The Homestead’s Romance of the Ranchos festival is coming this Saturday and Sunday, April 30 and May 1, from 1 to 5 p.m. The free event will feature music; dance demonstrations; a living history encounter with Pío Pico, the last governor of Mexican California; adobe brickmaking; house exhibits; and demonstrations of blacksmithing, woodworking, and food preservation.
What you won’t see among the many demonstrators is beef butchering (shown below). This particular scene took place at Rancho La Merced, the home of F. P. F. Temple and Antonia Margarita Workman.
William M. Godfrey, Photograph of beef butchering at Rancho La Merced, circa 1870. Courtesy of Philip Nathanson.
The adobe house, shown in the background, was built in 1851. It was a massive L-shaped structure with one wing said to be 70′ long and other 110′, located at the northeast corner of the 2,363-acre Rancho La Merced. The ranch was granted to Casilda Soto de Lobo by Governor Manuel Micheltorena in 1844 and passed into the hands of William Workman six years later, when he foreclosed on a loan he made to Señora Lobo. (Ironically, Workman would lose most of his massive estate twenty-five years later due to foreclosure.)
Workman then deeded the ranch in equal shares to his daughter and her husband and to his majordomo (ranch foreman), Juan Matías Sanchez. While Sanchez occupied and enlarged the Soto adobe, the Temples built the structure in this image. It stood until about 1907 near today’s Rosemead Boulevard and San Gabriel Boulevard/Durfee Avenue.
The image shows several people, probably employees of the Temples, and at least one of the Temple children, Lucinda, who stands at the right. They are gathered near a zanja (water ditch), which was probably used in the butchering process to clean the carcass. After butchering, some of the meat may have been consumed fresh that day and part of it salted and dried for later. Other interesting features of the image include a line likely used for drying clothes and what appears to be some clothes hanging on the picket fence. A couple of other people stand in the background to the left.
Provided courtesy of photograph collector Philip Nathanson, this rare image of a working ranch was taken by early Los Angeles photographer William M. Godfrey and dates to about 1870.
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