Objectives: New Life Wine Tonic

Objectives will be an occasional series highlighting artifacts from the Homestead Museum Collection.

In that singularly unsuccessful social experiment called Prohibition—introduced in 1919, repealed in 1933, and the only one in American history brought about by changing the Constitution—a wealth of interesting artifacts have survived the ravages of time.  A few of these items reside in the collection of the Homestead Museum.

New Life Wine Tonic box, front and back, 1928. From the Homestead Museum Collection.

Liquor manufacturers had many clever ways to skirt the law and present products that were legally made and sold under Prohibition. The most successful of these was the “medicinal wine.”  The artifact highlighted in this post is New Life Wine Tonic, a product produced by Vida Nueva Company of Los Angeles under a 1928 copyright.  Vida Nueva was sure to include on the bottle that New Life “is mfg. [manufactured] under authority of [the] Internal Revenue Department” via a permit for medicinal wine use.

Made from muscatel grapes, which are fermented into sweet dessert wines and fortified with “aromatic herbs,” New Life Wine Tonic was 42 proof (that is, made of 21% alcohol, a staggeringly high percentage for what was essentially a dessert wine!) and was marketed as a “tonic and system builder” that also served as a “world known appetizer, blood stimulative and nerve builder.”  Consumers of the “tonic” were informed that the product “may be taken Pure or with Seltzer Water, Coffee, Tea or Broth,” though, surely, most people took their “medicine” pure!   The recommended dosage?  “One-half Wine Glass Before or After Meals!”

The accompanying photos include the front and back panels of the box, including the image of the shirtless “Adonis” whose mere tasting of the muscatel grape transformed him into the very picture of vigorous health and manly vitality.

Within five years, however, Vida Nueva no longer had to mask their muscatel dessert wines as “medicinal wine,” though little is known about the company and whether it survived the Great Depression that was affecting America (and providing some reason for Prohibition’s repeal in 1933).

Picture This! Pico House and Neighbors, circa 1870

Picture This! will be an occasional series featuring (hopefully) interesting and enlightening photographs from the Homestead Museum Collection. 

This inaugural post concerns an image of the Pico House hotel, Merced Theater, and Masonic Lodge, taken around 1870 by William M. Godfrey.  This detail from a stereoscopic photograph is one of the earliest published views of the hotel and theater.

Detail of a stereoscopic photograph showing the Pico House hotel, Merced Theater, and Masonic Lodge, taken from Fort Moore Hill by William M. Godfrey, ca. 1870. From the Homestead Museum Collection.

The Pico House, at center, was built by Pío Pico (1801-1894), the last governor of Mexican-era California, who sold his land holdings encompassing much of the San Fernando Valley to build this structure.  Engaging Ezra F. Kysor, the first professional architect to practice in Los Angeles, Pico sought to build a modern brick structure that would keep the Spanish-era Plaza viable in the face of businesses migrating south on Main and Spring streets.  The 33-room hotel, the first three-story structure erected in town, was built between September 1869 and June 1870 and opened to great fanfare.  Unfortunately, the Plaza area continued to grow isolated, and the hotel struggled.   A severe economic downturn after 1875 led Pico to lose the hotel by 1880.  Although it continued to operate as a hotel and boarding house, the structure became rundown and was threatened with demolition.  Saved as part of today’s El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument, the building has had intermittent, but never completed, restoration and remains empty most of the time, excepting occasional exhibits and functions.

To the right of the Pico House is the Merced Theater, also designed by Kysor.  Built by William Abbott and named for his wife, Maria Merced Garciaalso, the theater was completed in December 1870 and began performances in early 1871.  It had the distinction of being the tallest structure in Los Angeles, besting its neighbor by four feet because of the design of the façade.  The 400-seat auditorium was on the second floor and had a connecting entry from the neighboring hotel.  The Abbott family occupied the third floor and the ground level was rented out as commercial space.  As was the case with the Pico House, the theater failed to maintain a long presence. By 1876, competition from other venues led to a decline in theater patronage and the Merced closed two years later.  The building continued to be used for commercial purposes.

To the right of the Merced Theater is the building that housed Lodge 42 of the Free and Accepted Masons (F & AM), the first Freemasonry lodge in town.  Completed in 1858, the structure’s second floor remained lodge headquarters until 1868 when Lodge 42 relocated south to a building built by prominent mason F. P. F. Temple.  Over the years, the building was used for commercial purposes as a boarding house and, perhaps, a brothel.  After its preservation, the structure was, for some time, used as a masonic museum until earthquake safety issues ended that use.  For now, the structure remains empty and awaits retrofitting and, hopefully, a viable future.

