USA > California > Los Angeles County > History of Pomona Valley, California, with biographical sketches of the leading men and women of the valley who have been identified with its growth and development from the early days to the present > Part 23
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of mountain and valley; fourth, because of the giant live oaks and sycamores that adorn its grounds, oaks that an English lord would give $10,000 an acre to possess." Except for slight frost and fog, all this is true indeed, but the explana- tion of the name Claremont may be enlarged. A number of Spanish names were suggested by Mr. Palmer at the company's request and the one English name, the latter being chosen because also one of the company had lived at Claremont, New Hampshire.
Thus again the derivation of a town name is quite at variance with what is generally supposed to have been, or what might have been expected. Claremont was not named simply for its clearness or altitude, nor as it might properly have been for some Spanish name suggestive of its origin; Pomona College is not an agricultural school, though the name of the town Pomona was suggested by the grangers, North Pomona or Pomona should have been Palomares; El Monte does not mean mountain, but thicket ; nor is there any considerable bridge at Puente as there is at El Monte ; Spadra was not named for a spade, but for a Spadra Bluffs in Arkansas; Chino has nothing to do with Chinamen, but with curly leafed willows, chino meaning curly ; San Dimas was a name given in the strange fashion recounted, not to the town first but to the canyon, its first designa- tion being Mud Springs, and then Mound City, there being doubtless no true mound city anywhere about; and finally the most appropriate names of all are not in use save as San Antonio is given to the little hamlet at the canyon mouth, and San José, the original name of the rancho, is retained simply for the "town- ship." because another city in the State was already known as San José.
The town of Claremont was launched with a boom. On the day of the auction hundreds of people drove up from Pomona and surrounding regions, and excursionists from Riverside and Los Angeles. The band played and the com- pany's agents pointed out the choice corners and the mountain view. Carpenters were at work on the new railway station and a gang of men were laying track. The crowd gathered about the front of the new store buildings across the park from the station, and teams of all sorts were massed around, while Colonel Hola- bird sold the lots, checking them off on the large map of "Claremont the Beauti- ful," conspicuously posted in full view. More than 300 lots were bought, the sales amounting to $85,000, and some lots were sold and resold the same day. Choice corners went as high as $600 and $700. Many of the spectators came from curiosity. One of these, a pioneer's daughter, sitting upon her horse as the auction proceeded, wondered what madness could induce people to pay such prices for lots in the desert. But later it was to be her home for a long term of years! Others went away disappointed because the prices were so high they could not buy.
On high ground in the center of the townsite "Hotel Claremont" was hur- ried to completion. Four or five small houses were built by the company, and two or three better residences by Colonel Holabird and others. The schoolhouse also was built about this time, located here by the earnest efforts of Colonel Hola- bird and Mr. Palmer, though serving for all the La Verne-Claremont district.
Then came the collapse of the boom and the town died. With one or two exceptions the houses were all empty ; the big new hotel was tenanted only by squirrels and bats. The graded streets were recarpeted with wild flowers, and sage brush and yerba santa reclothed the face of the earth, hiding the unseemly erup- tion of white corner stakes, and protecting with their green dress the naked isola-
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tion of those live oaks which had been selected as sentinels to stand in the center of certain streets.
The town had reverted to its ancient estate, when rattlesnakes and coyotes were its chief inhabitants. And this "prehistoric" age has still more of interest to many than the later times. For it was then a wild country in more senses than one. Vegetable and animal life were wild indeed, and so was human life. Not until 1880 or 1881 did the Indians leave their rancheria on the eastern edge of Indian Hill, moving to San Diego and the mountains, at least a remnant of them, after the majority had died of smallpox and had been buried there on the hillside. Three times in a score of years this disease had decimated the camp as it had other Indian settlements in the Valley. Along the San Gabriel River, hundreds of the poor victims, suffering with the irritation and fever, would rush into the stream and quickly die. In the seventies there were over two hundred Indians at the rancheria on the east of Indian Hill.
