by Paul R. Spitzzeri
Yesterday’s weather was about as perfect as it could be, around 70 degrees, for a hike, organized by the Tres Hermanos Conservation Authority, comprised of the cities of Chino Hills, Diamond Bar and Industry, to the historic ranch headquarters. As with the previous group of guided tours which drew several hundred people to learn about the history, plant and animal life and the dam and Arnold reservoir on the property, this was a stellar success with a reported 615 persons making the trek over the course of several hours in the morning and early afternoon.
The route from Grand Avenue Park in Chino Hills was about three miles round trip, much of it along Tonner Canyon Road, which is mostly an unpaved route from Chino Avenue in Diamond Bar at its northern terminus to the southern end at the 57 Freeway in Brea. So, this seems like an opportune time to provide some history of the road’s namesake, Patrick Charles Tonner (1844-1900).
The native of County Armagh, now part of Northern Ireland, southwest of Belfast, where he attended a Roman Catholic seminary, though, at age 16, the young man migrated to America to join an uncle and continue his education at a Jesuit college in Philadelphia. While it was the intention for Tonner to become a priest, a common vocation in his family, he and 26 other students abandoned their studies in 1863 to enlist in the Union Army as the nation was embroiled in the Civil War.
Before they could carry through with their plans, however, the group was intercepted and “the priests took Tonner away from the military authorities because of his tender age.” Shortly afterward, one story told it, the young man left the school, apparently because “the bishop up[b]raided him because he would not recant a heretical speech delivered to the student body just after he had taken a degree,” but it was confirmed that he never returned to classes after the failed enlistment scheme.
In any case, Tonner soon headed to California where two brothers lived and worked as miners in Grass Valley and Nevada City, as well as Virginia City, Nevada, but he had no interest in that field, so taught Greek and Latin at St. Mary’s College near San Francisco, as well as being a tutor at Marysville in the eastern part of the Golden State and in Monterey and Milpitas, the latter near Santa Clara. A newspaper in the coastal town of Santa Cruz reported that he was part of a Teachers’ Institute there in August 1868.
Tonner once told of how he became a stockbroker in San Francisco, the financial capital of California, and claimed to have earned $200,000, which, at that time, was a very large sum, though he added that “he lost everything in the space of a week” and left the Bay City with all $25 in his pocket. It was added that he had a brief journalistic stint with newspapers in San Francisco, as well, but,
He came to Los Angeles in 1869 and became connected with the law firm of [Volney E.] Howard & [E.J.C.] Kewen . . . Then he took a position as teacher in Los Nietos, near Downey, where he was married. A knowledge of Spanish gained in the college at Philadelphia, combined with a rare faculty of imparting learning and a love for children, made him a successful tutor.
Tonner was also a versifier and, in 1884, the Pomona Times published what he rather grandiosely called a “Descriptive, Retrospective and Prophetic” poem simply called “Los Angeles County, 1869.” A fairly substantial sample of his lengthy work may be of interest:
Great orchards clad in golden robes
Fair fields in robes of green,
With lillies lifting lovely lobes
Of drab and yellow sheen,
Surround us here on every side,
As though all nature came
To bring her tributary gifts,
To grace the angels’ name.
The orange with its dark green vest,
O’ershadows northern bloom;
The lime and lemon crowd apart
To yield the fig tree room;
The citron shades its saffron fruit
Beneath a dark green vest,
Beside the English walnut tree,
In English plainness dressed.
Thy mellow skies, Italia;
Thy beauties, famed Cashmere;
Thy fair fields, sweet Arcadia,
Are all out rivalled here.
The city of the angels’ queen
As far surpass you all
As Eastern beauty was excelled
By peerless Nourmahal [a reference to an 1817 poem].
But not alone the city fair,
Whose grandeur glads the view,
And boasts with pride, its beauty
Are all our praises due;
For fairest lands surround it,
And stretching far away,
From vine-clads fields of Anaheim,
To old San Pedro Bay . . .
