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 33
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Franklin S. Wade was about four years old when his parents came to California. He was educated in the old Cahuenga Pass School at Holly- wood, and took his preparatory and collegiate work in the University of Southern California. He graduated with the A. B. degree in 1908. In the meantime, in 1905, he had entered the service of the Los Angeles Gas and Light Corporation as a chemist, and continued in that capacity with them until 1912. Since then he has been superintendent of opera- tion for the Southern Counties Gas Company. This company has made a specialty of distributing the natural gas by-product of the oil fields, and many of the methods, processes and devices for the utilization of this natural gas and its distribution have been perfected with the tech- nical advice of Mr. Wade. This natural gas produced with petroleum has some distinct advantages and differences from artificial gas or the natural gas of eastern states. Primarily its superiority consists in the higher number of heating units, in fact almost double the number of British thermal units contained in artificial gas. In distributing this gas the company found it necessary to alter or replace much of the apparatus already installed in the homes and factories, the results being a much superior heating service and a correspondingly smaller cost per unit to domestic consumers.
While the chief territory supplied by the Southern Counties Gas Company is Orange county, the company's headquarters are in Los Angeles, in the Corporation Building, where Mr. Wade has his head- quarters.
He is a member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the American Gas Association and the Pacific Coast Gas Association, and also belongs to the San Gabriel Valley Country Club and the Auto- mobile Club of Southern California. He comes of an Episcopalian family, and in politics is conservative and independent. April 15, 1914, at Los Angeles, he married Carol D. Cooke, daughter of H. Jay and Ann Louise (Russell) Cooke. The Cookes are an old Connecticut family. Mrs. Wade was born in South Dakota and educated there. Her father is in the real estate business in South Dakota, handling chiefly his own prop- erties. Her mother died in that state in June, 1919. Mr. and Mrs. Wade have one son, Franklin Russell Wade, born at Los Angeles March 24, 1918.
WILLIAM MULHOLLAND is the designer and builder of the famous Los Angeles Aqueduct. Those who know how much of his real life has entered into this magnificent undertaking do not hesitate to call him its creator. Los Angeles for years has looked forward to the completion of this enterprise, and now that the water mains of the city are flushed with the sparkling waters of Owens River brought by means of the Aqueduct a distance of two hundred and fifty miles from the Sierra Nevada Mountains the achievement is properly regarded as marking a
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new era in the history of the city. It is without question the greatest aqueduct in the world, surpassing manifold the famous aqueducts of the old Roman Empire. The Aqueduct was built at a cost of nearly twenty-five million dollars and it was William Mulholland who in his capacity as chief engineer of the Los Angeles Waterworks devised the plans, estimates, and superintended the construction of the water way from end to end. Engineers from all over the world, men famous in the profession, studied and admired this tremendous construction, and have given Mr. Mulholland the highest degree of professional praise.
Los Angeles owes to Mr. Mulholland gratitude not for the Aqueduct alone, but for a constant and continuing service as chief engineer of its waterworks system for more than thirty years. As a hydraulic engineer Mr. Mulholland is undoubtedly one of the most eminent in the world today.
He was born at Belfast, Ireland, September 11, 1855, son of Hugh and Ellen (Deakers) Mulholland. In his youth he attended public schools and Christian Brothers College at Dublin, Ireland, and as a young man came to the United States and lived in Pittsburgh before removing to California in 1877. It was in 1886 that he was appointed chief engineer of the City Water Company, at that time a private cor- poration. He has been superintendent and chief engineer ever since and was retained in the same capacity when Los Angeles took over the water company in 1902. Few men have been so successful in choosing the field of their professional work. Besides his official duties at Los Angeles Mr. Mulholland has for forty years been a student of condi- tions in southern California and has designed and constructed a large number of great irrigation systems and water power projects for which the Los Angeles district is famous.
As a tribute to Mr. Mulholland's eminence in the engineering pro- fession the University of California in 1914 conferred upon him the honorary degree LL. D. He is a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers, of the Pacific Association of Consulting Engineers, is a charter member of the Engineers & Architects Association of South- ern California, is an honorary member of the National Association of Stationary Engineers, and a member of the Seismological Society of America. He is an honorary member of the Tau Beta Pi and belongs to the California, Sunset and Celtic Clubs, and a member of political and progressive organizations. In politics he is nonpartisan.
