Rancho Potrero Chico and Misión Vieja

In the general community of Old Mission or Misión Vieja, there were several ranchos created out of the former lands of the Mission San Gabriel, which was originally established along the Rio Hondo just north and east of San Gabriel Boulevard and west of Rosemead Boulevard in 1771 and then moved to its current location within about three years.  Before that, the Gabrieleño Indian villages commonly known as Shevaanga or Siba and Isanthcag-na was likely on or near the same spot.

Although the secularization of the missions took place in the mid-1830s, it was about a decade before the ranchos at Old Mission were granted.  The smallest, but the most historically significant, was Rancho Potrero Chico known also as Potrero de la Misión Vieja de San Gabriel.

A potrero is pasture land, so with the well-watered lowlands around the Rio Hondo (the old channel of the San Gabriel River) being so desirable for the maintaining of cattle, it is easy to see why the three ranchos named as potreros were of interest to potential grantees.

This detail from a very large 1877 map of southern California shows Rancho Potrero Chico in the "Old Mission" district with Rancho La Merced to the south, Rancho Potrero Grande (identified by the 4431 acres mark) to the north, west and east, and the 45 degree angle line marking the boundary between Potrero Grande and Potrero de Felipe Lugo to the east.

Rancho Potrero Chico was granted on 9 December 1844 by Governor Manuel Micheltorena to Juan Alvtire and Antonio Valenzuela and the size of the land in the grant was said to have been 1,200 by 450 varas.  A vara is a unit of length that varied throughout Spanish-controlled areas, but in California was generally acknowledged to be 33 inches.  Using this, the size of this rancho would have been in the neighborhood of about 96 acres.  By any standard, this is an extraordinarily small rancho and it is not known why the grant was so small, unless it was understood to be specific pasture land held over from the original Mission San Gabriel's 1771-1774 occupation of the area.  Although Manuel Requena, alcalde (mayor) of Los Angeles, conducted a survey or diseño, this map does not appear to have survived. 

Basically, the Potrero Chico lies north of San Gabriel Boulevard and Durfee Avenue and is bisected by Rosemead Boulevard, with more of the ranch to the east of the latter road than to the west.  To the north is Legg Lake and the Whittier Narrows Regional Park.  While this is not entirely clear, it does appear as if the Alvitres took the western portion of the small ranch, while the Valenzuelas occupied the eastern section.  The reasons for this assumption are below.

As to the original grantees, Juan José Alvitre was born on 30 August 1798 in Los Angeles.  His mother, María Rufina Hernandez was a native of the presidio of Loreto in Baja California.  His father, Sebastian Alvtire, was born in Villa de Sinaloa in the state of Sinaloa, Mexico.  A soldier in the Spanish army of New Spain (Mexico), Alvtire married Rufina at Loreto.  He was one of the soldados del cuero (leather jackets) who were the military guard for the first European land exploration of California, the Portolá Expedition of 1769-1770.  He was, then, present when the expedition stopped at the San Gabriel River (which Portolá called San Miguel) and camped.  Father Juan Crespí, another member of the expedition who was scouting potential mission sites, found this area to be excellent for a mission, though considered the area now known as La Puente to be superior. 



This 1924 map of oil fields in the Montebello/Whittier districts shows the Rancho Potrero Chico as being separate from much of the land denoted as the Barry, Repetto and Alvitre holdings, which was clearly not the case from other maps, as seen below.  Clicking on any map in this post will show them in separate windows and in a larger size.

In any case, Sebastian Alvitre remained in the military for some years and was then a settler of San José in 1783 before migrating to Los Angeles seven years later.  Still later, Sebastian settled on the enormous Rancho Nieto and died in 1817 on what became the subdivided Santa Gertrudes rancho within the larger Nieto grant of 1784.  There'll be more about him and others in his family in subsequent posts on this blog, but at the Mission San Gabriel in October 1817 Juan José married María Tomasa Alvarado, who was born in 1799, at the Mission San Miguel in Baja California.  The couple settled on the Nieto rancho with Juan José's parents and had 14 children, of whom five died in infancy or childhood, and by the time their last child was born in 1839 the area they lived on had been subdivided into Santa Gertrudes.
Five years after that, the grant to Potrero Chico was made and the Alvitres resettled.  The couple appeared in the 1850 federal census, actually taken in early 1851 because California's statehood did not become official until September 1850, but they do not appear in the 1860 enumeration, so they evidently died in the interim. 

