La Merced actually stretched east to west from the San Gabriel River and then in a vaiation of a pie-shape to the northwest, with one boundary running through the Montebello Town Center and across the 60 Freeway at Paramount Boulevard, then forming the southern boundary of Resurrection Cemetery and the northern boundary of La Loma Park in Monterey Park before coming to a point at Edison Trails Park at Garfield Avenue.
It meets a line that moves southeast from that point through residential neighborhoods in Monterey Park and takes in part of the border of the landfill that is on the south side of the 60 Freeway and entering Montebello. After crossing Montebello Boulevard near Avenida La Merced and then across Lincoln Avenue and Poplar Avenue, it reaches its southeast terminus at Beverly Boulevard and the Rio Hondo (the Old San Gabriel River.)
The boundary then moves northward to the Whittier Narrows Dam and goes along its southern flank and eastward through Streamland Park and along the north side of Kruse Road and the Pico Rivera Municipal Golf Course. After crossing Siphon Road (the old San Gabriel Boulevard route to the current San Gabriel River), the line enters the Whittier Narrows Nature Center briefly before turning back northwest to pass Durfee Avenue and then turn west to Rosemead and the line that this description started with.
The rancho, long a part of the Mission San Gabriel system, became subject to private ownership by a land grant from Mexican California authorities after the secularization of the missions in the mid-1830s. On 8 October 1844, Governor Manuel Micheltorena issued title to Casilda Soto, in a very rare instance of a California land grant being given to a woman. Casilda Soto was the widow of José Cecilio Villalobo, who also went by the surname of Lobo.
Cecilio Villalobo's mother was Maria Beltran, a native of Horcasitas, Sonora and born about 1756, and his father Juan José, born in Villa de Sinaloa, ca. 1742, was a soldier with the Rivera-Moncada expedition of 1781 that accompanied the 44 pobladores that settled the newly-founded pueblo of Los Angeles. Shortly afterward, in 1782, Juan José was sent with a detachment that founded the Santa Barbara Presidio. The family was in Santa Barbara when Cecilio was born there on 22 November 1786, but, by the time of the 1790 census of Los Angeles, the family was in the pueblo, listed under the name of Lobo, with Juan José shown as a muleteer. About two years later, in early June 1792, Juan José died.
Cecilio, meanwhile, married Casilda Soto at Mission San Gabriel in early November 1812 and a few years later, about 1816, the couple were living in San Diego. When the 1836 census of the Los Angeles district was conducted, the couple and five children were residing on what was termed the Rancho Santa Gertrudes, a spin-off in 1834 of the vast Rancho Nieto grant of 1784, and generally considered to be in the vicinity of modern La Mirada, Whittier, Santa Fe Springs and nearby areas. It seems like, though, that the Lobos were residing in what became Misión Vieja, or Old Mission. Although an online source lists Cecilio's death as taking place in 1847, the grant documents to his wife for La Merced in October 1844 refer to her as a widow, so he therefore died sometime between 1836 and then.
As to why Casilda Soto de Lobo received the La Merced grant, this appears to have to do with the fact that her mother was a Nieto, the family that owned Rancho Santa Gertrudes, where the Lobos were counted in the 1836 census, and that connection might have facilitated the grant to La Merced, though this will probably never be documentable. Casilda's mother, Juana María Nieto, born about 1771 at Buenavista, Sonora, was the daughter of María de los Reyes Armenta and Juan Crispin Pérez Nieto (commonly known by the Pérez surname), both, incidentally, born in Villa de Sinaloa, the hometown of Juan José Villalobo/Lobo, the father of Casilda's husband. Crispin Pérez was the younger brother of Manuel Pérez Nieto, who had received the massive grant referred to above, and resided on what became the Rancho Santa Gertrudes after the Nieto grant division.