July 3, 1890, Mr. Mulholland married at Los Angeles, Lillie Fer- guson, who died April 28, 1915. They became the parents of five chil- dren: Rosa, Perry, Lucile, Thomas and Ruth.
HON. AURELIUS W. HUTTON. It is a rare distinction enjoyed by Aurelius W. Hutton-a continuous and active membership in the Los Angeles bar for half a century, and there is not now practicing at this bar any lawyer who preceded him. During all this time his profession has represented to him a means of service to others, as well as to him- self, and many of the honors most prized by a lawyer have been bestowed upon him.
Judge Hutton was born in Green county, Alabama, July 23, 1847. His grandfather, General Joseph Hutton, was born in South Carolina in 1769, and married Nancy Calhoun, a cousin of the great southern statesman, John C. Calhoun. The grandfather, with his family, settled in Green county, Alabama, about 1821, and died there a year or so after- ward. Their son, Dr. Aquila D. Hutton, was born in Abbeville district
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of South Carolina, April 8, 1805. He married Elizabeth H. Tutt, who was born in Edgefield district of South Carolina in 1812. To their mar- riage were born six sons and two daughters. The father died in Decem- ber, 1852, at the age of forty-seven, survived by five children, and his wife passed away in February, 1854, at the age of forty-two. Their surviving daughter, Eugenia Floride, had married in 1853, David H. Williams, a physician, who became guardian to the four orphan boys and gave them a welcome in his own home. Aurelius W. Hutton has always given his sister and her husband credit for much of his success in life. When he was ten years old the family home was moved to Gainesville, Alabama. At the age of sixteen Judge Hutton entered the University of Alabama, a military school at Tuscaloosa, and with the Alabama Corps Cadets saw some active service in behalf of the Confederacy until April, 1865. All four of the brothers were in the Confederate service. The eldest was killed, as herinafter noted; the second, Aquila D., was in the Thirty-sixth Alabama Regiment, was wounded at Chickamauga and thereafter served as lieutenant in the Sixteenth Confederate Cavalry. His younger brother, Emmett C., was under fire April 4, 1865, one month before he was fifteen years of age.
After General Lee's surrender Aurelius W. Hutton returned to his home with his Springfield rifle and accouterments and turned them over to the Federal provost marshal at Gainesville, took the oath of allegiance and was paroled. The war swept away all his own inheritance and devastated the property of the family, and he had to face vastly different circumstances to those to which the family had so long become accus- tomed. He took up the study of law in the office of Bliss & Snedecor at Gainesville about January, 1866, his brother-in-law paying a hundred dollars a year for special instruction. Mr. Bliss was a native of New Hampshire and an elderly lawyer of great ability and had been a college classmate of President Franklin Pierce. Mr. Bliss had at one time also been a member of the firm of Bliss & Baldwin, his partner being Joseph G. Baldwin, author of the book of most entertaining sketches, "The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi," and subsequently distinguished in California as chief justice of the Supreme Court. Mr. Hutton spent eighteen months with the firm of Bliss & Snedecor, and in the fall of 1867 entered the law department of the University of Virginia. At that time the University of Virginia Law School was one of the most rigid in its requirements and curriculum, and a diploma had a current accept- ance recognized by the profession throughout all the states. Mr. Hutton combined both the junior and senior courses in one year, and came under the instruction of that great law professor, John B. Minor, and was able to graduate in June, 1868, being one of thirty-seven graduates in a senior class of about seventy. Upon attaining his majority a few weeks later, Mr. Hutton was, in January, 1869, without examination, admitted to practice by the Supreme Court of Alabama upon his B. L. degree from the University of Virginia. In January, 1869, he left Alabama with the Travis family, bound for California, the journey being by way of the Isthmus of Panama to San Francisco, and thence to Los Angeles.
