Misión Vieja and the 1930 Federal Census

This photograph shows one of the several dairies located at Misión Vieja in 1930 and is from a college report on the Old Mission Community called "A Rural Life Survey of the La Puente School District, 1930" by Trent H. Steele.  Click on the image to get an enlarged view in a new window. 
Courtesy of the Workman and Temple Family Homestead Museum, City of Industry.

With the 1930 federal census, changes that had been developing in the Old Mission area since the discovery of oil in the community continued to affect the demographics of the neighborhood.  Over three days, from 24-26 April 1930, enumerator Efner Farrington made his way through Misión Vieja, having come in from communities to the north in present-day South El Monte.

One page was identified as "near Rosemead on Potrero Rancho," which appears to mean the area in and around Rancho Potrero Chico.  In this part of the listings were the last two of the long-standing families from Old Mission still remaining in the area.  65 year-old Timoteo Repetto, whose mother was a member of the Alvitre family that received half of the approximately ninety-acre Potrero Chico land grant in 1845, resided with his Mexican-born wife Maria, age 60, in a home self-valued at $2,000 and was listed as a "fruit farmer."  The next household was that of Repetto's cousin, Pedro Alvitre, age 64, who declared his home at $300, and lived with four sons and a daughter, ranging in age from 16 to 26.

Of the eight other households on the page, seven were headed by persons born in Mexico and who migrated to the United States between 1900 and 1920.  The men in these household were mainly farm laborers, although there was one who worked in a nursery, another who toiled in a brick yard, and a third who was employed by a clay products company.  Surnames included Enriquez, Gonzalez, Valdez, Lara and Rodriguez.  The other household, that of the Abe family, was Japanese, with the husband, Tamakichi, coming to America in 1902 and his wife, Hana, arriving a decade later.  Tamakichi Abe was a farm foreman.

The next page consisted of persons listed as residing on Lexington Road (now known as Lexington-Gallatin Road and which was an old route between the old community of Lexington, now in El Monte, and Gallatin, which was in today's Downey) and Durfee Avenue.  Most families here were also Mexican and migrating to the U.S. between 1911 and 1924 and the men working in general farm labor.  Family names included Reyes, Rodriguez, Garcia, Contreras, Campos and Martinez. 

There was one Italian family, headed by dairy owner Bartolo Briano, who had worked in a local vineyard for his winemaking brother Paolo, partner of Giovanni Piuma in their business at the old Temple Homestead at the southeast corner of San Gabriel and Rosemead boulevards.  Briano, a 1906 emigrant to America, employed two German-born brothers as milkers, Johannes and Arnold Peterson.  Johannes was 24 and came to the U.S. eight years before and had just married an Oklahoma native in 1929, while his 20-year old sibling migrated in 1927.

Another dairyman was Andrew Irwin, a native of Northern Ireland, who came to America in 1892 at age 20.  He was married to a woman from Kansas and had a daughter and son in his household.  The next household was that of oil refinery shop foreman George Afheldt, a migrant from Germany in 1891, and his Kentucky-born wife and 9-year old daughter.  There was one other family to mention, that of 62-year old Indiana-born orange grower Edwin Eby, his wife Emma, a 52-year old also from Indiana, and their California-born daughter.  Emma Eby was the school teacher at Temple School, formerly called La Puente School, which had been founded in 1863 and was in its third building at the corner of Durfee Avenue and what is now Santa Anita Avenue (then Lexington-Gallatin Road.)

The next sheet was demarcated as "Siphon" and this refers to the old roadway that extended from San Gabriel Boulevard and then past its junction with Durfee eastward towards the San Gabriel River.  The roadbed is still there, though not as a public street.  In this area, households headed by native-born Mexicans predominated and these were farm laborers who rented their property.  Surnames included Hernandez, Mirelles, Estrada, Garcia and Robledo and these families came to the U.S. from 1914 to 1928.  Another laborer was an American, Alva Andrus, who came with his family to the area in 1926.

