Ascending Spanish Steps With a Postcard of the Gainsborough Heath Sales Office, San Marino, postmarked 11 June 1929, Part One

by Paul R. Spitzzeri

With median home prices topping $3 million, the city of San Marino is the most expensive place in which to buy a residence in the San Gabriel Valley (three decades ago, it was actually possible to purchase a small dwelling of not far over 1,000 square feet there for not much above $300,000). It was incorporated in April 1913 and its first mayor was George S. Patton, a prominent lawyer and friend and neighbor of the powerful transportation and real estate titan, as well as art, books and manuscript collector, Henry E. Huntington, a major figure in organizing San Marino. Patton’s son, George S. Patton, Jr, was a key, if controversial, general during World War II and subject of a well-known 1970 film starring George C. Scott.

In 1927, land near the Huntington estate, now the Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens, was acquired for the subdivision of Gainsborough Heath and the featured object from the Homestead’s artifact collection for this post is a postcard showing a curved, tiled staircase of the Spanish Colonial Revival sales office, the style of which reflected the predominant one in the tract (not to mention much of our region, including the Homestead’s La Casa Nueva, the Temple family’s remarkable residence completed late in 1927.)

Before we get to the early development of Gainsborough Heath, however, let’s take a look at what was there before it, because it was noted that the land was acquired by the J.B. Ransom Corporation, which at that time was in the midst of a large-scale development, of quite a different type, called Montebello Park.

The purchase of just under 300 acres was from the Bradbury Estate, derived from the holdings of mining magnate Louis L. Bradbury, who made a fortune in mining in the Mexican state of Sinaloa, and, after his death, owned by his widow, Simona Martínez. Following her passing in 1902, the Estate was held by their children and it was a quarter-century later that the deal was made with the Ransom firm for development of Gainsborough Heath.

Prior to the Bradburys, however, there was about 15 years in which the land, long part of the Mission San Gabriel, was part of the Dew Drop Ranch of Luther Harvey Titus (1822-1900). Titus was from Hamburg, New York, south of Buffalo, and, at age 18, he headed west and settled in Illinois, where he spent four years in lead mining, earning enough money to buy a farm. In 1845, though, he returned to his birthplace and operated a shingle factory with a brother.

While a lengthy biography in an early 20th century Los Angeles history book stated that was a Gold Rush migrant of 1849 and was gone for two years, he is recorded in the 1850 census in Hamburg with his wife, the former Maria Benedict and daughter Maria. The sketch goes into some detail about his migration, including sailing from New York City to Galveston, Texas and then his travels along the Southern Route to California.

This included a stop at the Gila River, where a conflict with indigenous people led many migrants to turn back, but it was said that Titus and two others pressed on. Prior to reaching the Colorado River at Yuma, Arizona, Titus joined a party led by Dr. James B. Winston. During the last leg, Titus was wounded when a powder flask he was using as a fire starter exploded in his face, but the group arrived in San Diego in mid-August 1849.

From there, the bio continued, Titus took a steamship to San Francisco and then headed, with one of those travel partners, to the mines, where, it was said, they “met with considerable success.” After their claim was exhausted, Titus went back to San Francisco and then to the redwood forests of the north, where he reengaged with shingle manufacturing, as well as selling salmon fillets and deer meat and further mining endeavors starting in February 1850. It was then that he determined to return to Hamburg, but perhaps the stated date of 1851 was off—in any case he was enumerated in the census on 29 July.

All that was said regarding nearly two decades of his life was that Titus “continued in the east, where his business ventures were successful. An 1855 New York state census listed him as both a shingle maker and farmer (he and Maria welcomed a second daughter, Clara, two years prior) and, by the 1860s, he began to raise race horses, establishing his name in that sport. The 1860 census showed him as a farmer, but the “Products of Industry” schedule recorded that he still operated the shingle factory, which employed steam power to manufacture product made from pine trees.

The bio then recorded,

Returning to California in 1869, Mr. Titus was so pleased with Los Angeles that he decided to locate here permanently, so went back home, and the next year, with his daughter and her husband, Capt. J.C. Newton, he once again crossed the continent to the [west] coast. Soon after his arrival he bought a ranch near San Gabriel Mission, where he engaged extensively in the raising of oranges. At the same time he was interested in the breeding of fine horses.

