The Temple Family of Misión Vieja

In 1851, shortly after foreclosing on Casilda Soto de Lobo on a loan that used the Rancho La Merced as collateral, William Workman, owner of half of the massive Rancho La Puente east of Old Mission, executed a deed that transferred the ranch to his son-in-law, F. P. F. Temple and to Juan Matias Sánchez, who had been Workman's foreman at La Puente.

While Sánchez moved to the Soto adobe on a bluff overlooking the Rio Hondo (then the San Gabriel River) and built a wing to the structure soon afterward, Temple and his wife, Workman's daughter, Margarita, began construction on an adobe home to the east of the river.  The Temples completed their L-shaped adobe the same year and it became the centerpiece of one of the more notable residences in the Los Angeles region and the headquarters of their half-share of the 2,363-acre La Merced ranch.



F.P.F. Temple and Antonia Margarita Workman, co-owners of Rancho La Merced.  From the Workman and Temple Family Homestead Museum, City of Industry, California.

Pliny Fisk Temple was born in Reading, Massachusetts, northwest of Boston, in 1822.  Named for a famed Congregationalist missionary who had done his work in Egypt and Palestine, Pliny was the youngest of his family of eleven children and was the son of Lucinda Parker and Captain Jonathan Temple.  After spending most of his youth in his hometown, Pliny decided at the age of eighteen to make the long journey to Mexican California to meet his oldest sibling, a half-brother, also named Jonathan.

The Temple brothers were twenty-six years apart in age, enough for Jonathan to be old enough to be Pliny's father, and the elder Temple left Massachusetts before the younger was born.  Jonathan sailed for what was then known as the Sandwich Islands (more commonly Hawai'i) within a couple of years of the arrival of Congregationalist missionaries from Massachusetts, who soon became dominant figures in the island kingdom.  As was often the case, missionaries were soon followed by merchants, who established their own power base in Hawai'i. 

While little is known about Jonathan Temple's years in the islands, it was recorded that he was imprisoned briefly for political reasons unstated and his stay was relatively brief.  In 1827, Jonathan left Hawai'i for San Diego, where he was baptized a Roman Catholic.  The following year, he migrated to Los Angeles, becoming the second American or European to live in the town (the first was an American, Joseph Chapman, who was a shipwreck from an Argentinian vessel captained by a French pirate named Bouchard--but that's another story!)

Shortly after settling in Los Angeles, Jonathan opened the pueblo's first store and over the years a small number of Americans and Europeans joined him in a small, but well-connected, community of merchants and traders.  When Pliny made his voyage from Boston, leaving in mid-January 1841, to Los Angeles, arriving about the first of July, his brother was owner of some prime property in the town, as well as the Rancho Los Cerritos, comprising much of today's Long Beach and nearby areas.

Pliny, it appears, intended only to visit for about a year before returning home, but found Los Angeles to be to his liking, so he remained.  Surviving letters from his family in Massachusetts indicate their concern for his well-being, but he adapted to life in Mexican California quickly.  Working as a clerk in his brother's store, Pliny was here less than a year when he began selling gold dust, through a brother back east, in Philadelphia from a March 1842 discovery at Placerita Canyon near today's Santa Clarita.

In 1845, Pliny was baptized (as Francisco, hence his new moniker of F.P.F.) and married at the same ceremony.  His wife was Antonia Margarita Workman, daughter of William Workman and Nicolasa Urioste, the latter a native of Taos, New Mexico, where the Workmans lived prior to migrating to California in late 1841 as part of a group commonly known as the Rowland-Workman Expedition.  The couple lived in Los Angeles and their first two children, sons Thomas and Francis, were born during the late 1840s.  Pliny had no involvement in the invasion of California by American forces in 1846-47, though he did write home about it.

With the outbreak of the Gold Rush in the Sierra Nevada mountains in 1848, Pliny left his brother's employment and ventured to the gold fields.  Eventually, though, he found another way to take advantage of what the Gold Rush had to offer, in terms of supplying fresh beef from Los Angeles-area cattle.  Namely, he developed a series of enterprises involving grazing lands, slaughterhouses and butcher shops in the Tuolumne County area near the towns of Springfield, Sonora and Columbia.  At the latter, now a state historic park, two surviving structures were owned by Temple, though his area residence was near Springfield.  For over a quarter century he maintained an active presence in the region.

