Tres Hermanos Ranch History Talk at Brea Historical Society Next Wednesday the 16th

For those who have not heard presentations on the history of Tres Hermanos Ranch, the next of these will take place next Wednesday, 16 April at 6:30 p.m. as part of the annual meeting of the Brea Historical Society.

The talk will include the area's use as public lands under Spain and México, its inclusion as part of the Rancho Los Nogales, and its acquisition by the "three brothers," William R. Rowland, William B. Scott and Harry Chandler, who ran cattle on the 2,500-acre property and built a Spanish-style ranch house that survived until the early 2000s.

Now, the Tres Hermanos Conservation Authority, comprised of owner, the City of Industry, and the cities of Chino Hills and Diamond Bar, in which the ranch is located, manages the land and has recently been offering public tours.  The next of these have not yet been announced, but it appears that there will be offerings at least twice a year, if not more.

In the meantime, join us at the Brea Historical Museum at City Hall Park, 495 S. Brea Boulevard.  Seating is limited, so you can RSVP by sending an email to info@breamuseum.org.

Tonner Canyon's Future and Past, Part Three

From the late 1870s, an expanded Rancho Los Nogales, including the original 1,000+ acre land grant of the 1840s and the additional of considerable sections of former public land with both combined to some 10,000 acres, was owned in a partnership between Los Angeles resident Charles M. Wright and Santa Cruz and Los Angeles lumber magnate Sedgwick J. Lynch and, after Lynch's 1881 death, his widow Jane.  A good portion of this enlarged property including much of Tonner Canyon.

While Jane Lynch remained an absentee owner at Santa Cruz, Wright was the on-site representative of the partnership and was something of a colorful figure in the Los Angeles region.  An 1889 history of Los Angeles County gave some background on Wright.  He was born in 1836 in Colchester, Chittenden County, Vermont, in the northwestern part of the state near Lake Champlain and the city of Burlington, and his father was a farmer.  But, in his early twenties, Wright migrated west by ship through Panama and then San Francisco, where he stayed briefly before moving down to Los Angeles.

Wright entered the employ of Tomlinson and Company, one of the main stagecoach companies servicing between the harbor at San Pedro and Los Angeles.  For a time, he left to try his hand at mining in San Bernardino County, but then went back to stage driving with Tomlinson.  By 1870, he formed his own stagecoaching firm with A.L. Seeley, but as the railroad began to make its imprint in southern California, it upstaged the use of the stage and Seeley retired to a ranch in San Diego County, while Wright obtained his interest in Los Nogales. 

In December 1911, just after Wright's death, a Los Angeles Times article titled "Famous Whips of the Past," devoted to famed stagecoach drivers of the Los Angeles region, featured a lengthy description by author Benjamin C. Truman (former publisher of the Los Angeles Star newspaper during the 1870s and author of a few noted books) of a journey he took in 1867 with Wright from Los Angeles to San Diego.

The 1889 Los Angeles County history noted that "the Nogales Ranch, [was] one of the finest properties in the beautiful San Jose Valley."  That name has long passed out of use, but it was denoted as the area spanning from Pomona towards La Puente in the corridor between the Chino Hills and the San Jose Hills in which the 60 and 57 freeways and the two railroad lines (formerly the Southern Pacific and the San Pedro, Los Angeles and Salt Lake lines) now controlled by Union Pacific run. 

Continuing, the account stated that "the ranch contains 9,000 acres, partly fine valley lands and partly hill and valley interspersed, but all of fine quality."  As to the use of the ranch under the ownership of Lynch and Wright, "the property is mainly to sheep and wool growing, about 5,000 sheep being kept.  A few hundred each of cattle and hogs and about seventy-five head of horses help to make up the stock usually to be found on the ranch."  Some portion of the valley land of Los Nogales was also devoted to agriculture: "about 600 acres of land are kept for seeding to barley.  Alfalfa is grown. and a variety of fruit and grapes." 

