by Paul R. Spitzzeri
It was another broiling day at the Homestead, though not quite as stifling and hot as yesterday, as we held our second day of Tombstone Tales, a program with a slide-illustrated introduction (in the air-conditioned Gallery auditorium) and a visit (at least it was a dry heat?) to El Campo Santo Cemetery, the Workman and Temple family burial ground, a rare private example in our region, that has existed since at least 1855. The two prior incarnations of this offering focused on Pío Pico and his wife María Ygnacia Alvarado, and John Rowland, while this year’s version concerns children who last resting places are there.
Part one of this post looked at Mattie Drown, who died about 1878 and whose tombstone fragments went unidentified for many years until a great-nephew visited the Homestead in the mid-1990s and we were able to identify her, and Ramón Yorba, a member of three prominent families in our region (Palomares, Rowland and Yorba), whose cerebral meningitis and epilepsy, which left him bedridden, as well as the flu caused his early 1922 death. These are among several examples of friends and family of friends buried in the grass area at the cemetery and this second part looks at Workman and Temple family members who are interred in the Walter P. Temple Memorial Mausoleum, completed in 1921 where St. Nicholas’ Chapel formerly stood.
As mentioned in the earlier portion of this post, my colleague Gennie Truelock did some research to provide an excellent introduction to childhood mortality, including looking at local mortality schedules as part of 19th century censuses—these examined causes of death for everyone who passed away during the year prior to the enumeration, with a large majority being children. She also analyzed major causes of death for children, informing guests that a key benchmark was the age of 5, as most young ones passed away before then and rates of death declined sharply afterwards.
What this also brought to the fore was that the measure of life expectancy was skewed downwards because of the incidence of childhood mortality for those under five years old; in other words, adults lived longer than life expectancy indicated when the data was controlled to account for the large number of small children who died. Gennie also looked at major causes of death, including fevers, communicative diseases, accidents and others and discussed the development of the germ theory, standing and unhealthy sources of water, sanitation, cleanliness, vaccines and food laws, including for the pasteurization of milk, rather than allowing for raw milk consumption. This introduction gave a good understanding of the conditions from the mid-19th century through the early 20th century, which, of course, involved a dramatic drop in childhood mortality because of measures undertaken to improve health outcomes.
Gennie also alluded to the earliest known children at El Campo Santo, all buried in the cast-iron fenced plot that survived the desecration wrought by Lafayette F. Lewis, who owned the 75-acre Workman Homestead from 1903 to 1907 and sought to raze the cemetery for more farming land. His destruction was halted by Walter P. Temple, who lived in the Whittier Narrows to the west, though a court order to repair the damage went unrealized because Lewis promptly sold the ranch. Remarkably, a decade later, in late 1917, Temple bought the Homestead and prioritized the renovation of El Campo Santo, including the construction of the mausoleum on the chapel site and moved the remains of family members into the new edifice, including his siblings, two boys named David Harrison and who died in the 1850s, and sister Agnes, who passed away in 1865. Gennie posited the likelihood that these young Temples died of fever and communicable disease during this era of high childhood mortality.
By the 1920s, conditions were far better for young ones, but there were still some risks. Walter’s older sister, Margarita (1866-1953) had a large family with her husband Samuel P. Rowland (1866-1916), a grandson of John Rowland, and two of her descendants died and were buried in the mausoleum during the Roaring Twenties. The first was María Concepción Duarte, who was born on 8 December 1921, eight months after the completion of the mausoleum. Her mother was Margarita’s daughter, Teresa, and her father was Manuel Duarte, whose family name is associated with a northern San Gabriel Valley city located between Azusa and Monrovia at the foothills of the mountains.
Teresa and Manuel married in September 1907 and the couple soon welcome a daughter, Loretta, and a son, Alfonso, as they resided in downtown Los Angeles near the river. The 1910 census shows the Manuel worked at odd jobs, perhaps associated with the industrial growth of that section of the Angel City. A decade later, the census enumerated Teresa living with her mother and three children, including a daughter Lucile born a year prior, and Manuel was not with the household, while Teresa’s marital status was denoted as single.
Soon after, Margarita Rowland, a widower since 1916, moved to the Homestead, where Walter provided her and another sibling, Lucinda, a house at the west end of the ranch, expanded to 92 acres, along Tenth Avenue, now Turnbull Canyon Road. Living with her was Teresa and her children. While Manuel was not in the household in the 1930 census (perhaps he traveled for employment?), Teresa was shown as married and there were two more children, including son Richard and daughter Concepción. We know that Teresa and her children did not move to the Homestead until at least 1922 because Concepción was born in Los Angeles.
On 10 May 1925, the child, who almost three-and-a-half years old, died at the family house at the Homestead. The death notices column of the Los Angeles Times two days later included the listing for “the darling daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Manuel Duarte” who died at what was then known as Puente. Funeral services were held at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, the third iteration of which is still on the site with “Interment [at] Temple Rancho.” The funeral directors were Utter and Son of Alhambra, where Walter Temple built their mortuary building, no longer standing, in that burgeoning city’s downtown.
Concepción’s death certificate was posted on Find-A-Grave shows that her attending physician was Dr. Lawrence J. Butka, who graduated from the Seventh Day Adventist-operated College of Medical Evangelists, today’s Loma Linda University (his brother and sister-in-law were doctoral graduates there) and practiced in San Gabriel. Butka recorded that the child died of endocarditis, or inflammation of the heart, probably caused by a bacterial infection, with a secondary cause being “Compensatory Hypertrophy” involving the enlargement and thickening of the heart muscle. Her illness lasted five months with Butka treating her for about eight.