[After paeans to his Los Nietos area and others]
But San Jose, sweet San Jose [the future Pomona],
Thou mountain valley fair,
Begirt by half a hundred hills,
Enthroned mid beauty rare,
Shall see thy towering domes arise
Where [Louis] Phillips herds his sheep,
And orange orchards yet shall stand
Where [Francisco] Vejar’s mustangs sweep.
The flocks of [one of the sons of Ygnacio] Palomares
Must seek some distant field;
His hog-trod, rich cienegas
The golden wheat shall yield . . .
The Indian for a thousand years
These lovely vales possessed;
The Spaniard for a century
The native people oppressed.
And now the blue-eyed Saxon,
From o’er the distant main,
With steady step is driving back
The dark-eyed race of Spain.
In 1869, Tonner was living and teaching at Los Nietos, for which he had admiring words in his poem, but he also seemed to be forecasting a future to the northeast, and an early local reference to him was when he took a teaching examination in early June 1870 and scored 90% for the second-grade (not a student level, but one for teachers) position.
In October, he participated in an annual Los Angeles County Teachers’ Institute, serving as secretary of the proceedings and listed as a teacher from the San Antonio district, this covering areas southeast of Los Angeles. The superintendent was William M. McFadden, with whom it appears that Tonner became quite close.
While he taught in that area for a couple of years and bought land there on the Rancho Santa Gertrudes in March 1872, two months later, Tonner purchased a tract of unspecified size from Robert S. Arnett, a resident of the town of Spadra, established about five years prior and now part of southwestern Pomona. The 11 May edition of the Los Angeles Star briefly remarked that,
Spadra is the place where friend [founder William W.] Rubottom keeps a first-class interior hotel, and serves up the biggest “boiled” dinners in the State. Egan & Blake, W.A. Humphreys, L. Phillips, P.C. Tonner, and Hon. F.M. Slaughter reside there . . . The place was named by Uncle [Billy] Rubottom after a place on the Arkansas River [in the state of that name] named Spadra.
It has been stated that, because of his facility in Spanish, Tonner was recruited to the Pomona Valley by Cyrus Burdick, one of the major figures in that east end of Los Angeles County at the time, to teach at the Palomares School, which covered modern Pomona, La Verne, San Dimas and Claremont and which then had mostly Spanish-speaking pupils, “among whom he became a great favorite.”
Additionally, Tonner’s teaching and other skills “gained the lifelong friendship, esteem and confidence of the Palomares family,” which settled, with the Vejar clan (who, however, lost most of their portion of the property in its southern half) , on the Rancho San José in 1837. His work was such that McFadden, after having stepped down as county school superintendent and then a resident of Anaheim, lavished praise on his colleague in a letter to the Los Angeles Herald, published in its 19 January 1874 edition:
From a letter received a few days ago from the Trustees of the Palomares School District, I learned that P.C. Tonner, who has been teaching there for the past three years has been re-employed, there not being a dissenting voice among the patrons of the school. The confidence the people of that district have in him as a teacher and a man, is a compliment highly to be prized.
The Herald of 28 February 1874 ran a feature that comprised remarks on a tour of several schools in the county and, when the Palomares was visited, the unnamed journalist commented, “I no [do] not believe Mr. Tonner has an equal [as a teacher]; he speaks the Spanish language fluently, and infuses his energy into the whole school so that not an idle scholar was visible in a school crowded to its utmost capacity.”
After noting that the scholars could easily translate back and forth in English and Spanish, the visitor praised the trustees, Francisco Palomares and Burdick, who earned the appreciation of the parents “for the faithful and careful manner that they have managed the affairs of the district.” The duo acquired two acres and donated another for the school and purchased lumber for fencing as well as ornamental trees, as well as furniture (desks and other items), leading the paper to conclude, “it were well if all school districts were as fortunate in securing Trustees who take such an active interest in the cause of education.”
In Tonner’s regular participation in the county’s teacher institutes, he delivered remarks, including one in March 1873 on “the subject of how to best to prepare students in common school for admission to [the] State University,” meaning the University of California in Berkeley, which opened its doors a half-decade earlier.
It would, undoubtedly, have been highly gratifying to him to see the opening of California Polytechnic University, Pomona, just a short distance from his Spadra home, when the land, largely on the Rancho San José, was given for that purpose in the late 1930s by cereal magnate Will Keith Kellogg.
