USA > California > Los Angeles County > Los Angeles > Los Angeles from the mountains to the sea : with selected biography of actors and witnesses to the period of growth and achievement, Volume II > Part 18
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He was born in Norfolk county, Ontario, June 30, 1837, of English and Scotch-Irish ancestry. In the paternal line his first American an- cestor, Edward Freeman, located at Woodbridge, New Jersey, as carly as 1658. Many of the Freemans in subsequent generations were promi- nent in public and business affairs. Daniel Freeman's grandfather was also named Daniel and was a Methodist preacher and missionary who went in the interests of the church from New Jersey to Canada, and devoted a number of years to the extension of the church and the propa- gation of Christianity. It is said that he preached the first Protestant sermon in the city of Detroit. He organized many .congregations through the province of Ontario and in the state of Michigan. He had a farm in Ontario, and there his son, father of Daniel Freeman, was born and gave his entire life to agriculture. He married a daughter of Scotch-Irish immigrants. Daniel Freeman was reared on a farm and his early life was remote from those special advantages that are part of a liberal education. However, he had that ambition for a higher edu- cation which made its attainment only a matter of minor difficulty. He graduated from a private academy and studied law in Osgoode Hall at the University of Ontario. He graduated and was admitted to the bar in 1865. He soon attained much prominence in his profession at Sim- coe. Ontario, and he also was interested in a shipyard on Lake Erie. But for one thing he might have remained in Canada and achieved pro- fessional eminence and great business success. He had married in 1866 a Miss Christie, whose health early became a matter of concern to Mr.
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Freeman. They spent several winters together traveling in the south, where the milder climate was of benefit to her, and in February, 1873, while on a train Mr. Freeman was offered by the newsboy a book entitled "Nordhoff's California." He bought a copy, began a casual examina- tion, and eventually was so absorbed in all the glowing descriptions that he hastily convinced himself that it was his duty to visit California, and accordingly the very next day arrangements had been made and accommodations secured for the long railway journey to the Pacific coast.
Mr. Freeman first went to San Francisco, and from that city spent nine months in investigating all sections of the state with a view to the purchase of property and permanent residence and business connections. In the course of his investigations he visited the Centinela Rancho, which with the Sansal Redondo comprised something like twenty-six thousand acres of land, then devoted to grazing purposes by the owner, Sir Robert Burnett, who was then living on the rancho, but later re- turned to Scotland. In September, 1873, Mr. Freeman leased the rancho for five years with the privilege of buying it within that time at six dol- lars an acre. Mr. Freeman also bought from the immense herds owned by Sir Robert Burnett ten thousand sheep. The rancho was supposedly useful only for grazing purposes. Mr. Freeman developed his herd and had considerable fortune with it until the extremely dry winter of 1875-76, when nearly half of his sheep were destroyed. In the mean- time, however, he had carried out a successful experiment for the raising of grain, having planted six hundred forty acres in barley. The fields harvested a crop averaging twelve sacks to the acre, and that, too, with a season's rainfall of only four and a half inches. This success with grain raising, coupled with the heavy losses incurred in his flocks, deter- mined him to abandon the sheep industry, and he therefore sold about sixteen thousand head to Lucky Baldwin, owner of the Santa Anita Rancho. After that Mr. Freeman steadily devoted his energies to the growing of grain and never lost a crop. He also studied and worked out many notable improvements on his vast property, and was particu- larly successful in making available a splendid natural water supply through artesian wells, so that hundreds and thousands of acres became a source of steady production by irrigated farming.
With the incoming of a large number of easterners in 1885 Mr. Freeman found it expedient to dispose of a portion of his vast ranch. The south half was sold and later divided into small tracts. The present site of Inglewood is part of the old' rancho.
At the height of his grain raising experience Mr. Freeman raised in 1880 a million bushels of grain, and sent an entire shipload of wheat to Liverpool.
He was a man of great generosity, gave liberally to public institu- tions and causes, was very active in the Chamber of Commerce in Los Angeles, serving as its president two terms, and was a director in the Southern California Railway for many years, it being a branch of the Santa Fe system. Mrs. Freeman died in 1874. She was the mother of two sons and one daughter. The daughter is Mrs. Charles H. How- land of Los Angeles.
