The Basye Family of Misión Vieja

The last post concerned the family of Juan Matias Sánchez, co-owner of Rancho La Merced from 1851 onward.  Sánchez occupied and then expanded the adobe built by the rancho's original owner, Casilda Soto de Lobo, and ran his nearly 1,200-acre half of La Merced from there.


In 1856, Sánchez was joined by a nephew, Rafael Basye, who migrated from New Mexico.  Rafael was a son of Sánchez's sister Geronima and James Basye.  James was born in Bourbon County, Kentucky about 1802 and, as a young man, lived in Shelbyville, Illinois and then moved to Cass County, Missouri, southeast of today's Kansas City.


Apparently, though, James traveled on the Santa Fe Trail to New Mexico, where he married Geronima Sánchez about 1830 or so.  Rafael was born in 1832 and there were at least two other sons, Joseph (born in 1837) and Peter (1839), all of whom were born in New Mexico.  By about 1842, however, Geronima died and James took his three sons back to Missouri.  When the 1850 census was conducted, James, his three sons from Geronima, his second wife Elizabeth and their daughter and son together were residing on a farm in the Sixteenth District of Cass County.

This early 1900s map shows the Misión Vieja area, with the Montebello Hills at the left, the Rio Hondo [Old San Gabriel River] going vertically at the center, and the bridge along San Gabriel Boulevard crossing the Rio Hondo at the center.  Just below that, on the left of the river, is the Basye Adobe.  Click on any image to see the set in a separate window and in enlarged views.  All photos courtesy of the Workman and Temple Family Homestead Museum.

An 1889 biography of Rafael stated "he was born in New Mexico, 1 May 1832; but while a youth his parents located in Missouri, where Mr. Basye was reared as a farmer and stock-raiser."  The account continued, "In 1856 he crossed the plains to California, and located in Los Angeles County, where, in connection with his uncle, John Sanches [sic], he was engaged in sheep-ranching and wool-growing in the San Gabriel Valley."


A Basye family history published in 1950 stated that James Basye "went to California in about 1850 [and] from there in 1851 he took a steamer for home, carrying a large sum of money, said to be $65,000, but he was never heard from."  If true, this statement indicates pretty clearly that James was wildly successful digging for gold during the famed Gold Rush and was heading back to Missouri with his riches when he vanished.  The account continued that, "it is supposed he was drowned, murdered, or lost on the Isthmus."

Another early 20th=-century map with detail of the southwest corner of Rancho Potrero Chico.  Coming from the upper left to the lower right is San Gabriel Boulevard and, towards the lower left, is a small indication for Lincoln Avenue.  Just below San Gabriel and right of Lincoln is the location of the Basye Adobe.

As for Rafael's two full brothers, Joseph, at around 13 years old, went to California with his father in 1850, and then was left there at Vacaville with relatives.  When James failed to make it back home to Missouri, Joseph was left in California and, "lost track of his people," according to the 1950 Basye history.  He married and had a large family and spent his last years in Bakersfield, where he died at the end of 1919.


Peter, the younger of the trio, left Missouri and went a short distance west over the border to Kansas, where, at age 23, he enlisted in the Second Kansas Cavalry for the Union Army during the Civil War.  He served as a private from April 1862 until his discharge from Little Rock, Arkansas, just a few days after the assassination of President Lincoln three years later.  Peter, who never married, worked as a farmer near present Kansas City and at Richland, near Topeka and Lawrence, before rheumatism led him to be admitted to the National Soldiers' Home at Leavenworth in 1887.  He was in and out of the home five separate times for stints as long as six years at a time.  During his last stay there, on 16 January 1904, he was walking along a Burlington Northern railroad track at night and was struck and killed by a train.


Whether Rafael had any contact with his brothers is not known, but, in the 1860 census he shows up as "Rafael Vasa" in the household of his uncle Juan Matias Sánchez.  He must have remained there for almost another decade, as he married Maria Antonia Alvitre, of a long-standing Misión Vieja family profiled in this blog previously, in 1869.