Actually, the sequence of events was not quite as depicted. He was in Hamburg in summer 1868 racing horses and in September 1870 he was back there, exhibiting, at a county fair, grapes raised in Marysville, not far from Lake Tahoe, along with oranges and prunes grown in Los Angeles, it appearing he took those back with him. But, the Los Angeles Star, of 26 June 1870, in its “Hotel Arrivals” section recorded that “H.H. Titus and wife, Hamburg, New York,” checked in at the recently opened Pico Hotel in town and the couple was documented taking a Pullman Hotel express on the transcontinental railroad, completed the prior year, from Omaha for the trip to the Golden State.

Moreover, Titus, with Maria possibly returning to New York, was settled in at a house on Spring Street, when the 1870 census enumerated him and another man, listed merely as laborers, and living between the attorney and future judge Robert M. Widney and real estate agent Milton Thomas, later a founder of the towns of Artesia and Pomona.

The 21 January 1871 number of the Los Angeles Express informed readers that,

A half brother of the celebrated trotter, Dexter, is said to be en route for Los Angeles via the Central Pacific Railroad [again, the transcontinental line], on which a car has been fitted up for his special use . . . The animal is owned by Luther Titus, Esq., of Hamburg, New York, who is to engage in fine breeding in Los Angeles. The Chicago Tribune surmises that the future champion trotter will come from this coast.

So, it seems abundantly clear that Titus came to Los Angeles specifically to breed horses, which he’d been doing, as well as racing them, in New York for at least a decade, as well as engaging in farming. The aforementioned horse was likely “Echo,” mentioned in the obit. With respect to where he was to embark on his breeding program, the “Deeds Filed” portion of the Star of 10 September 1871 recorded “L.J. Rose to L.H. Titus, tract of land near San Gabriel Mission, for $700.” Elsewhere, however, it was reported that he paid $7,000 for the unspecified amount of acres. In February 1873, Titus added to his holdings by acquiring 20 acres for $2,000 from George Stoneman, former Union general of the Civil War, who lived in the same general area.

With Maria and their two daughters coming out from New York, the Titus family settled in to what was soon dubbed the “Dew Drop Ranch.” A visiting Chicago journalist, Edward Chamberlain, sent back a travelogue of his ramblings through greater Los Angeles and one published in the 13 May 1874 edition of the Los Angeles Express in part concerned “A LIVE YANKEE IN THE SUBTROPICS,” though it is notable that nothing was said of horses in the piece.

Instead, Chamberlain began by remarking that “happy in golden anticipations is Mr. Luther H. Titus, the proprietor of Dewdrop plantation, across the way from Rose’s.” In a colorful manner, the writer continued that,

Titus, who hails from near Buffalo, is one of your wiry, double-and-twisted, home-made, self-made, untiring, ingenious Yankees, without the least touch of the sordid or narrow-minded quality which often goes with the other characteristics. He came here rich four years ago, bought a handsome homestead, well stocked, as the former proprietor thought, with fruit and everything desirable. Not so thought Titus, who has been at work at its improvement day and night ever since in the most desperate fashion—though he does take time to entertain, in a most generous and disinterested way, all Buffalonians and a great many other Eastern travelers who come this way.

Chamberlain added that Titus had nearly 4,000 citrus trees, comprising orange, lemon and lime, which would be ready to bear fruit in three years, while recoding that “the pride of Dewdrop is its perfectly regular southern slope, the regularity of its trees as to size and shape, [and] the cement ditches or zanjas [rather than the usual dirt ones], made by a process invented by Mr. T., and vastly valuable in saving both water and soil.”

The description concluded that Titus anticipated having a row of hedges consisting of lime trees that would form a fence around his estate and was “expected to do treble duty as a thing of ornament, utility and profit; for the hedge-row is expected to be prolific of marketable limes, as well as to the delight of the wayfarer, and deter the wandering steer from invasion of the premises.”

The 1880 census showed that the Titus family included their two daughters, with Clara as a school teacher, though she soon joined a convent in Los Angeles, Mary’s husband, Norton, their two girls, three white employees as a foreman and two laborers, and a Chinese servant and a half-dozen other Chinese farm workers. Neighbors included the fruit grower Rose, Joseph Heslop, who was married to a daughter of Michael White and his wife María del Rosario Guillen (whose mother Eulalia Pérez de Guillen was widely known in San Gabriel), and James Foord, who also employed Chinese workers, in this case five.