Before their dispersion the Indians were a convenient source of labor for settlers who used to drive up to the rancheria for them, as Kewen Dorsey says. In those days he was living first with his grandfather, Uncle Billy Rubottom, at the Rubottom Hotel in Spadra, and then at Mnd Springs, where he was farming. A half-brother of Kewen Dorsey by the name of Jeff was living in 1880 in a little house between Claremont and Cucamonga, where a curious incident occurred. Two men came one day to the Rubottom house in Spadra to spend the night. Before morning they got up and stole away, leaving a valise with some brick in it, but stealing Jeff's overcoat and some blankets. In spite of the valise Uncle Billy suspected trouble when he discovered that the men had gone. So he opened the valise and found the bricks and soon missed the overcoat and blankets. Angered more by the deception of the valise and its bricks than by the loss of the clothing, he made up a little party who set out to chase the robbers. Following them over the old San Bernardino Road, which ran by the south of Claremont not far from Cucamonga Avenue, they finally caught the thieves on the Rains' place at Cucamonga. And the plunder, including Jeff's overcoat, was found, by a strange coincidence, hidden under Jeff's own house.
The "desert," between Mud Springs and Cucamonga, was the scene of many a savage chase and tragic finish in earlier days. Here John Rains, proprietor of the Cucamonga Ranch, was murdered. The story of how he failed to return from town one day, and his team was found tied by the Charter Oak, how the Vigilantes hunted for days for the body and then found it by the buzzards circling overhead, in a cactus patch where he had been dragged by a rope and horribly mutilated-this story belongs perhaps more properly to Cucamonga. But this purple desert was the stage, and the whole countryside was stirred by the tragedy. so that a reward of $1,000 was put on the head of Juan Carillo, who was found under incriminating circumstances at the rancho, and a few days later he was shot as he was driving along the road in the wash east of Claremont. Then began. so it is said, the reign of terror created by Vasquez and his band, after Vasquez bad seen Carillo on his death bed and vowed vengeance on the Vigilantes and all their supporters.
But the Claremont region was not entirely without human inhabitants, other than bandits and Indians before the boom, even as far back as the seventies. Here and there was the shack of a homesteader squatting on his quarter section of wash. A half dozen nearly dead peach trees across from the eucalyptus grove at the mouth of the San Antonio Canyon mark the spot where the Kincaids lived
11
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in 1870 and raised choice fruit. Within the decade following Dr. Fairchild started his house and walled garden between the canyon and Indian Hill. And there were the bee men, especially Toots Martin and Peter Fleming. For Toots Martin, who was among the first settlers in El Monte, in Spadra, in Pomona, and in San Dimas, was also a pioneer, in fact the first to reside, in the region of Claremont, after the early Mexican days. Coming to El Monte as a boy with his father, in 1853, he had gone to school in Lexington, where his father, Uncle Billy, was so prominent as a hotel man, school superintendent and supervisor, had taught school in the old Mission district, and in 1865 had married Nancy M. Thompson, daughter of C. C. Thompson, who had come to El Monte in 1852. From 1869 to 1872 they had a bee ranch in San Dimas Canyon, north of Charles Cunningham. And then father and son each filed on a quarter section of land. The father, Uncle Billy Martin, had been getting out shakes with one McCarthy in the Dalton canyons, and now took up the 160 acres, which he sold in 1887 to the San José Land and Water Company. The son, Toots Martin, filed on 156 acres in section nine, which is west of Indian Hill Boulevard, and which lay just north of the upper line of the San José Rancho. Here, on what was later known as the Charlton place, he built his house about twenty-five yards west of the great oak, which was a big tree then. Good water was found here at a depth of only twenty-nine feet. There was then only one other building anywhere about, an old adobe on what was later the H. A. Palmer place, El Alisal, now owned by Rev. E. S. Young. Here Andres Duarte had lived on eighty acres adjoining Martin's place on the east, and had sold it to Black Wyatt, but Wyatt had found it too lonesome with so many Indians and so much hunting about, and turned it over to Toots Martin, going to Los Nietos to live. "El Alisal" was named for the willows which once grew abundantly in the ravine which crosses the place, although the word aliso strictly means alder and not willow. A spring in the ravine was noted as one of the best in the Valley. There was a legend of Andres Duarte which Mr. Palmer told as follows: "There is a tradition that he was possessed of considerable wealth, and that immediately upon the transfer of California to the United States he converted all his property into Spanish and Mexican coin and ingots of gold and silver. This pile I have heard variously estimated at from $60,000 to $80,000 Mexican of that date. After his death and many times sub- sequently, efforts to uncover this buried treasure were made. As late as 1902-3 I was importuned by a Mexican claiming to belong to the Alvarados to permit him to prospect for this caché, he claiming that a key or chart had recently come into his possession, by which he could locate it. My recollection is that Martin thought very lightly of the theory and, in my conversation with him regarding it, laughed heartily. Nevertheless at least half a dozen Mexicans have applied to me for permission to prospect the ground, and when I came to clearing up the ground I found many holes and evidences of prospecting around almost every old large tree on the place. So far as I know nothing was ever found." The story is very likely a variant of the story of buried treasure related in the first chapter.