A circa 1890s photo of the Basye Adobe with false wood fronts, including the former Basye Store at the right, then called the "Pioneer Store" and "Old Mission Saloon" and run by Manuel Zuñiga, who was from a long-time early Misión Vieja family.  Standing at the center is Zuñiga's second wife, Lucinda Temple, from another Old Mission family.

Settling into an adobe house built by him and Jesús Andrade situated just off the west bank of the Rio Hondo, which until a massive flood in 1867 was the old course of the San Gabriel River, Bayse opened a general store, which catered to the Old Mission community.  He remained a merchant for the rest of his life until he died on 27 February 1887.

After Rafael's death, his widow and children remained at the adobe and continued to operate the store, which soon became managed by the eldest child, James.  By 1900, however, the Basyes left the adobe, which continued to house the "Pioneer Store" and "Old Mission Saloon", owned by Manuel Zuñiga, whose family resided in the Old Mission area from well before 1850 and who was married to another Misión Vieja native, Lucinda Temple when he ran the store and saloon.

Walter Temple, upper right, Laura Gonzalez Temple, upper left, and their four children, from left to right, Agnes, Walter, Jr., Edgar, and Thomas, next to the Basye Adobe about 1914.  In April 1914, Thomas accidentally discovered oil on the hills to the west of the house, which led to a lease with Standard Oil Company of California.  Two dozen oil wells were drilled, several proving to be gushers, and, after the Temples moved, the adobe became the lease headquarters for Standard.  Once the company vacated the building, sometime in the 1930s, it was razed.

In 1912, the adobe was purchased by Walter P. Temple, Lucinda's younger brother, after he decided to sell the 50-acre Temple homestead on the east side of the Rio Hondo.  Temple and his family resided in the Basye Adobe for five years and, when oil was found on land the Temples owned in the Montebello Hills just west of the house, the structure became the headquarters for Standard Oil Company of California for the Temple Lease.  It remained in use by the company until sometime in the 1930s, when it was torn down.

This is a detail of a Summer 1917 panoramic photo that showed hundreds of persons gathered near the Basye Adobe, which is barely visible behind the trees, for a celebration commemorating the first Temple oil well at the Montebello Hills.  John H. Temple, brother of Walter, who owned the wells, sports a large white mustache and wears in a suit and bow tie at the lower center.  For a brief time, he lived in the adobe while he managed a gas station owned by his brother at the corner of Lincoln Avenue and San Gabriel Boulevard, just a stone's throw west of the adobe.

Meantime, the Basye family had a forty-acre farm about a mile or so northeast of their adobe and within the town of El Monte.  This property was owned by Maria Antonia Alvtire de Basye and, by the late 1880s, there were seventeen acres planted to wine grapes, an orchard and other crops.  Today, Basye Street in the area is a visible reminder of the family's quarter-section farm.

This fantastic image, probably taken in the 1920s from an oil derrick like those seen in the background, shows the Basye Adobe at the left while it was used as headquarters for Standard Oil Company of California and its Temple lease.  At the right is San Gabriel Boulevard heading to the northwest.  In the distance is a portion of the Montebello Hills.  Those with sharp eyes can make out, at the top right, the intersection with Lincoln Avenue.

In all, there were six surviving children of Rafael and Maria Antonia, including James, Rafaela, Thomas, Miguel, Edward and Isabelle.  The family remained in the Old Mission/El Monte area for many years and descendants continue to reside in the Los Angeles region.

As is often the case, there were some difficult times, much of it centered on the 1898 marriage of Rafaela Basye to Charles P. Temple, of the prominent Misión Vieja family, and her death very shortly afterward.  Her family blamed Temple for Rafaela's premature passing and, not long afterward, James confronted Temple after both had been drinking and the two men pulled out pistols and shot at each other.  Temple was wounded and James went on trial, but the case ended without a conviction and, it is said, the two men amicably parted from the courthouse.