Meanwhile, Tonner was an active force in establishing a local Grange chapter, that movement to protect the interests of farmers gaining major currency in the country during that period, as well as locally. He was also heavily involved in local Republican Party politics at a time when the Democrats dominated elections for close to 35 years.
In 1875, when adherents of the party thought it wiser to form a “People’s Independent Party,” Thomas A. Garey, of the newly founded town of Pomona, nominated F.P.F. Temple for county treasurer while Tonner made a motion that Temple be declared the nominee by acclamation at the party convention for the winner of the contest, the only non-Democrat to secure a local office that year. As we’ll see, there were close ties among the trio, though tragedy soon came that had profound effects for all involved.
It was earlier noted that, after coming to Los Angeles, Tonner studied with the prominent lawyers Kewen and Howard, though he continued his teaching career. In November 1875, however, he decided to take up the law again and was admitted to practice by County Judge Ygnacio Sepúlveda and left education, though certainly not abandoning his interests in it, to open his own office.
Lastly, Tonner’s long-standing penchant for property acquisition continued, as the first boom in greater Los Angeles, which began about the time he migrated there from the north in the late Sixties, continued well into 1875. When the Los Angeles Immigration and Land Cooperative Association was formed and initiated its first townsite development at Artesia, southeast of Los Angeles and not far from his former home at Los Nietos, Tonner jumped in to buy 55 acres for $2700 at an April 1875 auction and added more to it in August to the tune of $1200 more. The Los Angeles Express of 7 April commented:
Mr. P.C. Tonner, who was one of the largest buyers at yesterday’s sale, assured us that he went on the ground without any settled intention of purchasing; but when he saw the handsome schoolhouse [of course!], with its stately tower, he warmed toward the place, and insensibly fell into an irresistible desire to become the possessor of a portion of Artesia.
With that project apparently so successful, the company, including Garey, Luther Holt, Robert Town and others who names are memorialized in Pomona streets, wasted no time in turning to that effort later in 1875 and secured funding from the Temple and Workman bank, the president of which was F.P.F. Temple, for development work.
The Herald of 18 April informed readers that,
P.C. Tonner, Francisco Palomares and others have made a contract of sale to the Los Angeles Immigration and Land Co-oporative [sic] Association for a portion of the San Jose rancho, for about $115,000, said to be the most beautiful part of Los Angeles county. The company propose[s] cutting it up and selling it out on the plan of the Artesia Colony.
Another pivotal Pomona figure was Louis Phillips, who took over the Vejar half of the ranch during the dire years of the 1860s, and was completing a brick mansion that still stands at the base of Elephant Hill in what was then Spadra. The problem was that a financial panic struck San Francisco in late August 1875 and the news raced down telegraph wires to Los Angeles and sent jittery depositors to the two commercial banks in town, Farmers’ and Merchants’ and Temple and Workman, to withdraw funds.
While the former, run by the brilliant business figure, Isaias W. Hellman, easily weathered the storm, the latter operated by his former partners, Temple and Rancho La Puente co-owner William Workman, some of whose land abutted San José on the west, in an earlier institution, was unable to survive, despite a loan of nearly $350,000 from San Francisco capitalist, Elias J. “Lucky” Baldwin.
Temple and Workman closed permanently on 13 January 1876 and five weeks later, a two-day land sale was held at Pomona with Tonner purchasing some $8,000 in lots and 140 acres of land. In advertising for the sale, company officials assured potential buyers that title to land and water was perfect and referred readers to the attorneys Glassell, Chapman and Smiths, who were counsel for the project and were involved in a great deal of real estate work, as well as Palomares, Phillips and Tonner “from whom the land and water rights were purchased.”
With the failure of Temple and Workman and the California economic downturn part of a national Long Depression that spanned most of the 1870s, the future viability of Pomona, as well as Artesia, San Fernando, Centinela (in the modern Inglewood area and led by Temple), Santa Monica and others was truly in question.
We’ll return next with part two to carry some of this history of Patrick C. Tonner forward, so be sure to check back in with us for that!