Martin's quarter section was a valuable piece of property, containing a variety of soil, some good fruit land, some black land long used as a Chinese garden, and also containing an abundance of water in the Martin cienegas. But his chief occupation was that of raising bees, of which he had hundreds of hives. Yet though he lived here for a dozen years or more, it had been in the allotment of railroad land and he was most of the time in litigation over the title. Eventu-
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ally Carlton Seaver and George McClary were able to secure a good title and came into possession of the land. That to the east was secured by Charles French. also a prominent business man in Pomona. It was during his residence in what is now Claremont that Toots Martin was justice of the peace for the township, and after his removal to Pomona, in 1884, that he served on the school board and later as county supervisor.
At first Seaver and McClary bought the Martin tract together, but later they divided the place, McClary taking the upper eighty and Seaver the lower. Mr. McClary used to say, "Seaver was always a lucky dog. I said, 'Which half do you want ?' and he replied, 'I don't care,' so I took the north half. But it was the south half which proved more valuable because of its water. After we had been associated in banking for some time we drew lots in dividing up the stock, but my stock was in concerns that failed. If Mr. Seaver were cast adrift in an open boat on the Atlantic with no oars, he would land at Liverpool all right." Yet everyone knows, McClary as well as others, that Mr. Seaver's success was not due to his good luck.
Peter Fleming was another man who was engaged for a time in the pro- duction of honey in the fields near Indian Hill. Mr. Fleming had come to Cali- fornia from Boston by the way of Panama in 1874, and had brought with him good letters of introduction (among them one from Endicott, then secretary of war) to Phineas Banning, the transportation king. Peter Fleming had been the private secretary of Ethan Allen, grandson of the Ethan Allen of Revolutionary fame. He was dressed in the usual mode of Boston gentlemen when he met Phineas Banning at the wharf on arriving, the latter in blue flannel with pant legs tucked in his boots. Banning met him with the greeting, "Young man, the first thing you do, take off that biled shirt and store clothes and get into blue jeans and boots ; then you can be a man among men." And a man he proved to be in full measure. After a year in Spadra, his partner absconded with all their proceeds, and he moved to this place, which they called Sycamore Ranch, north- east of Claremont and east of the Kessler place, which he afterward bought. Leasing the land at first from Pancho Palomares, he started a bee ranch, beginning with thirty stands. From this the business grew to a thousand stands, yielding an income of $5,000 or $6,000 a year, with honey at only five cents a pound. Nine carloads of honey were shipped one season to Liverpool. In this business Mr. Fleming was assisted by his son, Edward J. Fleming, who was later city attorney of Pomona, and is now a prominent lawyer in Los Angeles. Soon, however, Mr. Fleming turned his attention to orange growing and especially to developing water ; but the account of his important operations in tunneling for water and in connection with the Sycamore Water Development Company, to whom his Claremont property was sold, and with the Consolidated Water Company of which he was superintendent, has already been told. Mr. Fleming was long and well known as a thoroughly reliable and successful business man, but his kindness and helpfulness to those who were in trouble and his generosity to such worthy causes as that of the Fruit and Flower Mission were not so generally known, especially as he disliked any publicity in such matters.
Northwest of the present town, and looking down over the Scanlon Mesa, Frank Evans, in 1873, squatted on his homestead where is now the Claremont School for Boys.
Claremont has been referred to again and again as the desert, but few now realize that for years the lower part of the town was wet and swampy. One
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could not go directly from the college to the station, but must make a wide detour because of the marsh south of Third Street and west of College Avenue. Mr. Biele's block between First and Second had to be drained with much underground tile pipe. The Pomona Land and Water Company had already begun to develop water below the railway line.