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| This detail from a reproduced 1877 map of southern California shows the Rancho La Merced with its distinctive pointed west end located within the community designation of Old Mission. Just above La Merced is the tiny Rancho Potrero Chico and the Rancho Potrero Grande. At left is the name "A. Repetto," for Alessandro Repetto, an Italian-born sheep rancher who ran his cattle in the hills of what is now Monterey Park and whose son, Timoteo, owned Potrero Chico land for decades. Click on the map to see an enlarged view in a separate window. Courtesy of the Workman and Temple Family Homestead Museum, City of Industry. |
In any case, it was under Casilda Soto de Lobo's ownership of Rancho La Merced that a small adobe house was built on a bluff overlooking the Rio Hondo, the original channel of the San Gabriel River. Señora Lobo resided in the house and superintended the ranch with her children when the American conquest occurred during the Mexican-American War in 1846-47; in fact, a skirmish between American and Californio forces occurred just downstream on the Rio Hondo not far from the newly-built Soto adobe house (a monument commemorating the "Battle of Rio San Gabriel," which took place on 8-9 January 1847, stands at this general location where Washington Boulevard crosses today's Rio Hondo at Bluff Road in Montebello.
Shortly after the controversial war's conclusion, the discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill changed the landscape of California in so many ways. While some cattle ranchers immediately benefitted financially from the growing demand for local beef in the gold fields, Casilda Soto de Lobo borrowed $2000 from William Workman, co-owner of the Rancho La Puente just east of her La Merced property. In return for the loan, she used her ranch as collateral and a mortgage document was drawn up on 18 December 1850.
Within a few months, it seems as if Señora Lobo was unable to repay the loan, but rather than file a foreclosure suit in the local district court, Workman executed a deed with Lobo on 30 April 1851, in which he purchased the La Merced for $2500, which might be interpreted as an actual $4500 purchase for the land. Did Workman take this route in some form of sympathy towards a widower with children? The answer will likely never be known.
What is known is that, within a short period time, Workman and his wife, Nicolasa Urioste, executed a deed with their son-in-law, F. P. F. Temple (husband of their daughter, Margarita) and Juan Matias Sanchez, formerly the majordomo or ranch foreman for Workman at La Puente, giving the two equal ownership of La Merced. Though this deed was dated 15 September 1852, it was already known that the Temples were living on the ranch; in fact, within a month of the deed from Casilda Soto de Lobo, on 25 May 1851, their third son, William, was born at La Merced.
Prior to the 1852 deed, the Temples, who had lived mainly in Los Angeles from the time of their 1845 marriage because F. P. F. Temple was clerk in the store (the first in the town) owned by his brother, Jonathan until 1849, when he went to the gold fields. Evidently finding, as many did, that digging for gold was not a profitable enterprise for the labor required, Temple may have been given La Merced so that he could have his own cattle ranch, so he could take advantage of the opportunities found in supplying beef to the gold mining communities. Indeed, F. P. F. Temple became a major landowner and businessman in the Tuolumne County boom towns of Sonora and Columbia.
Upon receiving the deed, the Temples built an L-shaped adobe house that has been said to have been 110 x 70 feet in dimensions--this would be almost 8,000 square feet, which seems hard to believe, unless those dimensions applied to the grounds immediately surrounding the residence. This home stood at what is now the southeast corner of Rosemead Boulevard and San Gabriel Boulevard/Durfee Avenue and was the center of a cattle ranch and farm that was highly successful for about a quarter century.
The same could be said, as well, for the Soto Adobe, which was occupied by Juan Matias Sanchez. He added a wing to the building, stocked his portion of the ranch with cattle and also raised crops on small sections of the land. While not as well known at the time or subsequently as Workman and Temple, Sanchez was a successful rancher and farmer, to the extent that, within a few years of his moving onto La Merced, he was able to acquire another ranch, which will be the subject of the next post, the Potrero Grande.
Meantime, there was a notable twist to the story of Rancho La Merced that took place in 1875. William Workman and F. P. F. Temple were the proprietors of one of the two commercial banks in Los Angeles, but, when the state's economy fell into a tailspin that summer because of overspeculation in silver mine stocks in Virginia City, Nevada and then the California Bank in San Francisco collapsed, the Temple and Workman bank found itself besieged by depositors looking to withdrawn their money--money that was not in the vault because the bank was funding many investment projects, such as land subdivisions, railroads and others, in the Los Angeles region.
When the two men realized that they needed a loan to try and save their bank, they also had to determine which of their massive landholdings, amounting to tens of thousands of acres of land, they would use as collateral for a loan. In the case of La Merced, the September 1852 deed from Workman to Temple and Sanchez, it turned out, had never been recorded. So, on 20 November 1875, almost exactly twenty-three years later, it finally was.
More on this and other stories connected to the Panic of 1875 in a future post!
Contribution by Paul R. Spitzzeri, Assistant Director, Workman and Temple Family Homestead Museum, City of Industry.
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