by Paul R. Spitzzeri
It was a scorching day at the Homestead, with temperatures pushing 105 degrees as we’re going to experience this heatwave for about a week. This third edition of Tombstone Tales, with past years highlighting the last resting places of Pío Pico and John Rowland, looked at the children buried at El Campo Santo Cemetery, or at least those we know are interred there and where they are in the burial ground of not quite an acre in size.
The reason we put it that way is that, in the first years of the 20th century, after John H. Temple lost the 75-acre Workman, or La Puente, Homestead that included the Workman House, Water Tower, trio of winery buildings and more, as well as the cemetery, his successor, Anaheim resident Lafayette F. Lewis, deciding that he had the legal right, began to destroy El Campo Santo, including “plowing up” graves, as a newspaper article put it. Lewis also razed three of the brick enclosure walls and some of the front (west) wall, while St. Nicholas’ Chapel, which he claimed was ravaged by fire, was also dismantled. Fortunately, the cast-iron fence surrounding the Workman and Temple family plot behind the chapel site remained.
Walter P. Temple, residing several miles west at the Temple Homestead in the Old Mission (Misión Vieja) community at Whittier Narrows, learned of the desecration, filed a civil suit in Los Angeles County Superior Court, and won a judgment to stop the effort and the forcing of the reconstruction of El Campo Santo, as well as a financial penalty. Lewis evaded this last part by selling the ranch in 1907 to Eugene Bassett and Thornton H. Pratt. A decade later, however, Walter was able to buy the property thanks to the astounding discovery, by his 9-year-old son, Thomas, of oil at a Montebello Hills tract he acquired near the Temple Homestead and the substantial fortune that resulted.
From 1919 to 1921, Temple engaged in an extensive effort to improve the cemetery, including pipe fencing to replace the removed walls, sidewalks, landscaping and the construction of the Walter P. Temple Memorial Mausoleum, in which the remains of many of his relations were reinterred from the family plot, including parents, grandparents, and siblings. Enough space was left in crypts in the structure for future family members.
The lawsuit provided a list of the names of those interred at El Campo Santo whose gravestones or markers were lost during the destruction and these included some children. The fact that Walter placed surface-level markers merely stating “At Rest” where it was understood that gravesites were, but was unable to pinpoint for whom is a very unfortunate reflection of Lewis’ stunning indifference to the dead at the cemetery.
Aside from the large and ornate marble gravesite for John Rowland, the oldest of the markers that survived the Lewis desecration was probably from the late 1870s, but, about a century later, when the City of Industry, having acquired El Campo Santo in 1963 from the Brown family, owners of El Encanto Sanitarium (this facility now is directly north of the Museum), readied for the cemetery’s restoration, this burial place on the north side was, at some unknown date, vandalized, and only a couple of pieces remained lying, for who knows how long, in the overgrowth.
Fortunately, these fragments were preserved and made an early part of the Homestead’s artifact collection, though identification proved fleeting because only portions of the names of the deceased and parents remained, while the smaller portion did have the name of William Declez, a marble and stone contractor in Los Angeles. So, these sat in their box in a storage room on the second floor of La Casa Nueva for more than a decade after the Museum opened in May 1981.
Around 1995, however, Walter Drown, president of the Temple City Historical City, visited and inquired about whether we had any information regarding a great-aunt of his that he knew was interred at El Campo Santo about 1878. I met with him and when he mentioned the names of Mattie and her parents Joseph Walter and Isabella Drown, I remembered the tombstone fragments and took Walter to the storage area and opened that box. Sure enough, “J.W.” was clear as day, while Isabella and Mattie became obvious.
It was around this time that the Internet began to become an ever-increasing source of information (and irritation, in other ways) for historical research and, in the years since, we’ve learned a fair amount about the Drowns, much of which we’ve shared in this blog previously. What was mentioned today at Tombstone Tales was the remarkable tragedy in spring 1852 that afflicted the family when Ezra Drown, his wife Adeline and their baby, Joseph Walter, migrated by ship to California.
