by Paul R. Spitzzeri
For about a quarter-century after the establishment of Los Angeles County in spring 1850, the development of transportation routes through the eastern San Gabriel Valley to points east, northeast and southeast were important for the movement of people, goods, mail and media and other items.
This included two early routes roughly paralleling today’s Interstate 10 and State Route 60, along modern Mission Road/Valley Boulevard and Ramona Boulevard/San Bernardino Road, though, by the early 1870s, an Upper San Bernardino Road became a third byway in the area of what is now Interstate 210.
After being forced to build a line through Los Angeles on its way to Yuma, Arizona, the Southern Pacific railroad worked on its route through the valley parallel to Valley Boulevard, reaching the hamlet of Spadra, now southwest Pomona, in spring 1874, then heading into San Bernardino County as the line slowly built out to the Colorado River. As part of a voter-approved subsidy plan, decided on in November 1872, the SP took control of the sole local railroad, the Los Angeles and San Pedro, connecting the Angel City with the humble port to the south.
The eastern line of the Southern Pacific, which included a branch line opened in 1895 to Covina from about where Valley Boulevard and Temple Avenue intersect just east of Interstate 605, proved important for transporting agricultural products, as well as passengers from the valley to Los Angeles and then to the port, though the regional boom that began in the late Sixties came to screeching halt in late summer 1875, with the financial panic in San Francisco that soon enveloped Los Angeles, with the major casualty here being the failure of the Temple and Workman bank.
Moreover, a financial downturn that hit the eastern part of the country in 1873 lingered as the Long Depression, lasting through the rest of the decade. So, in early September 1876, when the Southern Pacific completed its connection to the north, through the recently established town of San Fernando and then the rugged terrain to the north into the lower San Joaquin Valley, the occasion was more symbolic than economically transformative so long as the hard times persisted.
Regional residents also chafed under the monopoly that the SP had in greater Los Angeles (a rival railroad, the Los Angeles and Independence, of which F.P.F. Temple was a key founder in spring 1874, did not last long and was sold to the SP, which operated its only line, a branch to Santa Monica from the Angel City.) By the early 1880s, when the financial environment finally saw notable improvement, movements were afoot for additional transcontinental railroads.
This included the Southern Pacific’s Sunset Route, which included the aforementioned pass-through in greater Los Angeles and extended east from Yuma through Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and Louisiana to New Orleans. Then, there was the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fé’s line to our area, which involved a few critical steps. One was its construction to Deming, in southern New Mexico, where it linked with the SP’s Sunset line in early March 1881 and another was a meeting in summer 1883 of the two rail companies at Needles, on California’s side of the Colorado River.
The next phase was the formation in fall 1880 of the California Southern Railroad, including by the Santa Fé’s president, to construct a line from San Diego to San Bernardino, with the latter reached in September 1883. That line was acquired by the Santa Fé a little over a year later and was extended to Mojave, where a line from Needles built by the SP was purchased by its rival, with that vital connection realized in mid-November 1885.
In its issue of the 28th, the Los Angeles Tribune remarked that,
the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Company had determined to reach Los Angeles by, if necessary, building a branch from the California Southern parallel to the Southern Pacific, a distance of some sixty miles. This, with the terminal facilities, would have cost probably two millions of dollars, and besides would have opened hostilities where cost and end could not be foretold. Meantime the existing track and terminals were ample for all that both roads could obtain. Business common sense was brought to bear upon the situation. The new comer proposed to the rival whose territory is meant to enter that it be allowed to carry on its competition by means of the very facilities which the company in possession had and enjoyed. The proposition seems at a first glance almost an impertinence, but the management of the Southern Pacific took more than a superficial view of the situation and agreed to it, and the directors of both companies have now ratified the agreement.
This established a link to the ocean at San Diego, but the Santa Fé was clearly interested in reaching Los Angeles and the port, so it leased track rights from the SP from San Bernardino to Los Angeles, while soon working on a route that included a section through the northern San Gabriel Valley built by its subsidiary, the San Bernardino and Los Angeles Railway, while it acquired the Los Angeles and San Gabriel Valley Railroad, which got as far east as Duarte. The 40-mile line to there from San Bernardino was finished in May 1887 and operations began under a new firm, the California Central Railroad.
The Los Angeles Times of 1 June, under the headline of “Good-Bye, S.P.!” with a subheadings of “The California Central on its ‘Dig.'” and “It Has No Further Use of the Old Southern Pacific,” observed that, when two years prior, after the deal was struck for the California Southern to lease track from the SP, a two-year notice clause was added for either party to end the agreement, but “on their way out from the very meeting at which this compact was made, the high contracting parties had a falling out.”