Noting that "since Mr. Wright became interested in the ownership of the ranch, he has been the resident manager," the piece concluded by averring that "Nogales Ranch is known to be not only one of the largest, but one of the finesse grazing properties of southern California."  As to Wright being "resident manager," it turned out that he occupied the adobe built by Ricardo Vejar for his son, Ramon, as noted in the first entry on this subject last month. 

It appears that Wright moved into the adobe very soon after taking his ownership stake, as he appeared in the 1880 federal census in what was then the San Jose township.  In the household was Wright's younger brother, Mark, and nine other men.  Four of the men were French, including the supervisor and three sheep herders, with all likely being from the Haute Alps region, from where many sheep raisers and herders who came to Los Angeles County hailed.  There were two other sheep herders, including a Mexican and one known only as "Indian Charlie."  There were also an Irish cook, an American machinist, and tanner Stanley Bates, who later married one of Wright's sisters.

In the 1900 census (the 1890 enumeration was consumed in a fire), Wright was still at the Vejar adobe, but had a much smaller household, consisting of himself, a Maine-born farm worker, and a Chinese cook named Wong Ah Chow.  Sometime shortly afterward, however, Wright left for the big city and moved to Los Angeles, where he bought a property in the fashionable West Adams district, a short distance west of the University of Southern California.  There, remarried late in life and with a surviving son, he lived out his remaining days, dying in October 1911 at the age of 75.  In addition to his interests at Los Nogales, he and Jane Lynch invested in real estate in Los Angles, including some valuable property in the Spring Street financial district of downtown.  He survived his longtime Los Nogales co-owner Jane Lynch, by about a year.

Meantime, the two aging owners of the ranch had decided to sell it.  The new owner was a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania dentist and coal and oil investor, Walter Fundenburg.  While he has been discussed here previously, some new information about Fundenburg's varied and rocky career as a southern California real estate investor, including his ownership of the Los Nogales Ranch and part of Tonner Canyon, will be featured next.

Tonner Canyon's Future and Past, Part Two

With December's reporting in the Champion that the City of Industry was looking to buy outright the vast majority of Tonner Canyon, which its redevelopment agency had purchased over a period of years, but had to surrender due to the state's abolishing of those agencies, it seemed a good time to discuss more of the history of that canyon and its surrounding areas.

The last entry concluded with the end of a small growth boom in the Los Angeles area that collapsed in 1875-76, after which George R. Butler, who with his livery stable partner, Wilson Beach, had acquired the Rancho Los Nogales and adjacent public lands from the Vejar family, which had held those properties since the late 1840s.

Butler sold one-third interests to Beach, Spencer H. Wilson, and Charles M. Wright in June 1876.  Wilson, a native of Ontario, Canada, emigrated to Lewiston, New York, just over the border with Canada and immediately north of Niagra Falls and worked as a wheelwright.  Likely the California Gold Rush led him to migrate west, though he wound up in Los Angeles by the mid-1850s. 

He met another recent arrival, a Delaware native named Phineas Banning, who became a stage driver and then gradually acquired property near San Pedro.  Banning and Wilson, in 1856, founded a forwarding and commission business dealing with imported goods arriving by ship at the fledgling harbor and then being sent by stage to Los Angeles--Banning was a noted driver in his earliest years in the area.

Wilson then formed a partnership with Edward N. McDonald raising sheep on Santa Catalina Island, but with floods and then droughts wreaking havoc in the region during the first part of the 1860s, the business floundered.  Ironically, Catalina Island later become a possession of the Banning family, who turned it into a tourist haven that was expanded by chewing gum magnate William Wrigley, Jr.

Purchasing a part of Rancho Los Feliz, just northwest of the town of Los Angeles, Wilson became a stock raiser, perhaps sheep, and raised a family.  Aside from being a captain in a local militia called the Southern Rifles in the early 1860s, he lived a generally quiet life and then purchased his interest in the Los Nogales and nearby areas for $20,000 from Butler.  Only eight months later, though, in early February 1877, the 50-something Wilson died suddenly. 

