing anything else under such optimal conditions because “there is no horticultural proposition that pays to the extent that orange growing does” and, as a proof, the article concluded,
Mr. A.B. Chapman is on record as saying that land suitable in all respects to this industry in small subdivisions of five acres can be made to pay $500 per acre and upwards, and that such land in the raw state, with a well-established water right, is worth $2,000 per acre.
We’ll conclude this part five with a description of “the beautiful town of Orange,” which Chapman and his former law partner, Andrew Glassell, ably assisted by the latter’s brother, William, until his death in 1876, from the Herald of 15 April 1887. The paper recorded that, initially after the 1871 founding of what was first called Richland, orange growing there was limited because of a lack of availability and the high cost of those trees that could be obtained, but conditions improved after a few trees were successfully raised from the 1873 vintage.
From the mid-Seventies, the account continued, “steadily the orchards and vineyards stretched over the plain, till the grand Damascus-like town of Orange [Syria was a prime area for the Jaffa variety that, as noted earlier in this post, Chapman imported in 1879], rich in all that humanity needs from the bosom of nature, is now displayed in beautiful garments of green and gold, and the air made voluptuously sweet by the fragrance of flowers.”
The Herald proclaimed that, thanks in no small part to the acquisition in 1877 of interests in a ditch constructed by the Santa Ana Valley Irrigation Company and the resulting “grand water supply,”
Orange has taken no step backward. The houses have been improved and made beautiful, lawns, yards and gardens have been planted and tended with the utmost care.
In 1878, with vineyards planted in large amounts, wine-making “began in a moderate way” so that, after nearly a decade, some 300,000 gallons were produced each year (though the annihilation of Pierce’s, or Anaheim, disease would soon ravage these and almost every other vineyard in greater Los Angeles,) while raisin production was also significant, comprising some 200,000 boxes annually and a quarter million expected for 1887.
A depot of the Southern Pacific Railroad was opened on 2 February 1886 and a chart for the first five months of activity, including for trees, oranges, honey and raisins, was included, while the Santa Fe was at work “making a new line between the town center, and the Southern Pacific line.” Moreover, a streetcar line was completed to Santa Ana and would soon embrace nearby settlements, including at McPherson, to the east beyond what is now the 55 Freeway, the Quaker community of Earlham where El Modena is today and south to Tustin.
The account continued that Orange had a bank, “fine and elegant schoolhouses,” a pair of hotels and five churches, with the orange groves and apricot orchards such as to “present a beautiful appearance,” while it was remarked that “it is also noticeable that in a drive about the town there is seldom a sign of property for sale.” The piece ended with,
The settlers seem to be content with their locality, as well they may be; for many towns might be visited in all parts of California without finding so charming a place for homes as beautiful Orange.
Having concluded our look at Chapman’s life and work during the 1880s, we’ll come back next with part six, so please join us then.
As noted in this post, Chapman purchased land from the Yorba family in the 1860s at just $0.625 to $1.50 per acre. Looking back, one might naturally ask: if land was so cheap, why didn’t many more people invest and make fortunes?
Chapman’s experience offers a simple but powerful three-phase lesson in how land value evolves:
1860s – 1870s: The land had negligible value
1880s: The land was cultivated to become productive
1890s: The land became highly valuable
We often like to attribute this kind of success to “vision.” But in reality, most people tend to follow the crowd rather than take the lead. If vision were easy to acquire and apply, people today would confidently say that a $1 million home is still cheap, knowing it could easily become $2 million in a decade or two. Yet very few would act on that belief.
In fact, I would argue that people like Chapman were not necessarily driven by extraordinary “vision,” but more likely they were driven by “necessity.” This pattern repeats itself everywhere: field farmers, dairy operators, and nursery owners hold land simply to make a living – and then, when development arrives, they suddenly become wealthy. Not because they had perfect “vision,” but because they were already positioned due to “necessity.”
Another path to real estate wealth is “opportunity.” History has shown this again and again such as the housing crash during the early 1990s savings and loan crisis, the 2008–2012 subprime collapse when property values dropped nearly 50%, and even today in major cities of China where new home prices have fallen more than half from their peak in 2021. These “opportunity” moments require nothing but “action.”
Thanks, Larry, for the comment and it is interesting to compare Chapman’s purchase of property in the 1860s with others of that time, including the Bixby family acquisition of Rancho Los Cerritos in 1866 for something like 50 cents an acre or James Irvine’s buying of land in what became Orange County and note in those cases the generational wealth that was established. How much of this was a certain amount of foresight, or vision, or luck/circumstance is a good question, but it certainly worked out well, if on varied levels, for these three examples.