Other notable aspects of this photograph include a portion of the Plaza at the far left; several long, one-story adobe houses, most visible on the left side of the photograph; New High Street running along the base of Fort Moore Hill; a modern frame house on the hillside at the far right; and the wooden tanks of the Los Angeles Gas Works, from which pipes crossed under Main Street to the Pico House and its neighbors for lighting and other uses.  The number 19 etched into the original negative appears to be an identification number used by the photographer.

About the photographer:

William Moloch Godfrey was born in New York in 1825 and moved with his family to Michigan in the 1840s, working as a dentist and dabbling in photography.  In 1850, he took a wagon train to California and tried gold digging.  Failing at this, as most did, he bought a dauguerreotype camera from another miner and tried his hand at making a living as a photographer.  By 1860,  Godfrey settled in Redwood City, south of San Francisco, where he was identified in the census as a painter. 

In 1870, he was in San Bernardino as a photographer, but lived for a time in Los Angeles and owned the Sunbeam Gallery.  He took many photographs of the wider southern California region, including the earliest known photo of the Workman House.  In 1872, Godfrey sold the gallery to Valentine Wolfenstein and had a short-lived partnership with David Flanders.  He eventually went back to San Bernardino to practice photography, run a newspaper, and work occasionally as a dentist.  By 1880, the stagnant economy seems to have led him to other non-entrepreneurial occupations, notably as a janitor and stagecoach driver.  In 1900, at age 74, Godfrey died in San Bernardino leaving a widow and two children.

Views of the Pico House and Plaza area from the hill were many in the 19th-century, but Godfrey’s is among the earliest published.

An Account of the Wake for Tiburcio Vasquez

The Homestead isn’t just concerned with the history of the Workman and Temple families, but also the broader context in which they lived, which includes the Los Angeles area and beyond.

When discussing Los Angeles and California in the 1840s and ’70s, crime and criminal justice are among the most important topics to consider. This is because Los Angeles all-too-easily belied its name when it came to the extraordinary level of crime, and the underlying ethnic and racial tension that fueled much of it.

A notable figure during this time was Tiburcio Vasquez, second only to Joaquin Murieta in the myth and legend, as well as history, of the bandidos whose heyday was from the 1850s to the ’70s. Although Vasquez was from Monterey and his most famous criminal activities were in that region, his first arrest and conviction took place in Los Angeles County, as did his last arrest leading to his execution.

Vasquez was captured in 1857 for stealing horses from a rancher named Juan Francisco, probably in what is now the Antelope Valley. Tried at the Court of Sessions, Vasquez was found guilty and sentenced to ten years at San Quentin, the state prison. Within a few years, Vasquez escaped, though he was recaptured and served a long stint in prison. In the early 1870s, he was released, promptly returning to his criminal ways. After he and his men committed murder in a botched robbery at Tres Piños in San Benito County in 1873, Vasquez was on the run.

His last foray occurred in May 1874 when he robbed rancher Alessandro Repetto at his hillside adobe in present-day Monterey Park. Learning that Repetto had an account with the bank of Temple and Workman (hence the museum connection), Vasquez sent Repetto’s nephew (or son) in to town to withdraw $800. When the nervous young man asked for the money, bank president F. P. F. Temple became suspicious and called Sheriff William R. Rowland (son of John Rowland, William Workman’s long-time friend and co-owner of Rancho La Puente).

The sheriff immediately gathered a posse and rode out to Repetto’s, but the nephew/son dashed ahead and, fearing for the rancher’s life, gave Vasquez advance warning about the coming of the sheriff. This gave Vasquez and his gang ample time to escape, despite a long and desperate chase by the sheriff up the Arroyo Seco above present Pasadena (indeed, he stopped to rob two men doing survey work for the Indiana Colony, the founders of that city) before rushing into the mountains.

For the time being, Vasquez escaped, but, having decided to stay in the Los Angeles area, he was eventually discovered at a home in present-day Hollywood. Sheriff Rowland, who remained in Los Angeles to avoid detection by Vasquez, sent a posse to capture the bandit and bring him into Los Angeles. This caused a sensation, as visitors flocked to see the legendary bandit. Photos of him were sold for his defense, and a farcical play about him was hastily written and performed at the Merced Theater.

Eventually, Vasquez was extradited to Santa Clara County to stand trial for the Tres Piños murders. Found guilty, he was sentenced to hang with the execution carried out on March 19, 1875.

