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.
Showing posts with label Sedgwick J. Lynch. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sedgwick J. Lynch. Show all posts
16 February 2014
25 January 2014
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.
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.
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