The head of the California Southern then “sat down at his desk instanter and wrote the formal notice” of release, though “this fact, however, has been kept very quiet, and those outsiders who may have known of it at the time have forgotten all about it long ago.” While the first California Southern train reached Los Angeles within a half-year of that agreement, the article remarked,
The Santa Fé system has been steadily pushing its way in. It bought the Los Angeles and San Gabriel Valley Railroad . . . and built the San Bernardino and Los Angeles to a junction with it at Azusa [Duarte] . . . Then all the eight Santa Fé b[r]anches in Soutern California—including everything but the California Southern Railroad—were merged into one organization, the California Central, a move which has just been perfected and goes into effect today . . . It was evident that the Santa Fé was playing some big game; but it was generally attributed to a mere desire to corral the enormous traffic of Southern California as speedily and as fully as possible. The officials of the system in this city—and those of the Souther[n] Pacific here, too, for that matter—were in total ignorance of anything else . . .
It was therefore a thunder-clap from a clear sky [when the announcement was made that] the California Central would have nothing more to do with the Southern Pacific, but would run its own trains exclusively over its own track. It caught them all napping. The Southern Pacific people, when informed of its yesterday morning, were equally paralyzed.
It is hard to overstate how important that landmark was during this region’s Boom of the Eighties, as competition with the Southern Pacific was established, but also the development of the area along the line included the establishment of a slew of new towns, including Claremont, La Verne, San Dimas and, of course, Glendora. In general terms, the hordes of migrants settling in greater Los Angeles included those coming in by the pair of rail lines, though the boom inevitably went bust by the end of the 1880s.
A third major railroad to traverse the eastern San Gabriel Valley was the San Pedro, Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad, commonly known as the Salt Lake. There was a company formed during the Boom of the Eighties to build a route from the Angel City to the City of the Saints, but that project foundered with the resulting bust. As the 19th century came to a close, a new effort, the Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railway, was developed, but, the 30 November 1900 number of the Los Angeles Express reported on the name change.
The prime mover with the new project was William Andrews Clark, a copper-mining magnate and United States Senator from Montana, who, after a visit to the area after purchasing the Los Angeles Terminal Railway, which ran a line, like the Southern Pacific’s Los Angeles and San Pedro, to and from downtown to the burgeoning Port of Los Angeles, decided on the updated moniker. With greater Los Angeles embarking on its third boom as the 20th century dawned, Clark’s project came at a very opportune time.
The Salt Lake route left Los Angeles and went southeast around the Montebello Hills and then northeast through the Whittier Narrows before crossing the San Gabriel River very near the Workman Mill site mentioned earlier in this post. Whereas the Southern Pacific line paralleled Valley Boulevard and the Santa Fé track runs near Interstate 210 in the eastern portion of the San Gabriel Valley before hewing closer to Interstate 10 in the Inland Empire, the new line largely traverses the southern portion of the valley close to the 60 Freeway, though it runs adjacent to the Southern Pacific line through Pomona before veering southeast to Riverside. From there, a northward course heads into San Bernardino on its way to Utah.
The Salt Lake line opened to San Bernardino in early July 1904 and was completed to its northern terminus on 1 May 1905, though there were no stops on the inaugural train between Riverside and Los Angeles. After the 1909 death of Elias J. “Lucky” Baldwin, who took possession, four decades prior, of many thousands of acres of land from F.P.F. Temple and William Workman by foreclosing on a loan to their doomed Temple and Workman bank, sales of property helped foster development along the Salt Lake line in what became North Whittier Heights and a depot was installed at the subdivision of Hillgrove (today, Salt Lake Avenue parallels the track through portions of the City of Industry near the Homestead).
In 1921, the Salt Lake was sold to the Union Pacific, which three-quarters of a century later acquired the Southern Pacific. Today, the three major railroad lines through the Valley are used by Metrolink trains (including along the Salt Lake line to Riverside and on the Covina branch and its eastward extension to San Bernardino) and Metro rail cars (the A line on the Santa Fé route now ends in North Pomona) for mass transit.
Speaking of this, another important transportation element, of course, was and is the street railroad. F.P.F. Temple was treasurer of the first line in our region, this being the Spring and Sixth Street Railroad, which completed its first route in 1874. This horse-drawn car system was quickly followed by others and technology soon enabled the introduction of cable railways and, very soon after, electric lines.