Judge Hutton arrived at Los Angeles April 5, 1869. The prevailing characteristic of the little city of five thousand was the atmosphere of old Spanish and Mexican regime. The first trans-continental railway was just being completed. Mr. Hutton had a vision of a great future for Los Angeles, though doubtless surpassed by the reality which he now knows. Identifying himself thoroughly with the community, he entered the office of Glassell & Chapman, in the Temple Block. It was the agree-
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ment that his only pay should be board and lodging, but the firm appre- ciated his ability and paid him $50 for the first month. One of the in- teresting facts in connection with Judge Hutton's fifty years of member- ship in the Los Angeles bar is that for forty-six years he was continuously an occupant of the old Temple Block, and after being some months in the Haas Block, has more recently established his offices in the Wilcox Block. But for many years he worked in an unchanged environment, though surrounded on every side by change and progress and develop- ment, with lofty business structures rising about him, and with the intro- duction of all the growing complexity of modern municipal life. Among his associates in practice have been numbered Judge Henry M. Smith, R. H. Chapman, Col. John F. Godfrey, Judge W. H. Clark and Judge Olin Welborn. His last partner was Mr. Williams, his nephew, under the firm name of Hutton & Williams, but since the partnership was dis- solved, January 1, 1917, Mr. Hutton has practiced alone.
During these many years Judge Hutton has again and again been called to the responsibilities of public life. In December, 1872, he was elected city attorney of Los Angeles, and was the first man to hold the office for two consecutive terms. In 1874, alone with his pen-there be- ing here no stenographer nor typewriter-he drafted the first special charter for Los Angeles, the city having previously been governed under the general incorporation act and several special statutes. In 1876, acting with the City Council, he revised the charter, and every city charter since then has contained many of the wise provisions of that of 1874. As city attorney, Mr. Hutton also assisted in drafting the ordinance granting the first franchise for a street railway, and conducted the legal proceedings for the condemnation of rights of way donated by the city to the Southern Pacific Railroad Company. After considerable effort, he also convinced the local officials and brought about the requisite formality of complaint, warrant and commitment in the criminal procedure of the Municipal Court. When, in February, 1887, the number of superior judges of Los Angeles county was increased from two to four, Mr. Hutton received on the first ballot eighty per cent of the vote of the local bar recommending his appointment by the governor, although there were six candidates before the meeting. He was appointed by Governor Bartlett, and in the distribution of the business of the court that followed, in which he had no voice, he was assigned three-fourths of all the common law and equity cases tried without juries and nearly all the law and motion calendar. In his own department he never had a jury, but when presiding for other judges, he tried a few cases with juries. Perhaps the most important case coming under his jurisdiction was that between the Southern Pacific Railroad Company and Coble, with reference to overlapping land grants to the Atlantic & Pacific Railroad Company and the St. Paul Railroad Company. Judge Hutton found for the defendant in a case involving 160 acres, thereby declaring the land excepted from the grant to the St. Paul Railroad Company and opening the land to settlement. This was in July, 1888, and was the first decision of any court on this important question, and to Judge Hutton this credit is due, though more than once the credit has been given to another whose decisions in favor of the St. Paul Railroad Company were reversed by the Supreme Court of the United States in an opinion establishing the law precisely as it was held to be in the Coble case. See 39 Fed. R. 140, decided in 1889, and 46 Fed. R. 683, decided in 1892; also 146 U. S. Supreme Court Reports 570, decided in 1892, and the record in the Coble case in the county clerk's office. The decisions of the U. S. Supreme Court are binding on the in-
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ferior courts and they have of course decided these questions against the Railroad Company since the decision in the 146 U. S. Reports.
At the election in November, 1888, when the republican ticket, headed by Harrison for president, swept everything before it, Judge Hutton, with the whole democratic ticket, went down to defeat. In August, 1889, he was appointed by Judges Field and Ross to fill a temporary vacancy in the office of the United States district attorney, serving for six months. He was subsequently appointed by President Harrison's attorney general special counsel for the United States in the several cases known as the Hata cases, involving questions growing out of violations by the Chilian insurgents of the neutrality laws of the United States. In 1901 he was elected a member of a Board of Freeholders to prepare a new charter for the city. He was chairman of the Judiciary Committee of the board. He suggested the illegality of the boards, and on its order arranged and supervised a test case in the courts. The Supreme Court of the state sustained him in his view. (See 131 Cal. 263). The Board, however, continued its work and completed the charter, relying upon the province of the council to submit the charter to a vote of the people as amendments prepared or proposed by it. This could have been legally done, but it was never done. It was doubtless opposed by some power which con- trolled the council.