The other grantee, José Antonio Valenzuela, was the brother-in-law of Juan José Alvitre, being married to Juan's younger sister, Maria Dominga Alvitre, who was born in Los Angeles in 1805.  Valenzuela was almost a decade older than his wife, being born in 1796.  His father, Jose Manuel, was, like Sebastian Alvitre from Villa de Sinaloa, Sinaloa, Mexico and came to California for the 1781 expedition to Mission San Gabriel, which would evidently been the same that brought the original 44 pobladores to found the new pueblo of Los Angeles.  José Antonio and María Dominga had five children, including three sons and two daughters.  She passed away in 1853 and he followed a decade later.

Another 1920s era map that seems to show the Cruz, Barry, Repetto and Alvitre sections as clearly within the boundaries of Rancho Potrero Chico.  This is getting confusing!

Within a few years of the Alvitres and Valenzuelas receiving the Potrero Chico grant, the American invasion of Mexico, including its department of Alta California, took place.  While the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which followed the conclusion of fighting in 1848, was drafted to protect land grants made under Mexican or Spanish rule, the article covering this was removed by the United States Senate before ratification.  Consequently, Congress passed a land claims act pertaining to California grants in March 1851, establishing a commission to hear testimony and receive evidence of legitimate claims to grants by their owners.  Although the commission approved 85% of the 800 or so claims put before them, the federal government pursued an automatic appeal of successful claims to the federal courts, going as far as the United States Supreme Court, if needed.

Alvitre and Valenzuela filed their land claim on 23 October 1852 when the commission held sessions in Los Angeles.  A little more than a year later, on 13 December 1853, the commission ruled in favor of the claimants, but, as noted above, the inevitable appeal by the feds was filed.  Two hearings before the Los Angeles federal district court were held in late January and early March 1856 and, again, Alvitre and Valenzuela, were successful.  Another year passed by and, in late February 1857, the district court officially dismissed a federal appeal.  Believing, evidently, that their grant was fully confirmed, the owners had a survey drawn up by county surveyor Henry Hancock in 1858, which gave the acreage as 100.07, although a 1956 engineering report submitted by Valenzuela heirs stated that Hancock recorded 96 acres, divided into two even sections of 48--presumably one for each family, with Alvitre to the west and Valenzuela to the east (as noted above.)  This report also gives 1850s tax figures showing that the two men were assessed for 48 acres each.

Within a few years, however, both Alvitre and Valenzuela were dead and a number of issues developed that greatly changed the situation at Potrero Chico.   First, although the 1858 survey was filed, there was no delivery of the patent by the federal government nor was any effort by heirs to seek one made.  In addition, whatever income might have been made from the ranch, whether by farming and cattle grazing, the economy in the United States generally and in California and the Los Angeles area specifically soured in the late 1850s as a national depression erupted in 1857 and the end of the Gold Rush took place in the state.  Then, in the winter of 1861-62, enormous flooding took place that ravaged the area, especially the Potrero Chico situated within the Whittier Narrows, where torrents of water from the San Gabriel (then called the Sierra Madre) Mountains rushed south toward the ocean.  Once the area dried out, a two-year drought ensued that brought further devastation to farmers and ranchers.

Continuing the confusion:  this map, also from about the 1920s or so, shows considerable sections of the Alvitre, Repetto, Barry and Davis properties outside, but some are inside, of the rancho boundaries.

It is not surprising then to find that two of Valenzuela's daughters decided to sell their inherited lands, probably because of the severe economic depression that existed in the early to mid 1860s.  In early March 1863, just after their father José Antonio Valenzuela's death, Salome and her husband Lauriano García and Siriaca and her husband Francisco Duarte deeded their inheritance, which was not specified in acres, to William Workman, F. P. F. Temple and Juan Matias Sánchez.  These three men were the wealthiest land owners in the general area.  Workman, who owned half of the enormous Rancho La Puente to the east had obtained the Rancho La Merced, immediately south of Potrero Chico in 1850 by foreclosure against its grantee, Casilda Soto de [Villa]Lobo and gave that ranch to his son-in-law, Temple and his La Puente mayordomo (foreman), Sanchez.  Over several years, during the depressed economic period of 1857 to 1863, the three began acquiring ranch lands in the Misión Vieja area, including portions of Potrero Chico.