The gift of half of La Merced from Workman in 1851, then, made sense in terms of Temple's growing involvement in the cattle industry.  Along with Workman and Sánchez, Temple made many thousands of dollars in annual cattle and sheep runs from the San Gabriel Valley to the gold country, and he even had an interest in ranch lands along the Grapevine north of Los Angeles to rest his herds on the long journey north.  While the Gold Rush peaked before 1855 and declined steadily afterwards, the Temples still had about 1,200 head of cattle on the ranch.

The Temple Ranch from a stereoscopic photograph by William M. Godfrey, ca. 1870.  One end of the adobe house is at the left center, a water tower is in the center and some of the fencing that bounded the Temple portion of La Merced is in view.  The road in the foreground might be San Gabriel Boulevard.  Courtesy of Philip Nathanson, owner of the original photo.

Meanwhile, as his wealth grew, so did his residence and headquarters at La Merced.  Visitors in the late 1850s through 1860s described some of the Temple family's domain there.  For example, John Q.A. Warren, who published a livestock and farming magazine in San Francisco during the first part of the 1860s, spent some time at the Temple's home in 1860 and commented that "the mansion is adobe, built in substantial and comfortable style, and like the usual Spanish [?] houses forms a half-square 110 feet by 70 feet."  This reference to a "half-square" indicated that the adobe was L-shaped and, if a standard of about 20 feet wide is accepted, the house probably measured about 3,600 square feet, which was quite large for "usual Spanish houses," whatever that might mean!

As to the Temples' roughly 1,200 acre share of La Merced, Warren observed that there was "a large variety of fruit trees, pear, peach, plum, apricot, olive, figs, and English walnuts," with some 200 of the walnuts in the orchard.  As to field crops, there was corn, wheat, barley and rye.  Some of this was ground at a mill that was built by another man, but purchased by F. P. F. Temple in the 1850s and which, by 1860, had an inventory of corn meal and flour valued at $21,000, a small fortune for the time.  To irrigate the field crops, Temple constructed, in 1854, an irrigation ditch to run water from the San Gabriel River, a total of four miles through his property, both at La Merced and at the Rancho Potrero de Felipe Lugo, which was adjacent to the northeast.

Typically, ranchos were so large that fencing them was cost-prohibitive and too labor intensive, at least until "fence laws" forced ranchers to put up barbed-wire fencing later on.  But, F. P. F. Temple had developed enough wealth to spend, according to one source, $40,000 in lumber from Phineas Banning of Wilmington so that he could fence in his part of La Merced.

As prosperous as the 1850s were, the following decade largely proved the opposite.  The decline of the Gold Rush and lowered demand for local beef (affected, as well, by imported longhorn cattle from Texas and other locales), a national economic depression in 1857 and the vagaries of the weather caused major disruptions in the Los Angeles-area economy.

A view of workers cutting beef near a zanja (water ditch) in front of the Temple adobe at Rancho La Merced, ca. 1870.  Copy provided by Philip Nathanson.

On Christmas Eve 1861, rainfall started that hardly let up for several weeks up through most of January 1862.  As this was roughly a 40-day period, the resulting inundation was called "Noah's Flood," and many cattle, crops, and some structures were washed away.  Much of southern Los Angeles County became an inland sea, as was a significant part of the San Joaquin Valley.  A short notice in the Los Angeles Star newspaper in January observed that, with their adobe home flooded, the Temples "effected their escape from the house on a raft."  In hindsight, it's amazing the building survived for as long as it did, because the area is now a restricted floodplain controlled by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which built the Whittier Narrows Dam, just a short distance south of the adobe.

The El Niño effect (not known to locals, obviously) was then followed by La Niña and two years of devastating drought ensued in 1863 and 1864.  What cattle and crops were still left were ruined by the calamity, further driving the economy downward.  Eventually, though, as the drought ended and the Civil War concluded, Los Angeles experienced, in the late 1860s and early 1870s, its first significant period of population and economic growth.   While F.P.F. Temple continued to maintain his ranching and farming interests, especially increasing his investment in sheep-raising, he turned more towards business interests in Los Angeles and nearby areas.

With real estate, for example, Temple and El Monte resident Fielding Gibson purchased and subdivided, by 1867, a tract of land between Los Angeles and San Pedro that was initially known as Centerville and Gibsonville.  When a major part of the tract was purchased by George Compton in 1870, however, the developing community took his name.  Later, Temple became a major investor in projects with the Rancho Centinela, in what is now the Inglewood area, and the Lake Vineyard tract of today's Alhambra and San Marino, among others.