Judge Hutton was a stockholder in the San Gabriel Orange Grove Association, the corporation that bought the land and laid out the city of Pasadena. He has filled all the chairs in Golden Rule Lodge No. 160, I. O. O. F., of which he has been a member since September, 1871. He is also a member of the Society of Los Angeles Pioneers, the Los An- geles Bar Association and the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce. He was honored with an appointment by Gen. John R. Gordon, commander- in-chief United Confederate Veterans, as major general of the Pacific division of the United Confederate Veterans, and was subsequently elected for a second term. His division was territorially the largest of all, extend- ing to and including Colorado and New Mexico.
February 24, 1874, Judge Hutton married Kate Irene Travis. She was born at Gainesville, Alabama, May 3, 1851, and died February 1, 1915. Her father, Amos Travis, was born in North Carolina about 1805, and brought his family to Los Angeles in 1869, Judge Hutton, as has been noted above, being one of the party. Amos Travis returned to Ala- bama in 1885, and died there August 2, 1886. He married Eliza A. Coleman, who was born about 1820, and died in Alabama April 26, 1896. Judge and Mrs. Hutton had three sons and seven daughters. The oldest, Kate, who died April 11, 1897, had married in the previous year Raphael W. Kinsey, and she left an infant son, Aurelius R. Kinsey, who at the age of twenty volunteered as a member of Company E, One Hundred Seventeenth United States Engineers, in the Rainbow Division, and who has recently returned to his home. The second child, Aurelius W. Jr., died at the age of nineteen, on April 13, 1895, being a young man of brilliant promise in the field of electrical discovery and invention. The seventh child, Irene, died May 22, 1895, at the age of eight. The tenth child died in infancy. The other children of Judge Hutton are Mignon- ette ; William Bryan, who was named for Judge Hutton's brother, who, while a lieutenant of Company A of the Fifth Alabama Batallion, Arch- er's Brigade, A. P. Hill's Division, Stonewall Jackson's Corps, was killed at the battle of Chancellorsville, May 3, 1863; Helen, wife of P. G. Win- nett, vice-president of the Bullock Company at Los Angeles ; Elizabeth, surviving wife of Louis Adams, who died November 1, 1918; Travis
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Calhoun, and Eugenia, Mrs. Wilkinson. Travis C. made more than one effort to volunteer and went to Toronto, Canada, to join the Royal Avia- tion Corps, but on each attempt was rejected because of his light weight. Finally, being passed on the draft for clerical service, and disliking that, he was permitted to enter the Spruce Division and he served in that until his discharge. On January 9, 1916, Judge Hutton married Mrs. Rose A. Seymour, and they now reside at 1704 Ocean, avenue, Santa Monica.
HENRY R. COATE. The largest wholesale dry goods house in south- ern California is the Cooper, Coate & Casey Dry Goods Company, at Los Angeles, a business established in 1906, and which has made a tremen- dous growth, with trade connections all over the southwest, in the Latin American countries to the south and nearly across the Pacific to the Philippine Islands. The company is solely engaged in the wholesale dis- tribution of dry goods, notions, ladies' and men's furnishings, ready-to- wear garments, floor coverings, etc. Their main building is a large five- story structure at Seventh and Los Angeles streets, in addition to which they operate garment factories in a large individual building, have a com- plete warehouse in Los Angeles and permanent sample rooms at El Paso, Texas, Phoenix and Nogales, Arizona, at El Centro, San Diego, Fresno and San Francisco, and in Honolulu and Manila. The traveling repre- sentatives of the company cover all the southwestern states and also Mexico, Central and South America and the Orient. A New York office is also maintained at 377 Broadway.
The executive officers of the company are M. G. Cooper, president ; H. R. Coate, first vice-president ; Edward Casey, second vice-president, and G. Danielson, secretary and treasurer.