When Wilson's estate, valued at $30,000, went into probate, his executor was John M. Griffith, a prominent lumber dealer in Los Angeles.  At the end of May 1879, Griffith engineered the sale of Wilson's one-third interest in Los Nogales and the public lands for just under $7,000 to Sedgwick J. Lynch of Santa Cruz, who just happened to be a former partner with Griffith in a Los Angeles lumber business that was highly successful during those boom years of the early to mid-Seventies.  Land values had clearly declined in the previous three years as the boom collapsed and the economy stayed sour until well into the following decade.

Lynch, a native of Sandy Lake, Pennsylvania, which was near the famed oil and coal regions in that state, was born in 1822 and apprenticed to a carpenter in his teens and then migrated to Cincinnati as a young man, working for a building contractor.  That firm sent him to Nashville to work on construction projects, but with the news of the Gold Rush reaching him, Lynch left and joined the migrating hordes to the west coast, where he arrived in October 1849.  He worked as a ship repairman on the Sacramento River and mail carrier between Sacramento and San Francisco and also built structures in the growing city by the bay.  Trying his hand in the gold mines, he made a small fortune and returned to San Francisco by summer 1850 and became a contractor.  He was a member of the notorious Vigilance Committee that took over San Francisco amidst rising crime, but then left the city.

In 1851, he relocated to Santa Cruz and opened up a carpenter shop, staying in the coastal town for a short period before running a wood planing mill in Oakland and serving on a state-sponsored surveying team that worked throughout California in 1854.  Returning to Santa Cruz, when that project was completed, Lynch returned to contracting and then formed a lumber mill, a lumber yard and a wholesale and retail store for selling the wood products.  He had a partner for many years, George Gregg, and the business prospered, to the point that branch locations in the southern part of the state were established at Los Angeles, Wilmington and the new town of Compton.

After Lynch and Gregg ended their partnership in 1870, Lynch started a new enterprise with the well-established John M. Griffith, who'd had a stage company serving passengers and freight with his brother-in-law, John Tomlinson.  They were the main competitors of the same Phineas Banning mentioned above until Tomlinson's death in 1868.  Griffith then turned to the lumber business just as the local boom was starting by the 1870s.  When Lynch joined forces with Griffith, the two rode the wave of economic growth, building a factory making sashes, doors, blinds and other general milling.

Lynch decided to retire by 1876, just in time for the bust that drove the economy into the doldrums and returned to Santa Cruz, where he continued with banking and other businesses before his death in May 1881, not quite sixty years of age.

In 1878, however, Lynch filed a foreclosure action against George Butler, Wilson Beach and local banker Isaias W. Hellman, of the famed Farmers and Merchants Bank, to the lands at Rancho Los Nogales and public lands Butler and Beach had purchased from the Vejars during the earlier part of the decade.  In early March, a mortgage sale was held and Lynch took over everything Beach and Butler once owned, except the interests of Spencer Wilson and Charles Wright sold to them by Butler two years before.  As noted above, Lynch then went through his former partner Griffith to acquire the Wilson portion.

As for Charles Wright, he kept his share of the Los Nogales property and, after Lynch's 1881 death, teamed up with the latter's widow, Jane, and former a partnership that ran the large Rancho Los Nogales (including the former public land), totaling near 10,000 acres for over a quarter-century.  More on that next time.

Tonner Canyon's Future and Past, Part One

In the last month or so, the Champion newspaper has reported that the City of Industry, which acquired the majority of Tonner Canyon north of Carbon Canyon from 1978 onwards through its redevelopment agency, is looking to repurchase the several properties within the canyon from the successor agency to the redevelopment agency, which was abolished along with all others in the state a few years ago. 

According to the city, it still has plans for a reservoir for future water supply, a proposal that has met with opposition from environmental groups, as well as the City of Brea, which lies below the project site.  Meantime, the cities of Diamond Bar (which has its city limits within the smaller section at the north end of the Canyon, essentially north of Grand Avenue) and Chino Hills (with its boundaries basically south of Grand and taking up a larger portion of Tonner) have zoned smaller areas within Tonner Canyon to meet state mandates for affordable housing.  These "place-marker" actions are not indicative of concrete plans to allow for construction of these units, but merely comply with the law requiring zoning for them.