When it came to his “Dew Drop,” on which wine grapes were also grown, the biographical sketch remarked about Titus that,

Inventive ability was one of his noticeable characteristics, and was utilized in the devising of a ladder on wheels for picking fruit, also a three-notch board for planting trees, both of which patents are in general use in Southern California. Another ingenious device permitted of the cutting and picking of fruit with the same hand. He constructed a machine for moulding cement canals to economize the use of water, by which means a given quantity of water would irrigate three or four times as much land as when run in ditches in the soil. He was the first in Los Angeles county to use a portable apparatus for spraying fruit trees troubled with pests.

By 1886, the completion to the region of a direct transcontinental railroad route by the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fé was the primary catalyst for the Boom of the Eighties, which was transformative for greater Los Angeles in so many ways, and the Santa Fé constructed a line through the northern San Gabriel Valley very close to Titus’ property.

The 8 June 1887 number of the Los Angeles Times told its readers that one of its reporters “went out into the San Gabriel Valley to inspect one of the biggest land deals ever made there,” but held off on publishing the details until after the incorporation of the San Gabriel Valley Land and Water Company, a firm with future governor Henry H. Markham, a Pasadena lawyer and business figure, as president.

The firm acquired several ranches, including Foord’s 50 acres for $50,000, Bradbury’s 200 acres, another 600 acres held by four individuals and partnerships and Titus’ “Dew Drop,” comprising 212 acres and fetching $212,000, with the total expended for 1,142 acres said to be near $600,000. The paper went on that,

[The lands] are near the Old Mission [meaning the current Mission San Gabriel], and lie on both sides of the Southern Pacific Railroad there, while their northern end is but a mile south of Lamanda Park [established by Rose], on the California Central [line, with that railroad a subsidiary of the Santa Fé]. They are about a mile from Alhambra, one and a half from Ramona [Monterey Park], two from Raymond [South Pasadena] and three from Pasadena.

More than half the tract was “improved in the finest manner” with some 6,000 producing orange trees “and no end of vineyards,” though what distinguished the property was the “superb water supply.” It was specified that Foord’s place and “Dew Drop” were “on the highest part of the lands, [and] are in a fine artesian belt,” so that there was plenty of well water for irrigation.

The account added,

The company will at once subdivide its Eden into town and villa lots, and put them on the market. It will put water upon all its own lands, and sell to outsiders, giving a new value to a vast body of hitherto unirrigated lands. The deal is one of the most important in the history of the San Gabriel Valley, some of whose choicest portions it brings into the market.

Advertisements starting in the summer noted that the company had $1.6 million in capital stock and it was announced that the new town was to be called East San Gabriel. A key element was establishing San Gabriel Boulevard, four miles in length to link Lamanda Park with “El Monte road,” perhaps meaning Mission Drive, while two east-west thoroughfares were to be named Broadway and Grand Central.

A streetcar line, hotel and a system “piping water from the Titus place” were also promoted and it was expected that the Southern Pacific, the line of which runs between Mission Road and Broadway, was to “build one of the finest depots in Southern California, warehouses, etc.” Moreover, it was asserted that heavy freighting in the area “is most conclusive evidence that [East San Gabriel] is the place for banks, stores, warehouses, etc., where moneys invested in buildings of this kind will pay large dividends from the start.”

After remarking that “the property offered for sale being located on either side of the railroad, makes the whole tract central and accessible to the business portion of the town,” the promotional piece insisted,

The citizens of Los Angeles city and surrounding country are so well acquainted with the many advantages that EAST SAN GABRIEL possesses over any other townsite laid out in the county, it will be unnecessary to enumerate the many advantages of the new town.

The boom was filled with many such extravagant praising of new towns throughout greater Los Angeles, some of which actually survived and succeeded! East San Gabriel, however, did not and its commodious hotel, which was built by Markham, ended up being sold and turned into the San Gabriel Sanatorium and then the Southern California Masonic Home before it was razed for a subdivision in 1925—this just a couple of years before the establishment of Gainsborough Heath.

Speaking of which, this is a good place to halt for the time being and return with a part two, which will also feature a promotional publication as well as the postcard, so check back for that tomorrow!