Recently, a letter was acquired by the Homestead written by a Charles Brimblecom (now there’s quite a surname!) to his sister, Fannie. Dated March 22, 1875, from Santa Clara, the letter contained this fascinating passage:

The principle [sic] sensation around here lately was the hanging of Vasquez the robber and murderer, at San Jose last Friday. He went out with the greatest coolness. His relatives and friends brought his remains over here to the house of relatives in town here. Great numbers of people went down there to see him, and so after I finished work I went round there on my way up to grandma’s. A crowd of men and boys were looking in at the windows, and I stepped up, and looked in. On each side of the room sat a long line of greaser women and children, sitting very still and quiet, in the middle of the room, on a kind of bier, lay the body of Tiburcio Vasquez, the noted bandit and outlaw, with tall candles burning at the head and feet. He was a small man, face not very dark, black hair, black mustache, and very think black whiskers. He did not look particularly like a hard case, in fact I did not see a horrible monster, but simply a dead greaser. . . I could have gone in if I wanted to, but I just wanted to take a look so I could say that I had seen him. His friends made a great parade over him.

Brimblecom, a youth of eighteen years, used a common and demeaning term of the time in referring to Latinos as “greasers.”  Otherwise, his account is a relatively straightforward and unique document of the end of one of California’s most controversial and famous nineteenth-century figures.

Excerpt of a letter written by Charles Brimblecom, about Vasquez, dated March 22, 1875.

The Mystery of the Concealed Shoes

Woman's shoe, ca. 1870-1900. This shoe was found in a floorboard in the Workman House attic.

In December 2008, electrician Kirk Steinke was installing track lighting on the first floor ceiling of the the Workman House when made a strange discovery while tracing old wiring in the home’s attic.

Secreted under some nineteenth-century floorboards were four ladies’ shoes, none matching. After Steinke brought these to the museum staff’s attention, there was a bit of puzzlement, although a volunteer immediately identified them as “concealed shoes.”

A quick Internet search on the subject of concealed shoes led staff to contact the Northampton Museum in England, which has a notable shoe collection and a database of some 2,000 concealed shoe findings reported from all around the world.

Meantime, in July 2008, the archaeological firm of Greenwood and Associates in Los Angeles had completed a survey of the attic area seeking to better understand the development of the Workman House. The discovery of the shoes became a part of that larger project.

Through research done by both Greenwood and Associates and a staff member at Northampton Museum, it was determined that these shoes were manufactured some time between 1870 and 1900.

The Homestead was occupied during the 1880s by Francis W. Temple, grandson of the original owners, William and Nicolasa Workman.  Temple was unmarried and so it seemed highly unlikely that the shoes would have come from his occupancy.  After Francis died in 1888, however, the home was occupied by his brother, John, who was married and may well have built several rooms in the previously unfinished attic.  Perhaps John’s wife, Anita Davoust, placed the shoes there?

This leads to the question of “why?”  According to the Northampton Museum and other sources, there were several reasons why concealed shoes (and other objects) were hidden in houses.  Chiefly, persons in more superstitious eras were concerned about keeping bad luck, witches, the devil, or other nefarious elements out of their homes.   This would often be indicated by the placement of the shoes in proximity to a door or window.  Indeed, the Workman House shoes were found just a few feet (pardon the pun) from the doorway of the room.   Alternatively, a person’s desire to make their mark on the bedroom could be a reason for leaving objects.  The most common place for secretion of shoes has been the chimney, fireplace, or hearth, while the runner-up in frequency has been under floors or above the ceiling.

Shoes have been symbols of authority and fertility, as well as good luck, and they also speak to durability, given that, until our disposable society deemed otherwise, people repaired their shoes until they could no longer be worn.  Further, shoes were expensive.  Finally, women tend to have greater emotional attachment and interest in shoes than men, so the placement of female footwear could also reflect their strong feelings about this important belonging.

We do not, of course, know who put the shoes under the attic floorboards, or why, and this will almost certainly remain forever a mystery.  Yet, someone carefully and thoughtfully placed them there for reasons very personal to themselves.  Strange as it may seem, these concealed shoes now take their place, after well over a century, as an indelible part of the history of the Workman House.

A Rare Image of Pío Pico

Pío Pico, 1873. Donated by Jeannine Raymond.