As our region continued to develop, pressures are increasing for housing and other forms of development in those last bastions of open space--namely the canyons and steeper hill areas that constitute the last remaining native animal and plant habitats, but also provide some of the greatest risks for natural disasters including fire, flood, landslides and so forth.

Carbon Canyon has clearly been discussed frequently on this blog regarding the threats to its future through continued attempts to develop housing projects within it and the recent inauguration of sewer line work for the 76-unit Forestar Canyon Hills project, started within the last several weeks, is an indication that the improved (even if modestly) economy and housing market are going to bring further pressures for developments.  Starting 21 January, the Brea City Council will be holding hearings on an appeal for the 162-unit Madrona project on the Brea side of the Canyon.  Approval of this project would further constitute greater demands on fire protection and traffic flow in the area in addition to losing a significant swath of oak and walnut woodlands, which are rapidly vanishing from our region.

Tonner Canyon doesn't get as much attention because it remains largely hidden from view and scrutiny and has remained almost completely undeveloped (there are scout camps and oil wells at the southern end closer to Brea), but that will certainly change in coming years and, perhaps, decades.  It is, actually, astonishing that Tonner has remained in this state and, frankly, if Industry had not acquired its holdings over a quarter century period, there would almost have certainly been some development, especially at the northern end, by now.  Forecasting the future is not the aim here, but it stands to reason that there will be many vested interests (cities, environmental organizations, developers, and others) contesting what is really some of the last large-scale open space in the area.

As to its past, new rummaging around has revealed some interesting history.  Much of this goes back to the Mexican era of California, when the local area was divided into large cattle ranches, interspersed with public lands, set aside to allow ranch owners to graze their herds in common areas to avoid overgrazing on those ranches.  A good deal of the local hill lands, from the Puente Hills in Whittier to the Chino Hills in this area, were set aside as public lands.

With the seizure of Mexican California by the United States in 1847, subsequent years brought about the conversion of these public lands to properties sold to private individuals.  With respect to Tonner Canyon, there was a mixture of ranch and public land properties that created what was eventually a 10,000 or so acre holding known commonly as Los Nogales Ranch.

The ranch's origins came in 1840 with the grant of Rancho Los Nogales, amounting to slightly over 1,000 acres, by Mexican California's governor Juan B. Alvarado to Jose de la Luz Linares.  Linares died within a few years, however, and his widow María de Jesús Garcia, decided, in 1847, to sell the property to Ricardo Vejar.  Vejar had been, for the previous decade, co-owner of the Rancho San José, a large property to the north and east that he received with Ignacio Palomares.  While the latter built his home and raised cattle on the north part of San José, Vejar settled on the south side at the base of what is now called Elephant Hill in Pomona.

After acquiring the Los Nogales property, Vejar probably ran his cattle on it without much in the way of improvement and then came the Gold Rush, which burst forth in 1848-49 and continued full steam through the mid-1850s, allowing ranchers like Vejar to make fortunes supplying fresh meat to miners and other residents of the burgeoning new state.  Flush with cash, Vejar built two substantial two-story homes, one on San José and the other, for his son Ramon, on Los Nogales.  While they probably did some farming for personal and local use, they almost certainly relied on cattle raising for their living.

The glory days of the Gold Rush petered out, however, after about 1855, as placer production dropped and cattle ranchers faced not only declining demand for beef, but competition from imported longhorn cattle, a superior breed, from Texas.   A national economic downturn in 1857 made matters worse, but nothing could compare the dual disaster that came in the early 1860s. 

First, over a month of solid rain in December 1861 and January 1862, estimated to be up to 50 inches in some places, caused massive flooding throughout the state.  This was followed by two consecutive years, in 1863 and 1864, of almost no precipitation--estimates being about four inches per year locally (we should note here that 2013 had an official reading of 3.89 inches, the lowest since official records were started in 1877 and comparable to the 1860s drought--the difference being that we import huge amounts of water now.)