The steamer hit rocks off the coast of Baja California, caught fire and sunk. Ezra placed his wife on a piece of the ship’s wreckage and swam to the shore with the child. On his return, however, as he neared Adeline, she was either inadvertently or deliberately pushed off the piece and drowned. The grief-stricken Ezra continued on his journey with his son, commonly known as Walter, and ended up in Los Angeles, where he was a lawyer and district attorney until his death about a decade later. William Workman of the Homestead became Walter’s legal guardian and the boy was raised by the Temples—it may well be that Walter Temple was named for Drown.
Under this foster situation, Walter Drown, like some of the older Temple boys (he was about the same age as three brothers: Thomas, Francis and Walter, born between 1846 and 1851), was educated at Santa Clara College, now the University of Santa Clara, in the Bay Area. When a June 1874 robbery went awry at the Workman Mill store operated by ranch foreman Frederick Lambourn and miller William Turner and the perpetrator injured Turner and his wife, with the latter miscarrying their child, Drown joined Lambourn and an El Monte merchant, Jacob Schlesinger, in lynching Jesús Romo—this was one of the last such extralegal proceedings in our region.
Drown soon took over operating the store, which, in a 31 July 1875 advertisement in the Spanish-language Los Angeles newspaper, La Crónica, was dubbed the “Revolution Mercantile,” and he was undoubtedly assisted by his guardian Workman in the establishment. Within several months, however, the collapse of the Temple and Workman bank took place and almost completely wiped out the family financially. In September 1876, Drown married Isabella Kelly, who was from Grass Valley north of Sacramento and the two seems to have settled in at the mill store.
A half-year later, however, reported the 19 March 1877 edition of the Los Angeles Express, the store caught fire, from means that were undetermined, and the edifice burned. The value of the structure was determined to be $800 and the inventory up to $2,500, while insurance covered half of the former and about 60% or so of the latter. Around this time, Walter and Isabella welcomed their first child, Mattie (her formal name was likely Matilda), though we don’t know when she was born, when she died, or how she passed away.
The Drowns were enumerated at the Homestead in the 1880 census with Workman’s grandson, Francis W. Temple, living in the Workman House and farming and making wine since the bank disaster (and William Workman’s suicide, which took place in May 1876), soon to acquire the 75 acres and structures from Elias J. “Lucky” Baldwin, who foreclosed, in 1879, on his loan to the Temple and Workman bank. Walter was listed as a farm laborer and he and Isabelle had, in December 1879, another daughter, Alice.
Within a couple of years, the Drowns moved as Walter took a position with William Henry Workman, the nephew of his late guardian, at his Boyle Heights estate and was foreman of that property for several years through the 1880s. He then went to work at the Angel City wholesale mercantile house owned by his old friends, Lambourn and Turner, where it appears he remained until his death at age 47 in 1899 from heart failure. Mattie’s burial place and tombstone fragments are a tangible reference to the deep ties of the Drown, Temple and Workman families.
Another such example, without direct blood relations, involves the last resting place of Ramón Yorba, who lies with his mother, Jessie (María Jesús) Palomares de Yorba, under a large granite marker at the east end of El Campo Santo. The household, including Liborio, husband of Jessie and father of Ramón, on a portion of Rancho La Puente in what is generally known as the unincorporated Los Angeles County neighborhood of South San Jose Hills along Valley Boulevard a few miles east of La Puente and near the city of Walnut. Those who know that Fullerton Road, which comes from the south (connecting to Harbor Boulevard at the peak of the Puente Hills), ends at Valley may not know that a short extension north of Valley is Yorbita Road, where several members of the Yorba clan long resided and farmed.
Liborio was a grandson of Teodosio Yorba, grantee by Governor Pío Pico in 1846 of the Rancho Lomas de Santiago, which was just slightly smaller, at a little north of 47,000 acres, than La Puente and covered an area including much of today’s Orange County cities of Irvine and Tustin. In 1810, Teodosio’s father, José Antonio, was granted, with a nephew, Pablo Peralta, the Rancho Santiago de Santa Ana, which adjoined Lomas de Santiago to the east and sprawled across some 70,000 acres from the Santa Ana River at Olive to the north to the Back Bay at Newport to the south. Teodosio’s brother, Bernardo, was the owner of the 13,300-acre Rancho Cañon de Santa Ana where Yorba Linda is part of that property.