POMONA COLLEGE
To return now to the Claremont of 1887 and 1888, the Pacific Land Improve- ment Company found itself, not long after the sale, with a dead town on its hands, a big hotel as empty as a bubble, and with a multitude of disappointed customers, many of whom had still other payments to make on their unfortunate purchases. Overwhelmed with obligations and fearful for the town as to which they had hoped and promised so much, they searched earnestly for some way out of their distress. A second auction sale in January, 1888, was much less successful than the first. In this predicament their attention was turned to Pomona College which, in the fall of 1888, was trying to raise money for its first building on Scanlon Mesa at the mouth of Live Oak Canyon. The company offered the college the hotel building and two or three hundred lots in the townsite, if the college would move to Claremont permanently and at once with even one depart- ment of its work. From this time on the fortunes and life of the town were so inextricably interwoven with those of the college and the importance of the college to the town has been such that the history of the town is largely the story of the college. This is not the time nor the place in which to develop this history. It has been written already by Dr. C. B. Sumner in his charming and faithful story of the college .* Only the outlines of its earlier history can here be sketched. For this purpose it is necessary to go back to the beginnings of the Pilgrim Con- gregational Church in Pomona. Rev. C. B. Sumner, a home missionary of the denomination for Arizona and New Mexico, who had come to Arizona and Cali- fornia after successful school and church work in Massachusetts, on account of his wife's health, had been persuaded to organize this church in Pomona. In the midst of these beginnings, both pastor and church were peculiarly interested in the movement of thoughtful people in this section, especially among the Congrega- tional churches, to establish a college of high academic and Christian standards in Southern California. After various conferences the General Association of Congregational Churches of Southern California appointed an education com- mittee with full powers and instructions to organize the college and to select a location at once. Several generous offers of land and money were considered by the committee-two propositions especially, one from Beaumont and one from Lugonia ; but a more central spot was desired and the committee finally accepted the offer made by Mr. H. A. Palmer, of eighty acres on Scanlon Mesa, supplemented by forty acres adjoining, offered by two Boston ladies, the Misses Wheeler, a wonderfully attractive site. A board of trustees was appointed and Mr. Sumner was selected to take charge of the organization and the raising of money. For this he gave up the attractive new pastorate and threw himself with characteristic energy into the stupendous task. The canvass for funds began, and met with good response, considering the times, not only in Congregational circles but also from others in Pomona who were interested in higher education.
So far the movement had advanced, when in December, 1887, it was felt to be important that academic work should be commenced at once, instead of waiting
" "The Story of Pomona College"-C. B. Sumner; published by the Pilgrim Press.
CLAREMONT, 1890. FIRST COLLEGE BUILDING
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till the beginning of the school year in the following September. Accordingly Mr. Sumner visited the McPherron Academy in Los Angeles and invited Prof. F. P. Brackett, a recent graduate of Dartmouth, who was teaching there, to come to Pomona and begin the work. With rare faith and prophetic vision, Mr. Sumner told of the plans for the college and its possible future. The first of January, 1888, found a dozen pupils gathered with Professor Brackett in the chapel of Pilgrim Church, which had been offered as a schoolroom. During the six months following, this group of students, with a few additions, was prepared for the formal opening of the college in the fall.
The formal opening occurred September 12, 1888, in a rented house, called the Ayer cottage, at the corner of White Avenue and Fifth Street in Pomona. The faculty consisted of Rev. E. C. Norton, a graduate of Amherst, who had been for four years professor at Yankton College, and who was chosen as principal of the preparatory department ; Mrs. H. A. Storrs, wife of Engineer Storrs of Pomona ; Miss Edith Blades, daughter of Judge Franklin Blades, and later wife of Mr. W. A. Lewis of Pomona ; and F. P. Brackett, whose students in Pilgrim Chapel formed the nucleus of the first graduating class, and who had also had two years' experience as principal of academies in New England. There were also teachers of art and of music. No president was elected at first, but Professor Norton presided over the internal affairs of the college and Mr. C. B. Sumner, as secretary and financial agent for the board of trustees, was in charge of all outside matters.
The first board of trustees consisted of James T. Ford of San Bernardino, H. K. W. Bent and D. D. Hill of Pasadena, A. J. Wells of Long Beach, J. K. McLean and H. A. Palmer of Oakland, C. B. Sumner and C. B. Sheldon of Pomona, Seth Richards of Boston, George W. Marston and James H. Harwood of San Diego, Nathan W. Blanchard of Santa Paula, Judge Anson Brunson of Los Angeles, T. C. Hunt of Riverside, and Elwood Cooper of Santa Barbara.