Henry R. Coate was in business on the Pacific Coast nearly forty years. His own career is a contribution to the family record of Americanism. Mr. Coate was born at Troy in Miami county, Ohio, a son of John H. and Jane (Coppock) Coate, both natives of the same county and representatives of some of the very earliest families estab- lished in southwestern Ohio. Both the Coate and Coppock families have been Quakers in religious faith as far back as the record runs .. Mr. Coate's great-grandfather was Marmaduke Coate, the fourth in as many successive generations of that name. It is a part of the family history that the original Marmaduke Coate came from England and with his brother-in-law, Moses Coppock, obtained from the Indians a land grant of four thousand acres at Philadelphia. They leased this land for a period of ninety-nine years, and that lease recently expired. Henry R. Coate happens to be one of the third generation of heirs, and is related to the original lessors through two lines. The land is now valued at about fifty millions of dollars. Great-grandfather Marmaduke Coate went to South Carolina from Pennsylvania, and in that state was born his son Henry Coate, grandfather of the Los Angeles merchant. Henry Coate came to Miami county, Ohio, in 1803, but had to leave that county on account of fear of the Indians, though he subsequently returned and had a farm and also a blacksmith shop. In his shop he made many of the sickles with which the grain of the pioneer farmers was cut. He died in 1848, in his seventy-eighth year. Both he and his father were local ministers of the Quaker church.
John H. and Jane (Coppock) Coate died on the farm where Henry R. Coate was born. The latter was the oldest of four children ; his broth- er Warren is a resident of Piqua, Ohio; his sister, Mrs. Edwin Yount,
HABboate
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resides at Urbana, Ohio; while the other son, Orlestus, died at the age of thirteen.
Mr. Coate was educated in the public schools of Ohio, attended Earlham College, the noted Quaker institution at Richmond, Indiana, and at the age of seventeen his father set him to work in a dry goods store at Troy. In 1864 he was selling goods in his uncle's store at the then prevailing war scale of prices. At the time of his death he had been in the dry goods business for a period of over half a century. He traveled for the wholesale dry goods firm of John Shillito & Company, of Cincinnati, until 1876, then for a few years was traveling representative for a Philadel- phia house, and in 1881 came to the Pacific Coast. He first had charge oi Hale Brothers branch store at Petaluma, California, three years, spent a similar career with Winestock, Bloom & Company, of Sacramento, and then became connected with the jobbing firm of Murphy, Grant & Com- pany, at San Francisco as traveling salesman. His headquarters were at Seattle and he represented that firm until December, 1893. Mr. Coate then became Pacific Coast representative for the J. & P. Coates Thread Company, serving them capably for seven years, until 1900, when all the principal thread companies were merged into the Spool Cotton Com- pany. While with the Thread Company his headquarters were in San Francisco.
His next connection was with Levi, Strauss & Company, whole- sale dry goods merchants of San Francisco, and this business connection brought him to Los Angeles as his headquarters. He was with that firm until the earthquake of 1906, and in that year he became one of the principals in organizing the Cooper, Coate & Casey Company.
The rise of this company to prominence in commercial circles is probably well known to many southern Californians. Their first estab- lishment was a modest three-story building on Los Angeles street, be- tween 5th and 6th streets. After about six years they moved to the present site of their main building at the corner of Los Angeles street and Seventh street, where they have five floors and basement in addition to the other warehouses and factories owned and operated by them.
Mr. Coate was a birthright Quaker and has always remained true to the faith of his early youth. He was a member of all the Masonic bodies, York and Scottish Rite, a member of the Union League Club, Jonathan Club, Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, and his family have long been prominent socially in Los Angeles.
In June, 1880, he married Miss Virginia Winans, of Ohio, a na- tive of Illinois. Mrs. Coate is a prominent social and fraternal leader, being a member of the Woman's City Club of Los Angeles, and is grand associate matron of the grand chapter of California, Eastern Star, and in the spring of 1919 was also chosen grand royal matron of the Grand Court, Order of the Amaranth of California.
The daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Coate, Gertrude, is a native daugh- ter of California and was educated in Los Angeles. Mr. Coate died Feb- ruary 9, 1920. The family have made their home at the Ingraham Hotel.
CLARK JAY MILLIRON, whose offices are in the Trust and Savings Building, is a lawyer who has gained the reputation of being an expert on the complicated subjects of Federal income tax law, and the bulk of his practice is in connection with that difficult subject.
Mr. Milliron, who is a veteran of the Philippine war and for a num- ber of years was in the Philippine Civil Service, was born at Chamber- lain, South Dakota, December 21, 1879, a son of Dr. L. and Phoebe
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