It gets a bit confusing but Liborio’s parents were Yorba second cousins. His father was Teodosio’s son, Juan Bautista, while his mother María Antonia Rowland was a granddaughter of Bernardo. The latter’s daughter, Leonor, was the wife of John Rowland, Jr., son of John Rowland, Rancho La Puente co-owner, with William Workman. When Leonor married the junior Rowland, she moved to La Puente with him and, after John, Jr. died in 1869, four years before his father, she became owner of her husband’s share of the ranch. Remarkably, members of the Yorba family resided at that area off Yorbita Road until the 1990s when the area north of Valley Boulevard was developed as part of the City of Industry.
Jessie was the daughter of Tomás Palomares and Magdalena Vejar, who, in turn, were children of Ygnacio Palomares and Ricardo Vejar, the grantees of Rancho San José, embracing all or part of Pomona, Claremont, La Verne, San Dimas and other communities at the eastern end of Los Angeles County. While Vejar lost his portion of the south half of San José to foreclosure during the dire economic period of the early 1860s, the Palomares family held on to parts of the northern section for some years afterward. She and Liborio married in November 1903, just a couple of weeks before Walter Temple wedded Laura González. A daughter, Sylvia, was born two years before Ramón.
The 1910 census shows Liborio, Jessie, Sylvia and Ramón living adjacent to his parents and near three Rowland brothers, while a decade later, the family was joined by three members of Jessie’s Palomares relatives as they lived near Rowland and Yorba relations. The 1920 enumeration lists Liborio as a citrus grower, while the earlier county merely showed him as a farmer. Two years later, however, Ramón, who was nearing his 15th birthday, died and all we knew from obituaries in Pomona newspapers was that “he was an invalid since he was two years old” and passed away in the family’s residence.
My colleague, Gennie Truelock, put in a good deal of research for this year’s Tombstone Tales program, and prepared and presented an excellent introduction to visitors regarding infant and child mortality, common causes of death and medicinal and nutritional advances, not to mention those involving vaccination and other forms of health care, that meant drastically improved outcomes for young ones covering the period from the 1850s to the early 20th century. She also referred to the three children, two named David Harrison and the other Agnes, of Antonia Margarita Workman and F.P.F. Temple, all of whom died before the age of 5, an important benchmark for child mortality.
Another important contribution she made to the program was securing copies of death certificates, including for Ramón, and what it shows that he was afflicted with cerebral meningitis, which could have been caused by bacteria, a fungus, a virus or injury and that he also suffered from epilepsy. Because of it being winter, a contributory cause of death, which occurred on 26 February 1922, was “la grippe” or the flu—just a few years earlier was the worldwide Spanish flu pandemic. Moreover, the certificate, completed by Pomona doctor George W. Forester noted that Ramón spent “13 yrs. in bed paralyzed.” It added that the Yorba’s resided “west of Walnut,” that the burial location was merely “Puente, Calif.,” with services on the last day of the month and that the mortuary was Tood and Reeves, now Todd Memorial Chapel, and which has been operating for 120 years.
In early January 1928, Jessie Yorba died at a hospital in Monterey Park at age 41 after several weeks of illness. Todd and Reeves handled the funeral arrangements, a mass was held at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in Puente, where a new edifice was completed a few years prior including the installation of a large rose-themed stained glass window donated by Walter Temple, and she was interred with her son. Her widow, Liborio, lived another two decades, and he, Sylvia and her husband were buried at Holy Cross Cemetery in Pomona, likely because the Homestead was lost by Temple in 1932.
We have another day, under those hot conditions, of Tombstone Tales tomorrow, with the program running at Noon, 1, 2 and 3 p.m., including the slide presentation in the cool, air-conditioned confines of the Homestead Gallery and the walkthrough of the cemetery as limited as we can given the weather. It is also our open-site weekend, so you can take self-guided tours of the Workman House (which has portable AC) and guided visits, at 1 and 3 p.m., of La Casa Nueva (which has some fans, but no AC).
We hope to see you tomorrow and, if not, keep us in mind for Tombstone Tales 2027!