All of these laborers might have worked for the two dairy owners on this sheet:  Urbano Estrada, a California native of Mexican parentage and Italian Baptista Ciocca.  Estrada lived with his wife, Lucy, who had a Cuban father, and eight children, one of whom was a truck driver and another a seamstress.  Ciocca, who came to America in 1902, lived with his wife, who came the following year, and their nine children, one who was private nurse, another did fertilizer work on the dairy, and a third was a grocery clerk.  The last Siphon Road resident (the enumeration continuing on the following sheet) was walnut grower B. E. Nomann, who may have been cultivating an existing grove, because walnuts were raised in the Durfee/Siphon area at least as far back as the 1880s, when John H. Temple, member of the early Old Mission family, had a 132 acres of the crop on what is now the Whittier Narrows Nature Center.

The next sheet included households on San Gabriel Boulevard, Durfee Avenue, and Fleming Lane, which no longer survives.  On San Gabriel Boulevard, perhaps at the northeast corner of Rosemead, was John Rodriguez, his two brothers Joaquin and Amado and his sister Agnes--all natives of California, as were their parents.  John was listed as a vegetable farmer who owned a modest $100 house, and his brothers were shown as farm laborers, obviously working for John. 

The next three households on Durfee Avenue were those of oil workers who rented their houses, though from which oil company is not specified.  These were men aged 44 to 59, one from Pennsylvania, another from Ohio and the third from California.  Another household was the single one of Ed Ciocca, a relative of the Baptista Ciocca noted above, and who was a 36-year old dairy farmer and emigrant of 1912.  Ciocca had a Mexican-born employee named Reginaldo Gutierrez, who had come to the U.S. only two years before, in 1928.

On Fleming Lane was its namesake, truck garden farmer William Fleming and his family, dairy farmer Henry Kruse, a German-born emigrant of 1907, and two of Kruse's workers, one from Germany and the other from Kansas.  As the next sheet continues with Fleming's son, there was one more occupant of Fleming Lane: Japanese vegetable garden laborer Sam Inouye, a 56-year old emigrant of 1892, his wife of thirteen years, a Latina named Eloise; her child from an earlier marriage and their son, Samuel, Junior.  The family had been in Texas before coming to California and it is wondered how people in both states reacted to their mixed marriage and children.

Back on San Gabriel Boulevard was hog farmer Martin Litwin, a 40-year old who came from Poland in 1898, his wife Cassie, also from that country and an emigrant of 1913, and their two children, born in Michigan.  The last two households in the Old Mission community were back on Siphon Road and consisted of John Briano, brother of the Bartolo and Paolo mentioned earlier, who was a 30-year old grocery store owner, living with his California-born wife of Swiss parents, Frieda, and their three young children, a daughter and two sons; and "S. Hanashiro", a 53-year old Japanese truck garden farmer and migrant of 1922.  Hanashiro had two children from a previous marriage and a second wife, Kamado, who came with him to the United States and there were three sons and two daughters born in California.

From there, the census moved northwest up San Gabriel Boulevard towards Rosemead and it is interesting to note that the first household encountered before reaching Darlington Avenue and the small residential tract next to the 60 Freeway was that of William S. Prugh, a 70-year old rancher and mirror salesman from Ohio, whose house was declared as worth $50,000, a sum about ten times greater than anyone else in the area.  Prugh, who resided with his two sisters and the husband and daughter of one of the sisters, had worked in a glass and mirror company in Pittsburgh part-owned by his brother, and moved to Los Angeles about 1914 to represent the company.  He bought a small ranch off San Gabriel Boulevard, on which oil wells were successfully drilled, and he built his mansion, El Aliso (The Cottonwood), on it.  Prugh enjoyed his wealth another few years and died in October 1933.

By 1930, the community of Misión Vieja had undergone major changes.  Most of its longtime families were gone, including those from the Davis, Barry, Temple, Manzanares, Andrade families and the only who remained were cousins Timoteo Repetto and Pedro Alvitre, neighbors on the Rancho Potrero Chico granted to their grandfather 85 years before.  There were, however, new residents, most coming from Mexico between 1900 and 1930, although there were also a few Japanese, Italians and others.  Aside from the oil industry, the dairy business also became a fixture, with several of them in operation.  Neighborhoods change, but Old Mission remained fairly static for decades.  With the onset of the oil industry and widespread immigration from Mexico, mainly after the Revolution of 1910, and other factors, the community did transform.

In a few weeks, the 1940 census will be made available for the first time and it will be interesting to see what Misión Vieja was like a little over 70 years ago.

Contribution by Paul R. Spitzzeri, Assistant Director, Workman and Temple Family Homestead Museum, City of Industry.