Temple was also heavily involved in local mining, in such places as Santa Catalina Island, the White Mountains of Inyo County and the mountains of southwest Kern County, while keeping some of his Tuolumne County properties until the 1870s.  He also was an early entrepreneur in oil drilling, concentrating his work in what was called the San Fernando field in the mountains in present-day Santa Clarita.  He built the first steam-powered refinery in California, part of which survives as a state historical landmark in Newhall, and did produce a small amount of oil through his Los Angeles Petroleum Refining Company, the product being used for gas lighting.

With lumber interests in the San Gabriel Mountains above modern Claremont and in the San Jacinto Mountains near today's Idyllwild, as well as a stake in the import and raising of eucalyptus trees (intended for lumber, the wrong "gum" was imported and the trees wound up being used as wind breaks for farmers) through the Forest Grove Company, Temple sought a place in the lumber industry as the area grew.

He also was invested in railroads, becoming a major negotiator to bring the Southern Pacific Railroad's line from the north through Los Angeles and then forming his own railroad, the Los Angeles and Independence, which was aiming to tap silver mines in Inyo County where he had a water and mining company actively working.  He was the first president of the line, but needing outside funding, Temple and his partners convinced Nevada senator John P. Jones to take a majority stock ownership.  Jones was building a seaside resort called Santa Monica, so the railroad constructed a line from Los Angeles to the new town before starting work east towards Inyo County that was only partially completed.

Members of the Temple family and household workers in the garden next to the Temple family residence at La Merced.  From an original stereoscopic photograph at the Workman and Temple Family Homestead Museum.

To fund much of his projects, Temple and his father-in-law Workman got involved in banking.  They had a partner, the brilliant Los Angeles merchant, Isaias W. Hellman, and the firm of Hellman, Temple and Company opened, in 1868, the second bank in Los Angeles.  The enterprise was short-lived, though, because Temple and Hellman differed on loaning policy and other management questions.  While Hellman went on to found Farmers and Merchants Bank, run Wells Fargo and other San Francisco banks, and became the wealthiest man on the west coast, Temple and Workman opened their own bank in 1871, known simply as Temple and Workman.

The bank was popular, but often for the wrong reasons.  A genial and highly-popular man, Temple too easily loaned money to people who lacked the ability to repay and did not have proper collateral to collect on loans that were delinquent.  In addition, Temple was so busy with his many business projects and political ambitions (he ran for county supervisor in 1871 and county treasurer in 1873 and 1875, winning the last one), that he left day-to-day management of the bank to a cashier who did not properly administer its affairs.

When the overheated California economy, heavily dependent on silver mine stocks in Nevada, collapsed in late August 1875, the Temple and Workman bank faced a run by depositors and could not pay out due to low cash reserves.  It suspended business on the day of the county elections (at which Temple, ironically, was elected county treasurer) and remained closed for over three months.

Desperate for funds to reopen and save the bank, Temple finally secured a loan from Elias J. "Lucky" Baldwin, a San Francisco capitalist, who was acquiring Los Angeles-area real estate and saw that Temple and Workman, the two biggest local landowners, were in dire straits.  The loan was set up to be impossible to repay, but determined to avoid bankruptcy and shame, Temple signed on anyway, telling his father-in-law in a surviving letter that the loan was "on hard terms" but that everything would work out.

The opposite proved true.  After a grand reopening celebration in early December, depositors quietly closed their accounts and withdrew the borrowed funds.  Baldwin added $130,000 more dollars and then turned off the spigot.  In mid-January 1876, the doors of Temple and Workman closed for good and assignment proceedings began to sort our assets and liabilities.

A portion of the gardens at the Temple residence at Rancho La Merced, ca. 1870.  Copy provided by Philip Nathanson.

If the partners had declared bankruptcy when the bank first closed, they could have sold much of their assets to pay creditors and still been left with enough to live comfortably.  Their gamble with Baldwin's loan, however, proved to be a disaster.  Mismanagement was starkly revealed in the inventory of the books and it was quickly realized that with Baldwin holding a mortgage on most of the assets held by Temple and Workman, depositors would get almost nothing.

Remarkably, Temple was not asked to resign his office as county treasurer and served his two-year term without incident, although a deputy was assigned to conduct day-to-day work.  Having declared bankruptcy, six months after the bank's failure, Temple had the dubious distinction of being the county's only bankrupt financial manager while in office.

He was also beset by tremendous stress, suffering a series of strokes from within months after the bank's failure and continuing until his death in April 1880 at age 58.  Though some sources claimed he died in a sheepherder's hut on a corner of the ranch, this was not the case.  He still retained possession of his 1851 adobe house and a substantial brick French Second Empire home built around 1870.