Just two weeks after the opening day, the corner stone of a new building upon the foothill site was laid, with impressive ceremony. It was to be made of brown stone from Martin's quarry near by, but the building was never completed. It was impossible to collect subscriptions or to raise additional funds in 1888, and the offer of members of the Pacific Land Improvement Company, referred to above, looked like a Godsend. In accepting the offer there was no thought at the time of giving up permanently the plans for the college on Scanlon Mesa. Only the Preparatory School was to be located at Claremont. But after the work had been established here at Claremont, it became more and more evident that any separation was impracticable, and the Mesa project, with its new town of Piedmont, its foundations for a building, and all its expectations, was abandoned. And eventually the preparatory work also was discontinued after the local high school had become established. But all this occurred long after the removal to Claremont. At that time the boom hotel, called Claremont Hall, was remarkably well adapted to school use. The large halls on the lower floor were used as reci- tation rooms, the dining hall and kitchens by the boarding department, two or three members of the faculty and their families occupied suites of rooms, and there were plenty left for the students, one section assigned to men and another to women. And still there was room to spare! The name of Claremont Hall was later changed to Sumner Hall in memory of Mrs. Mary Sumner, the devoted
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wife of Doctor Sumner, who shared so largely in his labor and sacrifice for the college.
A tower of strength to the college in the early days was Mr. Thomas Barrows, who moved to Claremont with his family from his ranch in the Ojai Valley. Two of his children, David and Charlotte, were in the first graduating class ; his large house was one of the first to be built in the town, and his time and strength and counsel, as well as his property, were always at the service of the college.
Four teachers came to join the teaching force in the early years, who were to remain on the faculty to the present time. The first of these was Miss Phebe Estelle Spalding, later Professor of English Literature, who came to Pomona from Carleton College in the summer of 1889. A year later came Rev. D. H. Colcord, a graduate of Amherst and of Andover Theological Seminary, who was finally persuaded to surrender his pastorate at Monrovia for the teacher's toga, at the head of the Latin Department. In 1892 Rev. A. D. Bissell and Professor G. G. Hitchcock were added to the staff. The former, a graduate of Amherst and of Yale Theological Seminary, came as Professor of German : the latter, a gradu- ate of the University of Nebraska, came as Professor of Chemistry and Physics, and later of Physics alone.
Two others should be named among those who helped to shape the early course of the college as well as its later life. Professor Albert John Cook, who had already gained an enviable reputation and many friends at Michigan Agricultural College, his Alma Mater, brought to Pomona a national prestige, and his helpful influence was felt far beyond the college, especially among the farmers and horti- culturists of the state, until, at the age of seventy, he accepted the post of State Horticulturist. Professor George S. Sumner, son of Dr. C. B. Sumner, and a member of the first graduating class in the college, returned after winning his doctorate at Yale to teach in his Alma Mater, and soon to establish himself not only in his department of Economics, but as a strong leader in all the affairs of the college.
While this force of teachers, with others who did not remain so long, were moulding largely the internal life of the college, for it has always been peculiarly democratic in its policy, the general administration of affairs was taken over, in 1890, by its first president, Dr. Cyrus G. Baldwin, a graduate of Oberlin and then Professor of Latin in Ripon College. His coming marked a real advance in the life of the institution, and indeed of the town. He was primarily a seeker after men. First he sought the best men he could find for the faculty, Professors Bissell, Hitchock and Cook, already mentioned, as well as Professor Frederick Starr, later the noted anthropologist of Chicago, Professor Albert Shaw, Miss M. E. Harris and Miss Mary M. McLean (now Mrs. Richard Olney), lady princi- pals, Miss Mary E. Allen, Professor and Mrs. Brannan and John Comfort Fill- more, head of the School of Music and an author of note in the musical world, Mrs. Evangeline White Hardon, his niece, and also an instructor in voice here, rare teachers all, and of the finest spirit, were selected by him. And he was a seeker of men, too, in his relations with students, always striving to draw out the best talent in each and develop that most effectively. Through his efforts some increase was made in salaries. As the college entered technically upon its col- legiate work, as distinct from academic or secondary, at a meeting of the trustees held in the summer of 1890, Professor Norton and Professor Brackett were officially elected to professorships, the former in Greek and the latter in Mathe- matics. Other professorships followed. Through President Baldwin's influence
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