Photographed in 1930 for a college term paper on the La Puente School District, which included the Old Mission area, the Basye Adobe appears to have been abandoned and was missing windows and other details.  It had served as headquarters for Standard Oil Company of California for the company's Temple Lease, but was torn down within several years of this photo being taken.

This wasn't the case three years later, in 1902, when Thomas Basye was in Temple's "La Paloma" saloon, run out of the old Temple family adobe in Old Mission.  Naturally, there was drinking and an argument and Temple shot and killed Thomas.  A dramatic and avidly-covered trial took place, leading to Temple's acquittal.

These incidents will be covered in this blog in more detail at a later date.  Another Basye-related post for the future will be about the original ledger from the family store, which has remarkably survived the decades, though the book is badly worn and damaged.  Its pages contain transactions with the early families of La Misión Vieja and will make for an interesting addition to this blog.

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

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.

Misión Vieja and the 1920 Federal Census

This detail from a 1921 panoramic photograph published in a state report on the oil industry is taken from atop an oil derrick looking west.  The road is Durfee Avenue as it merges into San Gabriel Boulevard.  The newly-built bridge crossing the Rio Hondo (water is clearly seen in the river at the upper right) is near the Basye Adobe, headquarters at the time for Standard Oil Company's Montebello field operations.  The Montebello Hills are in the distance.  Click on the photo for a larger view in a new window.

In terms of demographics and the use of the land by its residents, especially, the Old Mission community changed relatively little from its earliest settlement before 1836 until well into the 20th century.  Matters accelerated, however, in the 1910s, specifically with the discovery of oil in the Montebello Hills.  A Whittier newspaper from 1915 attributed the local find to road crews driving bridge piles, presumably for San Gabriel Boulevard's new span across the Rio Hondo, and forcing a seepage of crude to the surface. 

Another version is that 9-year old Thomas W. Temple II, whose grandfather, F. P. F. Temple owned much of the land in and around Misión Vieja from the early 1850s, and whose father, Walter Temple, purchased in 1912 about 60 acres on and just below the very northeastern corner of the Montebello Hills, made a discovery in April 1914.  According to this account, young Thomas was playing in the hills after a rain and saw a pool of water bubbling and turning black, while a strong rotten egg-like smell emanated from the pool.  Knowing that there was oil there, the boy ran down the hill and crossed Lincoln Boulevard to the Temple family home, formerly the adobe store and saloon built by Rafael Basye and Jesús Andrade in 1869, to tell his father.  Walter Temple returned with a match and, riskily, struck it over the pool and flame shot out.  For those who remember the old television sitcom, The Beverly Hillbillies, this incredible tale might sound a little familiar! 

In 1915, the Temples arranged a lease with Standard Oil Company of California (now Chevron), while the daughters of Elias J. "Lucky" Baldwin, who took most of the area land about 1880 from F. P. F. Temple and Juan Matías Sánchez when Temple failed to repay a loan that Sánchez used his land as security for, arranged their own lease with Standard on hundreds of acres of the hills.

By 1916, a test well was drilled on the Baldwin portion and came in successfully.  The Temple lease was then drilled on and the first well came in there in late June 1917 with a gusher.  The bonanza was on!  Within a few years, leases were signed with area farmers and landowners by several companies and the Montebello oil field, centered on the hills and in the vicinity of Old Mission, was born.

Consequently, the 1920 federal censuses reflected an already-transformed community.  When enumerator Isaac F. Baker came through in late January and early February, many of the longtime families or older members of them were deceased or had moved away.  For example, Walter Temple, born in the neighborhood in 1869, used the proceeds from his immense stroke of luck and moved in 1917 to Monterey Park and then, later that year, to Alhambra.

One "old timer" who remained in Old Mission was Pedro Alvitre, son of Anastacio Alvitre and Eleuteria Verdugo, who lived long lives in the community and died during the 1910s.  Pedro assumed ownership of his father's share in the Rancho Potrero Chico, living in a section at the northwestern portion of the rancho, west of today's Rosemead Boulevard and east of the Rio Hondo.  His four sons, a daughter, and a nephew, Tony Bermudez, also resided with him on the farm, though there were attempts at finding oil on their land, as was the case with any property in the area.