MAJOR CHARLES H. HOWLAND came to southern California thirty- five years ago .. He was then in the flush of young manhood, and came here rot to retire but to work and to serve. While in later years he has had much leisure for the contemplative life, Major Howland for the
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greater part has been extremely busy as an engineer and manager of large property interests in and around Los Angeles, and is one of the notable men in this scction of the state.
He was born near Toronto, Canada, March 25, 1863, son of Fred- erick A. and Matilda Margaret (Musson) Howland. His father was descended from Henry Howland, who settled in Massachusetts in 1624, a brother of John Howland, one of the hundred and one passengers of the Mayflower who landed at Plymouth in 1620. His mother was from an old Huguenot family.
Up to the age of twelve Major Howland attended private school and after that the Upper Canada College at Toronto to the age of six- teen. With that experience and equipment he started for the Canadian Northwest as assistant to the chief of the astronomical section of the Special Survey for the Canadian government. The corps was employed in establishing initial points and meridians from which lines were run for the laying out of the public lands in what are now the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan. After a year Mr. Howland was appointed inspector of lands for the Hudson Bay Company, and his duties required much driving and traveling over the country that lies between Manitoba and the Rockies. That was before the first railway lines were built through the Canadian Northwest and the country was inhabited only by Indians.
After two more years of this varied and eventful experience Mr. Howland came to Los Angeles. As a surveyor and engineer he worked all through the southern part of the state. He ran the preliminary survey line for the Santa Fe Railroad from Los Angeles to Port Bal- lona and Santa Monica. After three years he became manager for Daniel Freeman's twenty-five thousand acre ranch, extending from the Baldwin Hills to the northern limits of Redondo City. Major Howland married a daughter of Daniel Freeman, and for many years has had the executive control of the extensive interests of the estate. From the old ranch have since been carved the sites for the following cities: Ingle- wood, Playa del Rey, El Segundo, Manhattan Beach, Hermosa Beach, Hawthorne and a part of Venice. The Freeman interests owned an office building in Los Angeles, a continuous brick kiln at Inglewood which furnished bricks for most of the older business blocks in Los An- geles, and at one time they had a steamer in operation hauling coal from British Columbia to San Pedro. There is still two thousand acres of the ranch undivided near Inglewood, and Major Howland farms that ex- tensive property.
Major Howland was formerly a director in the Broadway Bank and Trust Company at Los Angeles. He is a director of the Seaside Water Company, which is the holding company of the Virginia Hotel at Long Beach. He is also a director in the Long Beach Bath House and Amusement Company, and is a member of the Committee on Agricul- ture and Horticulture of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce.
In the Adjutant General's office at Sacramento can be found the military record of Major Howland. In brief it is as follows: Enlisted in Troop D, Cavalry National Guard of California, August 30, 1895; promoted corporal and sergeant of the same troop, commissioned first lieutenant October 12, 1896; commissioned captain of the same troop November 22, 1897 : commissioned first lieutenant and aide de camp, First Brigade, October 23, 1905 : commissioned major and engineer of- ficer, First Brigade, September 3, 1907; placed on the retired list Oc-
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tober 14, 1909, by Act of the Legislature approved March 22, 1909; and commissioned major, Ordnance Department, May 17, 1909. His last duties were as Major Ordnance Department, Inspector of Small Arms Practice, First Brigade, and as such he built the State Rifle Range in Sholl Canyon. He was placed on the retired list and withdrawn from active service with the rank of major on April 13, 1916.
Major Howland is an independent voter in politics. He married at Los Angeles September 22, 1888, Grace Elizabeth Freeman, daughter of the late Daniel Freeman, a sketch of whose career is found elsewhere in this publication. Major and Mrs. Howland erected the beautiful Episcopal church at Inglewood known as the Church of the Holy Faith as a memorial to their mothers. The cornerstone of the church was laid by Bishop Johnson April 26, 1913, and the building was conse- crated November 8, 1914. It is a beautiful memorial and a splendid addition to the churches and church buildings of the diocese. The building group consists of the church, the rectory and the parish hall. The church is a beautiful structure of the English Gothic style modified to suit southern California conditions, and well justifies the architect's "attempt to realize a permanent and monumental structure that shall stand for centuries as a work of art and shall fitly express the Episcopal church in southern California." The parish house, corresponding in style with the church, also has a large auditorium, guild hall and kitchen, and the rectory is an eleven-room, modern home.