As with railroads, there was intense competition, frequent acquisitions and mergers and the boom and bust cycles, as well. The first streetcar line in the San Gabriel Valley was the horse-drawn Pasadena Street Railroad, which inaugurated service in 1886, just after the Los Angeles and San Gabriel brought the first trains to the Crown City (then about a dozen years old.) Electric streetcar service was introduced several years later, but the major leap forward for electric railroads throughout greater Los Angeles came at the end of the decade.
Henry E. Huntington, cut loose from the Southern Pacific (which officially acquired the Central Pacific transcontinental railroad company in 1885) after the death in 1900 of his uncle and president, Collis, moved from San Francisco to Los Angeles to take the Los Angeles Railway, which operated streetcars within Angel City limits and which he acquired for the SP a couple of years prior, to new levels, including the acquisition of competitors.
Huntington’s partner in this was banker Isaias W. Hellman, formerly in business with F.P.F. Temple and William Workman, and, in 1901, the two (though Huntington was the public face and Hellman received little overt recognition for his contribution) formed the Pacific Electric Railway to expand into the vast hinterlands outside of Los Angeles, with the region undergoing its third boom at the time.
Naturally, the five-cent passengers fares and limited cargo transport were not where the action was; instead, it was in real estate, as well as power supply to communities reached by the lines. For Huntington, just two examples help demonstrate this point—Huntington Beach on the Orange County coast and Oneonta Park in South Pasadena and named for his New York hometown—while the PE’s first major line was to the fast-growing burg of Long Beach.
Notably, the Pacific Electric only built lines in the central and northern portions of the San Gabriel Valley, meaning from the Ramona Boulevard/San Bernardino Road route and north of that, so that this line passed through south Alhambra, Monterey Park, El Monte, Baldwin Park and Covina and eastward into the Inland Empire. A later one went through central Alhambra and San Gabriel and, eventually, Walter P. Temple’s Temple City.
The most northerly major route passed through Huntington’s Oneonta Park subdivision and San Marino, of which he was also a founder, through Arcadia, Duarte, Azusa and, at the end of 1907, reached Glendora. Two notable smaller routes included through Pasadena and Altadena to the famous Mt. Lowe resort via its railway up steep slopes of the San Gabriel Mountains and from San Marino through East Pasadena areas like Lamanda Park and Sierra Madre Villa and into Sierra Madre with access to the Mount Wilson Trail.
When the PE line was completed to Glendora, the Times of 29 December recorded the celebration, including remarks by the son of the town’s founder, George D. Whitcomb. In his address, Carroll S. Whitcomb compared the burg’s development to that of a young girl, asserting that
We have now passed the gawky stage, our skirts are at our shoetops and our hair is on the top of our head. Come out and see us often or you will some day find us a grown up young lady, and then you will need an introduction.
Educator James A. Foshay congratulated the denizens of Glendora “on the prosperity which is before you” and added that “the spirit that should come to all people is the desire to build up the country.” He added, reflective perhaps of concerns about the massive urban buildup amid incredible industrial growth in late 19th and early 20th century America, “for many years we have sent our boys to the cities, leaving the fields untilled” and intoned that “it is a great mistake for us to get away from Mother Earth.”
Foshay continued that “our boys should be led into the way of scientific and agricultural pursuits” and asserted that “the electric lines are doing much for the country by bringing it into touch with the city.” This meant, in his view, that “it brings the farmer into closer association with metropolitan ways, and it brings the city man close to nature.” Moreover, he proclaimed that “the extension of the electric car lines must mean the rapid growth of this beautiful valley . . . I believe that this valley will be settled solidly from the mountains to the sea.”
George Whitcomb, the Times remarked, “rose from a sick bed to take part in the celebration” and “prophesied that the time would soon be at hand when Los Angeles, Pasadena and the entire San Gabriel Valley would be one.” He then told the assemblage,
We have—I speak broadly of the whole valley, not of Glendora alone—the best roads in the United States, plenty of water, the best climate in the country and beautiful scenery. There is every reason why the San Gabriel Valley should grow; there is no reason why it should not. There is reason to hope that the time is not far distant when this whole country will be practically one settlement.
In 1907, though, another mode of transportation was rapidly ascending and would, within two decades, challenge the dominant position of streetcars and locomotives. We’ll return with a concluding fourth part to chart some of the history of automobile routes that remade the San Gabriel Valley landscape leading up to the establishment of Route 66 a century ago, so be sure to join us tomorrow for that.