Among the many interesting items that were donated to the Museum this spring from Temple family papers (see post from May 12) was this carte de visite photo of Governor Pío Pico.  Although badly damaged, to the extent that exposure to liquids caused the image to adhere to the glass from the frame the photo was housed in, this is a rare view of Don Pío.

The image was taken by early Los Angeles photographer Valentine Wolfenstein, a native of Sweden who came to the city by 1870 and operated the Sunbeam Gallery in the Temple Block, home of the Temple and Workman bank.  In it, we can see the white-haired ex-Governor turned slightly to his left and sporting a full beard.  He wears a black, three-piece suit with a white dress shirt and, presumably, a cravat or tie.

Notably, there are some inscriptions in red ink.  On the front, above the image is “76 years old,” and at the bottom is “Don Pio Pico 1st Governor Cal.”  Actually, Pico was the last governor of Mexican-era California, serving from 1845-46.  On the reverse is:

From Thornton

General Champagne Dinner

at Pico House, Sunday Evening April 13th 1873

Don Pio at head.  I was there

T

Thornton Sanborn was a nephew of F. P. F. Temple, a neighboring rancher, and long-time friend of Pico.  Sanborn migrated west from his native Reading, Massachusetts, in the 1850s and worked as a ranch foreman for his uncle at the Rancho La Merced near today’s Whittier Narrows Dam (close to South El Monte).  For a time, he supervised ranching operations at Temple’s property in Springfield in the Tuolumne County gold fields before returning back to the Los Angeles area.  After the failure of his uncle’s Temple and Workman bank, Sanborn returned to his hometown and remained there until his death.

In the meantime, sometime after April 1873 and before 1877, when he left Los Angeles, Sanborn sent this rare photo of Pico back home to relatives.  In 1926, when Walter Temple, F. P. F.’s son and Sanborn’s cousin, visited Reading to meet his relatives, he was presented with the photo.  It remained in the family’s hands until a few months ago when it was donated to the Museum.

As for Pico, whose life spanned nearly the entirety of the nineteenth century, from his 1801 birth to his death in 1894, he lost his Rancho de Paso Bartolo, near the Temple ranch at La Merced, to fraud in the early 1890s.  On his way to Los Angeles to live with relatives, he was said to have stayed with Walter Temple, leaving him a bench and other effects.  This bench was later given to Julia Davis, Temple’s childhood nurse, and eventually made its way to the Pío Pico State Historic Park, where it remains today.

In 1921, with permission from Pico’s heirs, the remains of the ex-Governor and his wife, Maria Ygnacia Alvarado, were moved from the old Calvary Cemetery near Elysian Park, to the newly-completed mausoleum erected by Walter Temple at the Workman Homestead ranch, founded by his grandfather William Workman, now the Homestead Museum.

Today visitors can walk the Pío Pico Memorial Walkway and pay their respects to Don Pío in the mausoleum.  This photo, then, is a reminder of the close connection between Pico and the Workman and Temple families.

Immigration, Labor, and Politics: William H. Workman’s Campaign for Mayor of Los Angeles, 1886

Throughout American history, the controversial and complex subject of foreign immigration and labor has been heatedly debated.  Whether it involved the forced slavery of Africans and subsequent importation and migration of the Irish, Eastern Europeans, Chinese and other Asians, Mexicans and Latinos generally, and many others, the question of lower-wage labor and the effect on “native” Americans (as opposed to the American Indian) has been at the center. 

William H. Workman, c. 1887. Courtesy of David A. Workman.

In 1886, William Henry Workman, nephew of William Workman, ran for mayor of Los Angeles.  Already a political veteran with several terms as a school board member and council member under his belt, Workman ran at a crucial time in the small city’s development.  A direct transcontinental railroad link to Los Angeles was completed the year before and a land boom of unprecedented proportions was in full flower.  Workman, who as a Democrat was once part of the dominant party in the city, found himself in the distinct minority in 1886 as Republicans “ruled the roost.”  Indeed, as a moderate, he enjoyed rare popularity among members of both parties and later served three terms as Los Angeles city treasurer from 1901 to 1907.

In the 1886 campaign, though, a hot contemporary issue arose that required a direct and vigorous defense from the candidate: whether Workman, a successful grape and citrus grower in Boyle Heights, had employed Chinese laborers to the detriment of “white” workers.  The Los Angeles Tribune newspaper had, indeed, asked, “Is it true that W. H. Workman is the steadfast friend of the Chinese…?”

While Workman replied that he hired white men regularly, he also noted that “to save my crops from perishing I have sometimes been compelled to employ Chinamen, but I have never done so when white help was available… I am opposed to the employment of Chinese, but there are cases where persons in my situation are absolutely forced by the necessities of the situation to accept their work.” 