On the bronze tablet at the entrance of the church is the follow- ing inscription, words from Bishop Johnson's dedicatory address : "Through this church two mothers will throughout the ages plead with every generation to come and rest awhile and pray. Think of the weary ones who will find rest here; think of the sorrowful ones who will here find peace; think of the wayward ones who will find guidance; think of the yearning ones whose earnest desires will be satisfied. You who know what is in every mother's heart, can you, think of a memorial for a irother more fitting than this one, that is to bring rest and peace, and guidance and joy, to generation after generation yet unborn? I cannot. And as I bear these sainted ones in mind, in whose memory it has been erected, I pray that they may invoke God's blessing upon us and ours through all time to come until the day dawns and the shadows flee away."
JOHN B. BUSHNELL for a quarter of a century has sustained a vital relationship to the growing and expanding institutions and affairs of southern California, particularly at Los Angeles. Mr. Bushnell has been especially prominent in financial circles for many years.
He was born at Peru in LaSalle county, Illinois, November 23, 1865. His father, William Bushnell, who was born at Norwich, Connecticut, in 1816, was educated in New England and became a contractor. On coming west he located at Princeton, Illinois, which many people then thought was destined to be a large and important city. As a contractor he did much state and county work in the central west, and later specialized his business in the erection of government lighthouses and life saving stations, and his organization put up most of those stations around the Great Lakes. For twenty-five years he was very active as the principal contractor in the state. For many years he made his home at Evanston, Illinois, where he died in 1890. In New York City he married Mary Fowler McKean, and they were the parents of eleven children.
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John B. Bushnell, youngest of the family, attended grammar and higlı schools at Evanston, graduating from the latter at the age of eighteen. He had a busy career as secretary of the Chicago Newspaper Union until 1890; when ill health forced him out of that occupation and from that part of the country. Coming to the southwest, he worked on a cattle ranch at Albuquerque, New Mexico, and was then in the employ of the Atlantic & Pacific, now the Santa Fe Railroad, until 1892. Since the latter year Mr. Bushnell has been identified as a resident and business man with Los Angeles. He was engaged in the loan business under the name John B. Bushnell Company for many years, and since 1909 it has been one of the leading firms for handling stocks and bonds, being a member of the Los Angeles Stock Exchange.
Mr. Bushnell organized the Jonathan Club, one of the best known social organizations of southern California, in 1894, and was honored as its first vice-president. In 1897 he organized and became president of the Columbia Club, which brought out Henry T. Gage and was chiefly instrumental in electing him governor of California. This club afterward merged with the Union League Club. Mr. Bushnell has been a leader in the organization of many other California institutions. He is a York Rite Mason and Shriner, Knight of Pythias and Odd Fellow, enjoys a membership in the Jonathan Club, is a member of the Gamut Club, San Gabriel Country Club, Automobile Club of Southern California, a life member of the Los Angeles Athletic Club and is an associate member of the Ellis Club. In politics he is a republican. Mr. Bushnell has two children : Margaret, a graduate of the Marlborough School for Girls, is the wife of William E. Shields of Yokohama, Japan. The son, George E., graduated from the Virginia Military Institute and is now a successful · merchant at Pocatello, Idaho.
HARRY E. TETER, stocks and bonds, has been identified with a num- ber of successful enterprises which he has assisted in financing and pro- moting. He is one of the younger men in the financial district of south- ern California.
