Crossing (County) Lines With a Photo of La Vida Mineral Springs, circa 1920

This is, so far, the earliest photograph of La Vida Mineral Springs that this blogger has seen, though there may be others out there somewhere.  In any case, it is one showing Carbon Canyon Road looking east with the mineral springs out of the camera's view to the left, though there is a car parked to the side (a sign by the car reads "Red Crown Gasoline," a product of Standard Oil Company of California, now Chevron, so a small filling station was obviously there) and a couple of eucalyptus trees in the frame, as well.

Carbon Canyon Road was completed from Olinda (Brea) to Chino (Chino Hills) in 1914 and remained a dirt road, with frequent washouts and improvements made periodically until it was fully paved in the late 1920s.  This image is postmarked on this date, 12 September, back in 1920—exactly 100 years ago—and was sent from San Juan Capistrano in southern Orange County.

Perched on the lower part of the steep hillside at the right is a small, dark brown cabin.  Back in 2012, this blog posted about James Williams, who'd lived in what became Paramount near Long Beach and managed the La Vida Mineral Springs on behalf of Edward F. Gaines, owner of the Flying Cow Ranch just to the west where the Olinda Village community is situated.  Williams had a house on the east side of the road across from the springs and died in 1919, after which his family left the springs and canyon.

Gaines' nephew, Allen Abbott, was managing the resort in 1920 and it may be that this was a new house built for him.  Incidentally, there are remnants of stone steps at the base of the hill in this general vicinity and these may be what was left of an access to this dwelling in days gone by.  It looks like there might be a path up to the house to the east of it.  The structure appears to be quite small with just a few rooms and, though it appears to be lifted off a small foundation, it has to be wondered how it fared with heavy rainfall (there were a couple of flood years during the Twenties, especially the winter of 1926-27) or during wildfires (a major one struck the canyon in 1929, for example.)

The reverse has a message from someone only identified as "Mae" to her sister Mrs. Carl Ward of Collyer, Kansas.  There is nothing said about the resort or the canyon, just a reference to a box of roses sent back to the Midwest and an acknowledgement of letters received.  So, there didn't seem to be much of a reason to look into who Mrs. Ward or Mae wight be, but a little searching was conducted.

It turns out that the two were Mae and Blanche Purinton before they married in their hometown of Collyer.  The 1920 census recorded them both living in that town in northwestern Kansas and which now has barely more than 100 souls roughly halfway between Kansas City and Denver, but Mae must have moved very soon after because she wound up living in San Juan Capistrano and was recorded there in the 1930 census.  As for Blanche, she and her family also picked up stakes and came to Orange County, settling in Santa Ana, though she later moved to the Sacramento area and remained there the rest of her life.

The maiden name of the sisters is spelled slightly differently, but they were distant relatives of Cleve A. Purington, who was living in Long Beach in 1920 and who may well have been the reason why Mae and then her sister migrated to the area.  Purington who worked in a shipyard at East San Pedro/Wilmington at the Port of Los Angeles became, a few years later in 1923, the founder with other Long Beach people of the Sleepy Hollow community just over the line in San Bernardino County to the east of La Vida.

A little searching found that Cleve (1882-1928) and Mae and Blanche's father, Leonard were five generations down from their shared ancestor, Elisha Purinton/Purington (1698-1751), who was three generations down from the first of the family to come to America, George, who was born in Devon on the southwestern tip of England and settled in York, Maine by the middle 1630s, about fifteen years after the Plymouth Colony was established in Massachusetts.

Perhaps it was Cleve who began visiting La Vida when Gaines operated it, though, by the mid-1920s, William Newton Miller, an oil operator living in Anaheim, took over and greatly operations with a large bath house, more cabins, and a bottling plant to poduce La Vida Mineral Water in a variety of flavors.  Miller and his descendants operated the resort for close to a half-century before it was sold to Leo Hayashi of Los Angeles in the 1970s.  Hayashi operated the springs until it closed about fifteen years later after a fire destroyed a hotel the Millers built years back.  The last vestige, the La Vida roadhouse closed in the early 2000s and all the remains today are remnants, including an old water tank on the side of the hill.

This photograph turned out to not only be an early view of La Vida (well, more of Carbon Canyon Road and the house across the street), but also had an unexpected connection to the founder of Sleepy Hollow to boot.  The image is made available courtesy of the Workman and Temple Family Homestead Museum, a City of Industry Historic-Cultural Landmark.