To back up these statements, Joseph Walter Drown, Workman’s ranch foreman and son of a former county district attorney, offered that, “there are some classes of business incident to vine and tree growing which white men do not wish to perform, and which are of such a character as to endanger the health of persons attempting to do the labor… Mr. Workman had two Chinamen employed, who do this kind of work.” 

How much of this defense was based on political expediency is hard to say, but Workman was a surety for a bond offered by a Chinese defendant in a criminal case directly connected to the infamous Chinese Massacre of October 1871.  That notorious blot on the city of Los Angeles involved a mass lynching of nineteen Chinese men by an uncontrolled mob of hundreds and the Chinese defendant was tried for his role in the shooting of another Chinese man that was a factor in the subsequent bloodshed.

Workman’s candidacy seemed largely unaffected by the Chinese labor question and he was elected by a solid majority.  Interestingly, a year later, on October 23, 1887, Mayor Workman received an invitation from Ah Foy requesting  that

Yourself and family are respectfully invited to visit the Chinese Temple where the closing religious ceremonies of Ah Dieu will take place at 9 o’clock AM Monday morning the 24th instant. 

We remember your uniform kindness to our people these many years past and desire you to take notice of our people [and] how kindly they feel…towards yourself as Mayor of this City of Los Angeles.

And, the reason for the Ah Dieu ceremony?  In remembrance of the Chinese Massacre of sixteen years before.

The Tale of Sarah Ann Horn and the Workman Brothers

In the violent and racially-charged intersection between Native Americans and whites in the West, there were many incidences of women and children taken captive by natives as part of their retaliation for the incursion of whites into their ancestral homes.  In at least one instance, this had a direct connection with William Workman and his lifelong friend, John Rowland. 

In 1834, the Beales colony of British subjects settled in southern Texas, then part of Mexico, but the project was doomed from the beginning because the land was poor for farming and there were constant threats from Comanche Indians.  Matters worsened not long after American residents of Texas revolted against Mexico and formed their own country.  Finally, in 1837, a Comanche raid destroyed the colony and a small group tried to flee, but was decimated.  All eleven men were killed and two women, a Mrs. Harris and Sarah Ann Horn, and Mrs. Horn’s two young sons, James and John, were captured.

For a year and a half, Mrs. Horn was held by the Comanches while her sons were kept at a distance and only allowed to see her for brief visits on rare occasions.  Finally, an American merchant in New Mexico named Benjamin Hill ransomed Mrs. Horn, but treated her with very little respect; she was nothing more than a household servant to him.  Eventually, she was able to leave that household and move into a better situation, though she was still hopeful of being reunited with her sons.

Meanwhile, her plight came to the attention of merchants John Rowland and William Workman, longtime residents of Taos.  When they learned that Mrs. Horn was ready to give up on retrieving her children, they implored her to allow them to help her.

As she expressed it:

In the month of February [1838], I received a present of two dresses, presented by Messrs. Workman and Rowland, of Taos, with a note, bearing their kind respects, and a request, that I should delay my intended journey to the States, until after they should make another effort to recover my children; and further, if I should think it best to go the ensuing spring, that I should by all means come to Taos in season to spend as much time as I could before I should leave the country; and, at the same time, they gave me to understand, that all they possessed was at my command, as far as my wanted should require;–all of which, (with an inexpressible sense of gratitude do I record it.) they performed to the letter.

Mrs. Horn traveled to Taos, arriving at John Rowland’s house on March 10.  She recalled, “I spent my time about equally with this excellent family, and that of Mr. Workman, until the 22nd of August.”  Prior to her ransom, she learned, Rowland had sent out a party to rescue her, her sons, and Mrs. Harris, but the Indians fended off that group.  Further, Mrs. Horn noted, “Messrs. Workman and Rowland sent by two trading companies . . . authorizing them to obtain my children at any price.”  In this latter case, however, the terrible news was received that her younger boy, John, had been forced to guard a horse in the midst of a winter storm and died of exposure.  Meanwhile, Joseph, her elder son, could not be ransomed and was never heard from again.

After Sarah Ann Horn lost all hope of being reunited with her children again, she went from New Mexico to Missouri and lived at the home of William Workman's brother, David, where she died within a year.