Notably, the sale price was only $1, which suggests that Workman, Temple and Sanchez had perhaps loaned money to the sisters or, more likely, to their father or that there was some other consideration that would lead the Valenzuela women and their husbands to transfer the property for literally nothing.  Also of interest is that the land described was "known by the name of Potrero en media de Potrero Chico originally granted to Antonio Valenzuela and Juan Alvitre."  The italicized name indicates that this was half of the overall Potrero Chico consisting of separate pasture lands--in other words, this would be what Valenzuela had separate from Alvitre.

Meantime, another portion of Potrero Chico was sold a few weeks later, in early May 1863.  This was a tract, described as in the northeast portion of the ranch and measuring 350x250 varas in extent.  This is about 15 acres or so.  This tract had been sold in March 1853 by Antonio Valenzuela to Francisco Vejar, of the well-known family that owned much of present today Pomona, and Vejar was assessed for 1850s taxes on 13 acres.  Vejar, in turn, appointed his son Juan to be his "attorney in fact," handling the sale of this parcel to Workman, Temple and Sanchez.  This was another $1 deed, but the reason for it is also not known.

And, yet . . . this map, another early 20th century example, shows the Cruz, Barry, Repetto and Alvitre parcels as being mostly within the rancho and only partially without!  Again, click on any map here to see them in a different window.

This left approximately 40 acres or so that was retained by the Alvitre family on the western side of the ranch.  After the deaths of Juan José Alvitre and his wife Tomasa Alvarado, their estate administrator was their son José Anastacio, who was born in 1822 and lived into the 1910s and who took possession of the northwestern portion of the ranch.

Just below this was a section that was inherited by Anastacio's sister, Maria de la Cruz.  Although she was married in 1843 to José Ygnacio Cerradel, she had a later common-law relationship with Alessandro Repetto, a native of Genoa, Italy, who raised sheep on a ranch he owned in the hills of today's Monterey Park.  In 1866, Maria de la Cruz gave birth to a son named Timoteo, who claimed his birthplace as the Rancho Potrero Chico, presumably on his mother's land. 

In a parcel below Maria de la Cruz was one inherited by her sister, María Ventura, who was married to José Antonio Bermudez.  Finally, there was about 6 acres held by another sibling, Micaela Alvitre.  All four of these Alvitre tracts, owned by Anastacio, Cruz, Ventura, and Micaela, survived the the difficult years of the late 1850s and early 1860s, although Micaela did sell her tract to F. P. F. Temple in the early 1875.

Temple, Workman and Sanchez, however, experienced their own financial disaster, when the bank owned by the former two collapsed in 1876 due to poor management, bad investments, and a souring national and state economy.  Desperate to save their institution, Temple and Workman took out a loan from San Francisco capitalist Elias J. "Lucky" Baldwin, putting down their many landholdings as collateral.  Baldwin would not execute the loan without getting Sanchez to include his land in the deal.  The loan failed to prevent the failure of the Temple and Workman bank and the three men were ruined.  Subsequently, Baldwin foreclosed and took over the eastern portions of Potrero Chico deeded by the Valenzuela daughters and Vejar to Temple, Workman and Sanchez.  After Baldwin's 1909 death, his daughters Anita Baldwin Stocker and Clara Baldwin became owners of these areas of the ranch.

Meantime, Temple had deeded the Micaela Alvitre tract shortly after he acquired it to Venancia Peña de Davis, who had been associated for years with Sanchez, and Mrs. Davis occupied it with her children.  After Venancia died, her daughter Julia Davis de Cruz assumed ownership and resided on the property until her death in 1918.  By 1930, a man named Stearns was said to have bought her land, shown as a little over 8 acres.  As to the Ventura Alvitre de Bermudez tract, this soon passed to her daughter Adelaida (Elizabeth) Bermudez de Barry, who was married Irish-born George Barry.  After the death of Cruz Alvitre in 1907, her tract went to her son, Timoteo Repetto, who had lived for years in Mexico and worked as a professional acrobat with his Mexican-born wife, Maria before moving in with his mother on her 16-acre spread in 1902.  Finally, after Anastacio Alvitre died in the 1910s, his land went to son Pedro.  Timoteo Repetto and Pedro Alvitre proved to be the last of the original ranch descendants to live on Potrero Chico, remaining there well after the 1940 census (as shown in the last post on this blog.)