The next family was that of the Salgados, whose head, Victoriano, a 50-year old native of Mexico, was listed as a farm laborer, perhaps assisting on the Alvitre farm.  Victoriano lived with his California born wife, Nasario and their four sons and two daughters.

Interestingly, the next household was that of Elizabeth Barry, who owned the middle of three sections of the western portion of the Potrero Chico ranch, and she listed her occupatiuon as "farm, oil wells."  Indeed, there were successful wells drilled on the Barry lease in the late 1910s.  Elizabeth, who was a Bermudez, before her marriage to Irish native George Barry (who died in the 1890s), was 70 years old in 1920 and lived with two unmarried daughters.  The adjacent household was that of her son, James, a 50-year old widower, who was shown as an "oil field laborer" and was living with three sons and a daughter, with the eldest son, age 15, working as a farm laborer.

Notably, the third landowner of the sections between the Barrys and Alvitres was Timoteo Repetto.  He and his wife Maria were counted, but on two sheets earlier than that of his neighbors.  Perhaps Baker visited the home out of order for some reason.  He also indicated that the Repettos were renters, which was clearly not the case.  Previous censuses and the 1930 count showed Timoteo as an owner of his own farm.

Another early family that still had some members residing at Misión Vieja in 1920 was the Manzanares clan.  Specifically, there were the brothers Pedro and Inocente, whose brother Victor had been in the area in 1910, but moved to Monterey Park by the end of the decade.  The two remaining in Old Mission were 51 and 48, respectively, and both single, working as farm laborers.

Next to them were step-siblings and the last of the long-standing families to still be in the neighborhood in 1920.  These were brother and sister, Antonio and Dominga Duarte.  They were the children of Maria Siriaca Valenzuela, whose father was one of the original grantees of Rancho Potrero Chico, and Francisco Duarte.  After their father died, Siriaca married Cristobal Manzanares, the father of the Pedro and Inocente noted above.  Antonio, like his step brothers, was also a farm laborer.

There were, however, many new residents of the general Old Mission community, most of whom were associated with the new and burgeoning oil industry.  For example, after Walter Temple left the neighborhood in 1917, the old Basye Adobe became the headquarters of the Standard Oil Company for the Montebello oil field.  Several dozen single men were listed on two sheets of the census as residents of "Boarding House Standard Oil Co."  The great majority of the workers were in their 20s, which was natural given the rigorous physical (and dangerous) work involved in much of the oil industry.  While a number of the employees housed at the boarding house were native Californians, most were from the Midwest, with a few from eastern or southern states.  Five were from other countries, including England, Austria Denmark, Norway and Russia.  Occupations included rotary drillers, tool dressers, derrick men, pumpers, gaugers, rig builders and roustabouts.  These latter were general laborers, doing whatever work they were ordered to by the foreman, while tool dressers prepared the tools to be used in the drilling and operation of the well.  Gaugers typically oversee the flow of crude in pipelines and into tanks.  There were two other employees to point out from the Standard boarding house: cook Katherine DeMaine, who was listed as born "on sea American vessel", and baker Rose Kalics, an ethnic Bohemian from Vienna, Austria.  These two were clearly essential to the maintenance of the workers trudging to and from the field every day!

Other oil workers in the general Misión Vieja community lived with families in separate housing often rented from the company or the lease owner.  While some of these men could be workers like those listed above, they also included the supervisors or foremen, such as Standard's drill foreman Romane Richardson, a native of Pennsylvania (the birthplace of the American oil industry) and machinist foreman August Segelhorst, both of whom had families with children, or Columbia Oil company's lease foreman William M. Talbot, a New York native of Scottish parents, who lived with his wife, two daughters and two "wards," these latter being two sisters who might have been orphans taken in by Talbot and his wife.

In any case, the onset of the oil industry at Old Mission from about 1917 dramatically changed the community, a process that would continue through the next decade and beyond, though later developments were more about another use of the land, as will be seen in later posts.

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