Without any hope of seeing or reuniting with her children, Mrs. Horn joined a caravan bound for Missouri via the Santa Fe Trail.  As she remembered:

I left Santa Fe under the protection of my sympathizing and honored friends, Messrs. Workman and Rowland . . . I arrived at the house of Mr. David Workman, (a brother of my kind friend William Workman,) New Franklin, Howard County, Missouri, and beneath whose hospitable roof I have since continued to share the kind attentions of him and his amiable lady.

While in Missouri, Mrs. Horn dictated her memoir for publication to raise funds for her return to England.  The book, titled A Narrative of the Captivity of Mrs. Horn and Her Two Children With Mrs. Harris by the Camanche [sic] Indians, was published in St. Louis in 1839, just before she died.  It was stated that Mrs. Horn’s death was caused by the physical wounds and mental and emotional abuse she sustained at the hands of the Comanche.

The Sarah Ann Horn incident, however, is a rare example of the connection between these naturalized Mexicans of American and British descent and the native peoples whose world was being lost to the incursions of the whites.

Source: Carl Coke Rister, Comanche Bondage (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press,) 1989.  This work, originally published in 1955 by the Arthur H. Clark Company, has a complete reprint of the Sarah Ann Horn narrative.  Also, thanks are expressed to Rowland and Workman descendant Jason Klascius-Fernandez for bringing the Sarah Ann Horn narrative to our attention.

Revolution in Mexico and the Temple Family

Rafaela Cota de Temple, Gregorio de Ajuria, and Jonathan Temple ca. 1855.

Jonathan Temple (1796-1866) was the first member of the Temple and Workman families to live in Los Angeles.  He left his native Reading, Massachusetts, sometime in the first half of the 1820s and relocated to Hawaii, which had, in 1819, been opened to American missionaries and merchants from Massachusetts.  Temple’s stay in the Islands as a merchant was brief and, in 1827, he moved to California, arriving in San Diego that summer.  The following year he became the second American or European (after Joseph Chapman) to settle in Los Angeles and opened the pueblo’s first store. 

Temple’s success in Los Angeles were rapid and he became the owner of a significant section of the pueblo that was later the center of the community’s downtown and is now the site of City Hall.  He also owned the 27,000-acre Rancho Los Cerritos, encompassing most of Long Beach and surrounding areas, and amassed other significant landholdings.

Most intriguing and little-known, however, was his lease of the national mint of the Republic of Mexico, which he obtained in 1856.  The story melds with a larger one of the seemingly annual parade of revolutionary movements and political and military strife that engulfed Mexico in that period and it directly involves Temple’s son-in-law, Gregorio de Ajuria.

Temple and his wife, Rafaela Cota, a Santa Barbara native, had one child, daughter Francisca, born in 1831.  In January 1848 she married de Ajuria, a native of Bilbao, Spain, who was an up-and-coming merchant with many contacts in Mexico.  While the couple remained in Los Angeles, living with the Temples through at least the 1850 census (actually taken in early 1851), the de Ajurias moved to Mexico City and then relocated to New York and Paris several times over the years.  The two had a family of nine children and de Ajuria’s personal wealth of $10,000 in the 1860 census was not insignficant.

Indeed, it was his financial position that brought him into contact with Ignacio Comonfort, a military officer and politician from Puebla, Mexico, who had designs on the presidency of that country.  Comonfort was a military commander in the state of Guerrero in the 1830s who won office in the Mexican Congress in 1842 and 1846, though both times the body was dissolved by the federal government.  After fighting against the United States in the Mexican-American War, Comonfort won election as a senator and was an administrator in Acapulco.  In 1854, he joined the Revolution of Ayutla, an attempt by Juan Alvarez to unseat Gen. Antonio de Santa Anna as president of Mexico.  Comonfort traveled to San Francisco and then New York seeking funds for the revolution and had little luck until he landed in the latter and met with de Ajuria.  De Ajuria was not only a friend of Alvarez but his mercantile company had an office in Acapulco when Comonfort was the city’s administrator (incidentally, Jonathan Temple also held significant land interests between Acapulco and Mazatlán, perhaps due to the assistance of his son-in-law).  For a loan of 60,000 pesos, which came in the form of cash and weapons, de Ajuria was promised 250,000 pesos if the revolution was a success. 

With the cache of weapons that Comonfort obtained, thanks  to de Ajuria, the revolt moved forward and Santa Anna resigned his office in early August 1855.  Alvarez assumed the presidency and Comonfort became the Minister of War, though within months Alvarez resigned and Comonfort took his place as the leader of the country.