Notably, the certificate records the home address as “Tent Avenue,” those this was Tenth Avenue (Turnbull Canyon Road) that was grandmother Margarita Rowland’s residence. We can assume Butka treated Concepción because he had some connection to Walter Temple as the physician practiced in the mission town of San Gabriel where Temple had major real estate investments during that period. Another family tie was that the morticians were Utter and Sons, whose funeral parlor at the northeast corner of Main and 4th streets in Alhambra was constructed by the Temple Estate Company, though the edifice was razed in the late 1990s. Lastly, the place of burial was simply designated as “Temple Rancho, Puente, Calif.”
When Concepción was interred in the mausoleum, however, she was placed in a crypt that already had inscriptions in the shutter. This was because, after Walter’s wife Laura González died at the end of 1922, she was placed in a nearby crypt but it was decided that the shutter needed more information in the inscription, specifically that that she was the wife of Walter and the mother of their children, Thomas, Agnes, Walter, Jr., and Edgar. A new one was installed and the older one was moved to the crypt in which Concepción was placed.
A half-dozen years later, in March 1931, Concepción’s older brother, Alfonso, an employee of the C.C. Stafford milling company of El Monte, which had a branch in Puente (now in City of Industry) just north of where Valley Boulevard and Hacienda Boulevard meet, was killed in a truck accident. Alfonso was the passenger as his colleague lost control of the vehicle as it descended south on Hacienda through the Puente Hills and rolled over, not far from today’s Hsi Lai Buddhist temple. Walter Temple still owned the Homestead at the time, though he’d moved to Ensenada, Baja California, México to save money and rented much of the ranch to the Golden State Military Academy, so Alfonso was interred with his sister in the crypt. In the early 1990s, I was among Homestead staff who took part in an effort to access small portions of these crypts, during which we noticed an ornate casket in the one with the Laura Temple inscription with more information and small and large coffins in the other crypt—this seemed certain to the final resting places of. For about a century, the siblings have lain in that space unrecognized, but this post at least provides a belated acknowledgment.
Speaking of which, their nephew was another such example who rested in peace in a crypt in the mausoleum for some 90 years until an astonishing discovery was made. In 1981, as the Homestead was about to open and the Brown family, who owned El Encanto Sanitarium at the site for many years, retained rights to what was considered the last empty space. A member of the family opened the crypt, found what seemed to be an infant’s casket, picked it up and though it empty, recording this in a memo. The matter seemed settled until 2018 when one of the Browns passed away and a request was made to use the crypt for her.
Feeling, however, that it was better to err on the side of caution, a few of the Museum staff decided to open the crypt to make sure that what was recorded nearly four decades before was the case. Because my colleagues, understandably, did not want to be present for the opening of the tiny coffin, I undertook this grim task and found an infant’s skeleton dressed in the funereal gown inside. Undoubtedly, it was thought in 1981 that the casket was empty because of how light it was, which was definitely the case, but it was still a surreal experience.
In addition to securing a re-blessing of the space by a monsignor from a nearby Catholic church, we contacted the Browns about this, as well as Beverly Lindebaum Laughlin, who told me and my boss when she donated the 1871 Chickering square grand piano, bought new by F.P.F. Temple and Antonia Margarita Workman and which is now in the Music Practice Room of La Casa Nueva, that she’d long hoped to know the final resting place of her brother, Joseph. He was the son of Teresa and Manuel Duarte’s daughter Loretta (sister of Concepción and Alfonso) and her husband, Joseph Lindebaum, a drummer and band leader in Long Beach.
Well, we’d clearly made that discovery in 2018 and so, when I called Beverly with the news, she was obviously very happy to finally have closure. Additionally, she told me that, as long as her brother’s name was on the shutter, his casket could be moved to the back of the crypt to make room for the Brown family member. The Browns, however, felt that it was only proper that the space remain for young Joseph and so it became with his name and year of birth and death inscribed.
Gennie was able to get his death certificate, as well, and it was learned that the newborn lived just 20 minutes after his birth at 6:40 p.m. on 18 October 1928 due to a laryngeal obstruction and spinal bifida. As with his Duarte relations, the infant’s remains were handled by Utter and Sons, while the burial place was shown as “Temple Mauso—Puente, Calif.” Why the shutter did not have an inscription, however, is unknown, while the Brown family was obviously unaware that little Joseph was interred there when they bought the Homestead a dozen years after his death.
It was a pleasure to participate in this year’s Tombstone Tales program, with kudos to Gennie for her research and meticulous preparation of the slide deck, as well as the exhibit of the Mattie Drown tombstone, coffin fragments unearthed from the fenced plot when the 1998 burials of Walter Temple, Jr. and his wife Nellie Didier was undertaken, an etiquette book with sections on how to plan for and behave at funerals, and several post-mortem photographs of children from the Museum’s collection, including an image that is one of the Temple children from the 1850s and 1860s.
The focus on the children whose final resting places are at El Campo Santo Cemetery, either in the Walter P. Temple Memorial Mausoleum or the areas behind it allowed us to delve into the conditions of childhood mortality from the 1850s to the 1920s, including vast improvements in lowering death, especially for those under five years of age, thanks to improvements in medicine, nutrition and other areas, as well as to share the personal stories of these young ones and their ties to the Workman and Temple family and to our interpretation of the Homestead.