Just before Temple's death, Baldwin, having waited over three years to allow interest to accumulate, foreclosed on his mortgage in 1879, with the required sheriff's sale held early the next year.  Baldwin did allow Temple's widow to purchase the family's houses and 50 acres surrounding them and Antonia Margarita Workman de Temple remained the owner of what was called the "Temple Homestead" for over a decade afterward.

The family held on to the land, growing crops and raising animals and selling off other lands that were in her name and not subject to Baldwin's mortgage.  In early 1892, the flu carried off Mrs. Temple, her mother and her oldest child within two weeks.  Ownership of the Temple Homestead passed to her two youngest sons, Walter and Charles, both in their early twenties.

A circa 1900 view of the houses at the Temple Homestead at Misión Vieja.  The building at the left is the same adobe house shown in earlier photos with the addition of a wood second-story and other additions.  To the right is a ca. 1870 brick French Second Empire residence.  This photo was taken when the adobe was leased to winemaker Giovanni Piuma, whose sign is atop the roof at the left.  From the Workman and Temple Family Homestead Museum.

The two leased out the old Temple adobe to Italian winemarkers, Piuma and Briano, and continued to farm--Charles owned the northern half of the spread and opened a club called "La Paloma."  Wild and prone to drinking, Charles was involved in several notable incidents, including a duel with his brother-in-law after Charles' young wife died suddenly not long after the marriage.  A few years later, and newly remarried, Charles got into a dispute with another brother of his first wife and shot him to death.  While he was acquitted of murder charges and freed, Charles soon sold his interest in the Homestead to Walter and left the area.

Walter, now full owner of the property, continued to farm and worked at other jobs, including as a teamster and insurance agent, among others.  Struggling often financially, he frequently borrowed money, using the Homestead as collateral, though he didn't lose the property.  In 1903 he married Laura Gonzalez, who grew up in the Misión Vieja community and was a household worker for Walter's brother, Francis, at the Workman Homestead.  Walter and Laura even had a secret romance as teenagers and did not marry for over 15 years.  Between 1905 and 1910, they had five children, four living into adulthood.

Then came a staggering stroke of good fortune.  Walter Temple sold the Homestead in Fall 1912 and bought a similar sized property just to the west at the northeast corner of the Montebello Hills and some land next to it that was also adjacent to the Rio Hondo,  An adobe house, built in 1869 and lived in by the Basye family (later to be profiled here), was occupied by the Temples.

It has been speculated that Temple acquired his new spread because a friend, Milton Kauffman of El Monte, worked for oil companies and knew that attention was being given to places near the newly-developed fields of Fullerton and Whittier, such as Montebello.  Remarkably, Temple lacked the funds to buy the 60-acre property outright, so borrowed from its owners.  These happened to be the daughters of Lucky Baldwin, who foreclosed on the same property over thirty years before from Temple's father.  Maybe the barren Montebello Hills didn't seem a likely place for a fortune, so loaning Temple the money seemed as much an act of charity as anything else?

In any case, in Spring 1914, Temple's oldest child, nine-year-old Thomas, was playing on the hillside above the family's house when he breathlessly ran down to tell his father he'd found oil.  Sprinting back up the hill, Walter verified that a pool of water that was bubbling, smelling like rotten eggs and turning black, was, indeed, crude oil.  For those that remember the old television show, "The Beverly Hillbillies," here was "The Montebello Hillbillies"!

The Walter and Laura Temple family at the middle of the first row at a barbeque celebrating their first oil well at Montebello, July 1917.  Behind the dense thicket of trees is the Basye adobe, built in 1869, which was the Temple family home.  From an original photo at the Workman and Temple Family Homestead Museum.

There is another story, reported in a local newspaper, that oil was also found by crews driving piles for a new bridge along San Gabriel Boulevard as it crossed the Rio Hondo within yards of the Temple's home, but the one involving a kid's stumbling on a pool of "a-bubblin' crude" sounds more interesting.

Whatever happened, the Temples executed a lease with Standard Oil Company of California (now Chevron) in 1915.  The already-rich Baldwin daughters, Anita Baldwin Stocker and Clara Baldwin, did the same and a test well on their land in the Montebello Hills in 1916 proved to be a producer.  The following year, Temple well #1 was drilled and, in late June, a gusher was located, just yards from the Baldwin test well.  At age 48 and after a quarter-century of owning parts of Rancho La Merced within the Old Mission community, Walter Temple and his family were on their way to wealth.