The Vejars, along with many ranchers, were wiped out by these conditions and borrowed from merchants in Los Angeles to keep afloat, but were unable to pay these loans with the drought proved to be the proverbial last straw.  Foreclosure took the family's portion of San José, which soon became the property of Louis Phillips, an eastern European-born Jew, whose name is reflected in today's Phillips Ranch subdivision in southwestern Pomona.  Phillips lived in the Ricardo Vejar adobe below Elephant Hill until he razed it and built a French Second Empire house in 1875, a structure that survives today and is a Pomona city historical landmark and under the management of the Historical Society of the Pomona Valley.

As to Los Nogales, the family held on to it for several more years, but began selling it off in sections during the early to mid 1870s.  It seems probably that they did so because the economy improved dramatically in the late 1860s and a small rush of settlers, many leaving the southern states devastated by the Civil War, came to Los Angeles, which experienced its first development boom.  Railroads, banks, harbor improvements, new towns, and the subdivision of the old Spanish and Mexican ranchos to farms were among the features of this boom, which lasted through 1875.

The Vejars sold Los Nogales to two livery stable proprietors from Los Angeles, Wilson Beach and George R. Butler--perhaps they had been customers or were friends, there's no way to tell. It is also assumed that the Vejars acquired the hillside public land to the east that had been the former common grazing lands mentioned above, though Butler and Beach may have done this, as well.  Ramon Vejar moved to what is now La Verne and Ricardo remained in an adobe house he constructed in what is now Walnut and died there in 1881.  Members of the Vejar family still live in the area today.

Wilson Beach was born about 1823 in Ohio and came to Los Angeles sometime in the 1850s, where he was listed in the 1860 census as a stock raiser with Pennsylvania native Jacob Metzker.  The two self-reported a combined $12,000 value of their personal property, presumably the bulk of this reflected in the cattle herds.  As noted earlier, though, the floods and droughts were on the horizon, and, in an 1867 voter registration list, Beach's occupation was given as farmer.  By the early 1870s, though, he decided to become a livery (horse) stable keeper and partnered with George R. Butler.

Butler, was born in New York, about 1836 and seems to have come to Los Angeles during the 1860s.  In the 1870 census, he is listed as owner of a livery stable on Main Street in Los Angeles, and took on Beach as a partner.  Butler was also the city treasurer of the town during the early part of decade.  In July 1874, the Los Angeles Herald ran a short article noting that the two were selling their stable to Macy and Wilson for $14,000, so that the paid could "devote their time and attention to sheep-raising upon their extensive ranch." 

Sheep ranching, in fact, became a growing part of the local economy from the mid-1860s onward (though it existed before that), as such transplants from central and northern California as James Irvine and the Bixby brothers bought cheap ranch land during the droughts of 1863-64 and stocked them with sheep.  With the economy growing by leaps and bounds, it made sense for Beach and Butler to quit the livery stable business and head out to Los Nogales, where they almost certainly occupied the Ramon Vejar Adobe as their headquarters.

Unfortunately for them, the economy soon crashed.  San Francisco speculators with stock from silver mines at Virginia City, Nevada created a massive bubble that burst in late August 1875 causing the suspension of the Bank of California, whose president was found the day after floating in San Francisco Bay.  The telegraph brought the news to Los Angeles, where the town's two commercial banks, Farmers and Merchants and Temple and Workman suspended operations for a month after a panic led depositors to swarm the banks demanding their deposits.  While the former reopened with no damage to its operations, Temple and Workman remained closed until a loan could be made, but that, too, failed to stem the tide, and the bank succumbed in early 1876.  Los Angeles fell into a lengthy downturn that lasted well into the 1880s and led to a population decline, a phenomenon not witnessed since.

Not surprisingly, Butler decided to sell out at Los Nogales.  In June 1876, he sold off 1/3 shares of his holdings to his former partner Beach and to Charles M. Wright and Spencer H. Wilson--for a total of $64,000.  He then returned to his old profession, opening the Fashion Livery Stable in Los Angeles, which he operated for years afterward.  In May 1893, however, while riding his horse-drawn wagon in the city, he was bucked off the vehicle and was mortally wounded, dying a few days later.

As for Los Nogales, a new phase of its ownership will come with the next phase of this post . . .