Still, there was an essential problem.  Despite the 1856-57 court judgments in favor of the Alvitre-Valenzuela land claim, no patent had been issued by the United States for Potrero Chico.  There were also serious questions about the actual boundaries and acreage of the ranch and, as was often the case with Henry Hancock's work, the survey he did in 1858 was seriously questioned.  Consequently, in 1920, the Joy Survey was conducted and came up with about 95 acres in total.  This map was accepted by the California Surveyor General and the commissioner of the federal General Land Office.  With a new survey on file, the heirs, presumably that of the Alvitre family, were able to request, finally, their government patent, which was dated 4 April 1923.

By 1923, some of their residents and heirs on Potrero Chico were leasing their properties for oil development, which had swept the area since the discovery of oil in the Montebello Hills several years prior.  In many cases, prospecting was unsuccessful, in others there was moderate production, with the best wells generally being the hills or very close to them.  In at least, possibly more, cases at Potrero Chico, there was at least some production, as Adelaida Bermudez de Barry and the estate of Julia Davis de Cruz (who died just weeks before oil drilling started on her land), in the southwestern sections closest to the hills, did receive at least some royalties.

In later years, though, oil or at least the potential of it seems to have driven the effort of the Valenzuela heirs to look into possible claims for the Potrero Chico lands they had once owned.  The 1956 engineering report mentioned above was created to advance the Valenzuela family's assertion that they had been deprived, by bad surveying, other legal actions, and even an unsourced report of violence, of oil-bearing (or potentially so) lands that they were entitled to as descendants of one of the original ranch grantees. 

A reading of the document, however, seems to show that the engineer was seeking to identify the location of the Potrero Chico ranch as being further west and south than the official maps show (basically over a reading of the original grant--the map of which is long gone--that indicates a reference to crests of hills that could have been the Montebello Hills to the southwest), including "covering" land owned by such successful oil leasors as Walter P. Temple (who was actually south of San Gabriel Boulevard) and William Prugh (whose land was on San Gabriel Boulevard, but near Darlington Avenue quite a distance north and west of Potrero Chico.)  Moreover, the engineer, who did a great deal of research which is useful, also made some erroneous statements about deeds and grants. 

One example is the claim that the 1853 deed from Valenzuela to Vejar was invalid because "having been made in 1853 over a year during which period the Mexicans could retain their old citizenship after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was ratified, the transfer would clearly come under American Law . . . which would bar further action."  The problem with this interpretation is simply that the treaty guaranteed that citizens of Mexican California would automatically receive American citizenship with the transfer of California to the U. S. unless they elected otherwise within five years.  There is no evidence that Valenzuela elected to forego American citizenship and remain only a Mexican citizen and if he did nothing, he was automatically an American citizen and, therefore, entirely capable of issuing deeds.

In any case, it is hard to get around the fact that, in 1863, Salome and Siriaca Valenzuela, with their husbands, sold their interest in Potrero Chico to Workman, Temple and Sanchez and that there were many owners, residents and users of the land over the following 90 years.  In addition, the surveying clearly was a mess (as the examples of maps shows above does demonstrate), but the assertion that the ranch boundaries would be so much further west and south is based on reading very vague statements made in the 1840s and then from witness statements from Valenzuela descendants who were not alive when the original grant was made. 

Notably, one of them said that Valenzuela asked for land in the Montebello Hills (where valuable oil wells were located--some still operating today, though not for long) because he wanted to raise potatoes on them where it was drier than the land near the Rio Hondo.  Yet, how would raising potatoes have been conducted on rocky hilly slopes with little soil in which to plant and no easily obtainable water supply for irrigating?  If that were the case, than owners over the following decades, including Temple, Sanchez and Baldwin, would have been able to have farmed the hills before oil was found in 1917--but the hills apparently were only used for grazing animals.

Rancho Potrero Chico, though one of the smallest ranchos found in the Spanish and Mexican eras of California, is significant.  Home for thousands of years to Gabrieleño Indians whose village of Isanthcag-na was located in the area, the rancho also has an important connection to the first European settlement in Los Angeles County, the Mission San Gabriel.  Granted to descendants of early Spanish-era immigrants to California in the Alvitre and Valenzuela families, the rancho was occupied, ranched and farmed for a few generations with much of its parcels sold and deeded to others over the decades.  The oil industry coming in after 1917 transformed the rancho and, after World War II, the creation of the Whittier Narrows flood control district also meant great changes as residential use was banned.

Finally, the Bosque de Rio Hondo park opened at the northwest corner of Rosemead and San Gabriel boulevards and part of it may (depending on whether surveys are believed!) be within the rancho, while other sections have commercial, government and recreational use in and around Whittier Narrows Regional Park.