As Standard Oil moved aggressively to drill more wells and extract crude from the small, but significant Temple lease on the Montebello Oil Field, the Temples decided to move.  They lived for a time in Monterey Park (known then as Ramona Acres) before buying a substantial home in Alhambra.

The Basye Adobe became the headquarters for Standard Oil at the Montebello field and Temple built a gas station at the southeast corner of San Gabriel Boulevard and Lincoln Avenue.  He also erected two historic monuments at the southwest corner of the same intersection.

Walter and Laura Temple with their children (left to right) Walter, Junior; Agnes; Edgar and Thomas, October 1919.  From the Workman and Temple Family Homestead Museum.

The first, put up in 1919, was in honor of Joseph Kauffman, his business partner's brother, who died in the Argonne Forest in France at the end of the recently-concluded First World War.  This cenotaph, said to be the first private memorial to a World War I soldier in the state, was moved to Temple City in 1930 and remains there today, along with one of two cannons that were said to have been unearthed by Temple from the Rio Hondo and to have been used during the American invasion of California in 1846-47.

The second marker was placed in 1921 to commemorate the founding of the Mission San Gabriel.  As mentioned here before, the marker misleadingly states the mission was founded on that spot, which is a small flat piece of ground beneath a steep hillside, not exactly a location for a mission complex, which was almost certainly across San Gabriel Boulevard a short distance to the northwest.  This monument, a protected state historic landmark, is still in its odd location next to the hills, where an occasional oil well is still in operation, though there have been plans, so far not much beyond the discussion stage, of developing the Montebello Hills into housing tracts, shopping, schools, parks and so on.

Walter Temple kept ownership of his sixty-acre oil lease property throughout the 1920s. About two dozen wells were drilled, some of them producing and a few becoming gushers.  Well number 9, completed in Spring 1919 was, for a time, the most active well in the United States, according to newspaper references, churning out some 30,000 barrels a day for a spell.  The Montebello field, however, proved to be a short-lived major producer and the Temple wells slowed down considerably by the mid-1920s.

Temple went on to build office buildings, post offices, movie theaters and other structures in Los Angeles, Alhambra, San Gabriel and El Monte and developed the Town of Temple, changed to Temple City in 1928.  He was an investor or owner of oil projects in Mexico, Texas, Alaska and many places in California, including Ventura, Huntington Beach, Signal Hill, and Whittier, but did not realize anywhere near the results he had at Montebello.

Finally, he bought the Workman Homestead near La Puente, which had been whittled down to 75 acres, the family home and cemetery and some outbuildings and owned by two of Walter's brothers in the late 1800s before passing to other ownership.  In 1917, the week he bought his Alhambra residence, Walter and his wife purchased the Workman place.  Over the following decade, the ranch was extensively renovated and a large Spanish Colonial Revival mansion, a showplace of adobe construction and all manner of decorative tile, woodwork, stained and painted glass, and wrought iron was constructed.

Charles and Walter Temple, their wives Susie Castino (front center) and Laura Gonzalez (front right) and their two sons, Charles, Junior and Thomas (in their father's arms), with an unknown woman, probably at Santa Monica, ca. 1906.  The Temple brothers jointly owned the family homestead at Old Mission from 1892 to about 1903.  From the Workman and Temple Family Homestead Museum.

All of this activity quickly drained the family's finances, however, and, by 1926, money was borrowed from a bank.   If this sounds familiar, so will the outcome.  As the economy worsened with the onset of the Great Depression, Temple was unable to salvage any of this holdings.  He lost the oil lease property and the Workman Homestead by the early 1930s.  Pioneering, probably, the concept of Americans living "on the cheap" in Baja California, at both Ensenada and Tijuana, Temple developed cancer and returned to Los Angeles, where he died in 1938.

Physically, there is little left of what the Temples had at Misión Vieja.  The Mission San Gabriel marker still stands in its lonely little corner.  Yellow metal markers dot the oil fields indicating where the Temple wells once stood.  A palm tree east of Rosemead Boulevard and south of where San Gabriel Boulevard meets Durfee Avenue indicates where Walter and Laura built a simple wood-frame home in the early 1900s. 

And, on Durfee, outside Rancho La Merced and just inside Rancho Potrero de Felipe Lugo, stands the local headquarters of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which manages the floodplain on which the Temple Homestead once stood.  A few of the buildings date back to the 1930s, when the site was the Temple School, originally La Puente School, opened in 1868 on an acre donated by F.P.F. Temple.

The Temple family history at Old Mission was lengthy and significant, as was the case with many other families, more of whom will be discussed here in the future.