Upon assuming power, Comonfort issued a manifesto the Mexican nation noting that, among the debts that had been contracted in service to the revolution,

the first is to make payment to be sent to D. Gregorio de Ajuria, who provided for the movement of the revolution in the South.  While it is true that the business has been signficantly beneficial to the lender, you should not miss the opportunity, knowing that, without the assistance he provided, it would have been impossible to sustain the revolution, which was in immediate danger of losing capital.

Comonfort, however, went on to state that:

The second relates to the lease of the mint in the capital.  The government takes the opportunity to declare openly against such a system, but lacks the funds to manage the mint itself, and has succumbed in this case, as in some others, to the law of imperative necessity.

The “imperative necessity” was arranging for Jonathan Temple to assume the lease by a cash payment, said to have been $500,000, an enormous sum for the era, especially from a small-town merchant.  There was a precedent, however, because, from 1847, the Mexico City mint was leased to foreigners.   In addition to the advance payment, de Ajuria (and, perhaps, Temple) made loans of almost $270,000 in 1856 to the government. 

Temple’s lease of the mint was on a ten-year contract and was managed initially  by Alejandro Bellangé, another supporter of the Alvarez/Comonfort coup, and then by Jose Mendizabal.   Comonfort was unseated in yet another revolt in early 1858 and fled to the United States (he did return to Mexico as a general in the fight against the French invasion and died in Fall 1863).  Meanwhile, de Ajuria also became an exile in Paris where he died in 1864.  Although the French empire in Mexico sought to annul the lease, Temple was able to override this by more loans to the new government.  After Jonathan Temple died in Spring 1866, an extension was signed with his daughter, Francisca, as the leaseholder.  The Mexican government rescinded the contract a couple of years later, but chronic financial shortages led it to reverse its policy after Francisca Temple de Ajuria came up, in 1871, with a substantial loan of $130,000  to the government.

For two decades, the lease stood, presumably on ten-year agreements, but Mexican dictator Porfirio Diaz finally stepped in and demanded the return of the mint to the government.  In 1892-93, Antonio de Ajuria, Francisco and Gregorio’s son and Jonathan Temple’s grandson, acted as the agent on behalf of his mother, then residing in Paris, and worked out an indemnity of some $75,000.  With this, the mint reverted to government ownership in February 1893 after almost forty years in the hands of the Temple family.

Sources:

Sol Alexander, “Juan Temple and the Mint of Mexico,” Plus Ultra, no. 116, May 1973.

Enrique Canudas Sandoval, Las Venas de Plata en la Historia de México: Síntesis de Historia Económica Siglo XIX (Universidad de Autónoma de Tabasco), 2005.

“Mexico to Control Her Mints, ” New York Times, 24 November 1892.

“Mexico Controls Her Own Mint,” New York Times, 7 February 1893.

“The Official Mexican Mint Records: Can We Trust Them?”, Mexican Coin Facts and Figures, Vol. 2, No. 7 (www.mexicancoinmagic.com).

Workman and Temple Family Documents Acquired!

William Workman, courtesy of the Homestead Museum Collection.

Site founder William Workman (1799-1876), an English native who lived in Missouri, Mexican-era New Mexico, and Mexican and American-era California, was a longtime rancher, farmer, and businessman whose empire of more than 25,000 acres (centered on his portion of the immense Rancho La Puente in the eastern San Gabriel Valley) collapsed in 1876 when the bank he co-owned with his son-in-law, F. P. F. Temple (1822-1880), failed. 

 Temple, who left his native Massachusetts in 1841, the year the Workman family came to California, and migrated to Los Angeles to join his older half-brother, Jonathan (1796-1866) in running a store in the town, was an immensely popular figure whose naivete did not match his ambition. 

Temple’s son, Walter (1869-1938), enjoyed a resurgence in his family’s fortunes thanks to a fortunate discovery of oil in 1917 on land he owned (and had once been owned by his father) in the Montebello Hills.  Walter Temple bought a 75-acre piece of the ranch his grandfather Workman had established and engaged in an extensive remodeling and the building of a grandiose Spanish Colonial Revival home, La Casa Nueva, that reflected much of his family’s history and his romantic views of California.  Real estate and oil investments soured by the late 1920s, however, and Temple lost all by the advent of the Great Depression, eerily mirroring the difficulties his father and grandfather faced fifty years before.

Thomas Workman Temple II. From the Homestead Museum Collection.