He was born at Mount Pleasant, Iowa, February 7, 1884, son of Alvin J. and Eva E. (Barker) Teter. When he was twelve years old his parents moved from Mount Pleasant, where he had attended public school, to Topeka, Kansas, where his education was finished with two years in high school. His first business employment was in the general offices of the Santa Fe Railroad Company at Topeka. He was there two years. During that time he had an opportunity to make a visit west to Los Angeles, and it was, not long afterward that he resigned his position at Topeka and established himself, permanently as it has proved, in California. For two years he was secretary to the Board of Examiners of the Southern Pacific Railroad Company. Since then he has been in business for himself. For a time he was in the mining and brokerage business at Ogden, Utah, and became vice-president of the Interstate Brokerage Company there. Having sold out his Ogden interests he returned to Los Angeles in 1910 and established the present H. E. Teter & Company, Stocks and Bonds, of which he has since been president.
In 1915 Mr. Teter was one of the organizers of the Big Jim Gold Mining Company, which in 1917 sold that part of their property upon which the mine was located for approximately a million dollars. In 1910 he assisted in financing the Midway Northern Oil Company, which is one of the successful of the smaller oil companies of California. He
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was also one of the organizers and from 1912 to 1914 was president of the Standard Corrugated Pipe Company of San Francisco and Los Angeles. In 1918 Mr. Teter assisted in organizing and financing the Palmer Photoplay Corporation, the only institution teaching photoplay writing that is recognized and endorsed by the motion picture industry.
Mr. Teter is a member of the Los Angeles Stock Exchange, Los Angeles Athletic Club, Brentwood Country Club, and is a republican voter. At San Francisco July 23, 1909, he married Pauline Recktenwald. They have one son, H. E., Jr., born in 1911, now a student in the Urban Mili- tary Academy.
JAMES CALHOUN DRAKE is president of the Los Angeles Trust & Savings Bank, an institution which with over three millions of capital and surplus stands in the front rank of financial houses on the Pacific Coast. Mr. Drake became president of this institution in 1903, soon after it was founded, and in many other ways he has been influentially identified with the growth and history of Los Angeles since about twenty years ago he retired from service in the United States Navy, which he had entered as a boy cadet.
Mr. Drake was born at Cincinnati, Washington county, Arkansas, July 26, 1858, son of Wesley and Martha (Kellum) Drake. As a schoolboy he received an appointment to the United States Naval Acad- emy, and in 1880 graduated. As a midshipman and ensign he cruised several years in the Mediterranean and in the West Indies and Central and South American coasts, and was then assigned to duty in the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey, and for two years had command of government vessels on the coast of North Carolina and Georgia. In 1890 he began a three years' cruise around the world in the Alliance, spending most of the time in Asiatic waters. In 1893 he was appointed · inspector of ordnance at San Francisco, and while there the duty fell to him of equipping 'the Olympia and Oregon, which a few years later played such a brilliant part in American naval history of the Pacific.
Mr. Drake retired from the navy and took up civil life at Los An- geles in 1896. Besides his long service as executive head of the Los An- geles Trust & Savings Bank, he has been for many years director of the First National Bank, has served as waterworks commissioner, and is a director of the Pacific Mutual Life Insurance, the Southern California, the Edison Company, the California Delta Farms, the Southern Cali- fornia Telephone Company and various other concerns.
April 26, 1893, he married Miss Fanny Wilcox, and they became the parents of two children. The Drake home, erected a few years ago, is one of the magnificent private residences of Los Angeles.
JOHN S. CRAVENS has been a conspicuous figure in financial and busi- ness affairs in southern California for over twenty years. A long list of business, social and civic organizations honor him as a member and participant.
Mr. Cravens was born at Kansas City, Missouri, March 5, 1871, a son of John Kenny and Frances Catlett (Frame) Cravens. He graduated from the Kansas City High School in 1888, and from Yale University with the class of 1893. On December 28, 1893, Mr. Cravens married Miss Mildred Myers, of St. Louis, daughter of George S. Myers, founder of the Liggett & Myers Tobacco Company.
After his university career Mr. Cravens was engaged with the Liggett & Myers Tobacco Company in various capacities, and was an active
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participant in the negotiations which culminated the sale of that company on January 1, 1900, to the American Tobacco Company.