To tell the amazing story of these people and others in the family, as well to place this in the context of what happened in the Los Angeles region from 1830-1930, documents (letters, photographs, reports, and more) are vital.  Over the years, the Homestead has been fortunate enough to receive collections from family members, but no collection so far received has been more important than one just acquired by the Museum in the last month. 

A cache of documents accumulated by Thomas Workman Temple II (1905-1972), a noted genealogist and historian of early California and whose father and grandfather built the historic homes at this site, was donated by Jeannine Raymond.  Her father, Carl Sutter, was the second husband of Temple’s widow, Gabriela, and after Mr. Sutter’s passing last December, Ms. Raymond contacted the Homestead about the gift.  And, what a gift it is!

The collection has many items that prove to be a treasure trove of material from 1930 and before.  There are relatively few photographs, though one photo album, which will be thoroughly documented and dismantled because of acidic conditions, has many family photographs from the 1920s and 1930s.  There are also some nice portraits of family members from 1905 to the 1930s.  Glass negatives of Walter and Laura Temple, from a 1919 photo shoot by well-known Los Angeles photographer George Steckel, are, unfortunately, broken into two pieces.

Correspondence is a significant proportion of the collection, including many letters between family members.  A few rare examples date to the 1850s and 1860s, including an exchange between F. P. F. Temple and his sister Cynthia from 1856 and letters to William Workman from two grandsons, dating to the 1860s.  Other 19th-century examples consist of love letters from Walter Temple to his future wife, Laura, that are stellar examples of formal, Victorian-era romantic correspondence.  Much more common are letters from the 1910s and 1920s, including Christmas cards, letters to and from school by the Temple children to their parents, and business correspondence involving Walter Temple.

Financial reports form a central component of this collection, covering the personal and business affairs of Walter Temple from the late 1910s into the early 1930s.  Through these, a composite of his efforts to establish himself as a prominent capitalist is given a fuller rendering.  Unfortunately, we can also see the immense difficulties he faced after the local real estate market cooled by the mid-1920s.  Letters from his personal attorney show starkly the realities that came to full fruition during the Great Depression.

There are many more items; too many to list here, but over the coming months, some of the entries in this blog will focus on specifics from this incredible collection.  For now, one document, probably the most valuable of them all, stands out, if for no other reason, than its relevance to what is going on now, in this difficult economic recession.

In 1875, two years after a national depression descended on America, California’s bubble in silver mining speculation from the mining areas around Reno, Nevada, burst.  As a late August panic spread to the state’s banks, the Workman and Temple bank, one of two commercial institutions in Los Angeles, faced a run by depositors.  After suspending business, bank president F. P. F. Temple and his managing cashier, Henry Ledyard, spent much of the fall in San Francisco, the financial capital of the state, seeking funding, not from government (as has been the case lately), but from private funds held by capitalists.  One, Elias J. “Lucky” Baldwin, was busily acquiring Los Angeles County property and knew full well that Workman and Temple were the two wealthiest persons and biggest landowners in the county.

A 20 November 1875 letter from Temple to Workman states the case plainly: 

My Dear Sir,

You will please pardon me for not writing you before, my business here has been of a disagreeable nature . . . [the object for his extended stay in San Francisco was] to get money so that we can go on with our business, but on rather hard terms—of two evils we must choose the least—we shall come out all right in the end . . . Mr. Baldwin lets us have the money, we have to secure him.

Additionally, Temple offers some commentary on the feeling of the times and one which could be almost word-for-word a modern, 2009 statement:

This money crisis has been one never known here on the Coast before, it has created great disconfidence and people holding or having money will not put it in circulation, this state of things will remain for a number of months after which money will seek investment.

Naturally, the role of government was entirely different than from now.  Regulation of banks and financial markets was non-existent and bailouts and stimulus packages were inconceivable.  Yet, depressions lasted for years as consumer and investor confidence was slow to rebound and markets waited until such confidence resumed. 

For Temple and Workman, Baldwin’s “hard terms” were, indeed, almost impossible to meet in terms of interest and terms of payment.  Yet, it really didn’t matter.  Once depositors learned that there was money in the bank’s vault, they rushed to close their accounts.  Over $340,000, a princely sum in that day, was borrowed and lost in a staggeringly short time of six weeks.  In January 1876, the bank collapsed and ruined the fortunes of its owners.  The population of Los Angeles dropped after 1876 and has not done so since.

When it comes to understanding current conditions and future prospects, history can be a window to understanding, if we’re willing to open it.  All too often, we’re not and documents like those in this new collection of Workman and Temple family papers can sometimes be an aid to helping us get that necessary view.