Mr. Cravens began spending his winters at Pasadena in 1897. He has been a prominent resident of southern California since 1900, in which year he acquired interests in the Edison Electric Company of Los Angeles, and was chosen first president of that corporation. In 1901 he helped organize the Southwestern National Bank, and resigning as president of the Edison Electric Company was made executive head of the bank in October, 1902. This bank and the Los Angeles National Bank and the First National Bank were subsequently merged, taking the name of the First National Bank, of which Mr. Cravens has since been vice- president and director.
Mr. Cravens is a director of the Los Angeles Trust & Savings Bank, is president of the American Conduit Company of Los Angeles, manufacturers of fiber conduits, is a director of the Dominquez Land Corporation, a director of the Los Angeles Extension Company, and a director of the Chino Land & Water Company.
He is president of the Barlow Sanitarium, a member of the Cali- fornia Club, Los Angeles Athletic Club, Bolsa Chica Gun Club, Mid- wick Country Club, Yale Club of New York City, Englewood Country Club of Englewood, New Jersey, Bohemian Club of San Francisco, Bankers Club of New York City, Graduates Club of New Haven, Metro- politan Club of Washington. In politics he is a republican and is a mem- ber of the Presbyterian church.
Mr. Cravens was formerly chairman of the executive committee of the Southwest Division of the Military Training Camp Association. Out of the plans and work of that organization as a national affair grew the officers training camp at the beginning of the great war. Mr. Cravens is devoted to southern California as a place of residence and business, but he sacrificed his convenience and pleasure for the greater part of the period in which America was engaged in the war to devote himself to the strenuous task of war work at Washington as a "dollar a year man." He was in Washington from October, 1917, to April, 1919, as chief of the Federal agencies section of the Council of National Defense. At the time he resigned he was the recipient of an official letter from the director of the Council of National Defense, a document that speaks for itself :
"It is with far from a prefunctory feeling that I respond to your letter in which you take leave of the Council of National Defense. As you know I was extremely reluctant to have you go, for in many respects these are more trying days in an administrative sense than were those of the actual war period. But your reasons for returning to California were so unanswerable that the Council could no longer in justice to your- self ask you to postpone your departure.
"This brings me to the point of telling you, if I can do so adequately in the brief space of a letter, how very genuinely appreciative the Secre- tary of War, as chairman of the Council, and the other five cabinet members forming the Council, as well as its director, are of the highly important and faithful contribution which you made to the government of the United States during your long and untiring service here. Not only as perhaps the most potent figure in the Council's field organization, the antennae of which stretched out through the states into almost every hamlet of the land, and which during the war formed a mighty national system, but in your dual capacity as chairman of the Council's Highways
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Transport Committee, which is performing a most vital task in the interest of the people of the country, you have left an impress upon the history of the Council and in the life of the nation that will be ineffaceable
"It is difficult to analyze a man's qualities, but I think that those responsible for the striking success of your work here were your entire absence of self-interest, your tact, your industry, and, above all, your per- ception that our war making was in essence simply co-ordinated action on the part of all elements of the public. Particularly with regard to the last thought, I do not think that anybody has left Washington with a more powerful and sentient grasp of the civilian factors in the Nation, the welding together of which forged the unity which made America's war effort a surprise even to itself.
"We shall all miss you, but you have richly earned your return to civilian life, and I offer you every good wish therein."
CAPTAIN ROBERT E. HUNTER, a graduate mechanical engineer, is vice president and director of the Blankenhorn-Hunter-Dulin Company, one of the most successful investment, stock and bond houses on the Pacific coast. Captain Hunter only recently returned from France, where he commanded a battery of field artillery on the fighting front during the great allied drive of 1918.
Captain Hunter was born in Chicago, Illinois, November 20, 1886, son of Edward S. and Elizabeth M. Hunter. His father was born in Troy, New York, and in his childhood the family moved to Chicago, where he was reared and educated and where he has been a member of the Chicago Board of Trade since 1884. He is one of the veteran grain operators in Chicago, and his name is one of the best known in Board of Trade and financial circles of that city.
Robert E. Hunter attended public schools in Chicago, the University High School, and in 1903 entered the Throop College of Technology at Pasadena, California. On graduating in 1906 he entered Yale University, where he specialized in mechanical engineering and was graduated with a degree in that school in 1911.
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