Charles C. Lips, a German, came to Los Angeles from Philadelphia in 1866 and joined the wholesale liquor firm of E. Martin & Company, later Lips, Craigue & Company, in the Baker Block. As a volunteer fireman, he was a member of the old Thirty-Eights; a fact adding interest to the appointment, on February 28th, 1905, of his son, Walter Lips, as Chief of the Los Angeles Fire Department.
On October 3d, William Wolfskill died, mourned by many. Though but sixty-eight years of age, he had witnessed much in the founding of our great Southwestern commonwealth; and notwithstanding the handicaps to his early education, and the disappointments of his more eventful years, he was a man of marked intelligence and remained unembittered and kindly disposed toward his fellow-men.
A good example of what an industrious man, following an ordinary trade, could accomplish in early days was afforded by Andrew Joughin, a blacksmith, who came here in 1866, a powerful son of the Isle of Man, measuring over six feet and tipping the beam at more than two hundred pounds. He had soon saved enough money to buy for five hundred dollars a large frontage at Second and Hill streets, selling it shortly after for fifteen hundred. From Los Angeles, Joughin went to Arizona and then to San Juan Capistrano, but was back here again in 1870, opening another shop. Toward the middle seventies, Joughin was making rather ingenious plows of iron and steel which attracted considerable attention. As fast as he accumulated a little money, he invested it in land, buying in 1874, for six thousand dollars, some three hundred and sixty acres comprising a part of one of the Ciénega ranchos, to which he moved in 1876. Seven years later, he purchased three hundred and five acres once called the Tom Gray Ranch, now known by the more pretentious name of Arlington Heights. In 1888, three years after he had secured six hundred acres of the Palos Verdes rancho near Wilmington, the blacksmith retired and made a grand tour of Europe, revisiting his beloved Isle of Man.
Pat Goodwin was another blacksmith, who reached Los Angeles in 1866 or 1867, shoeing his way, as it were, south from San Francisco, through San José, Whisky Flat and other picturesque places, in the service of A. O. Thorn, one of the stage-line proprietors. He had a shop first on Spring Street, where later the Empire Stables were opened, and afterward at the corner of Second and Spring streets, on the site in time bought by J. E. Hollenbeck.
Still another smith of this period was Henry King (brother of John King, formerly of the Bella Union), who in 1879-80 served two terms as Chief of Police. Later, A. L. Bath was a well-known wheelwright who located his shop on Spring Street near Third.
In 1866, quite a calamity befell this pueblo: the abandonment by the Government of Drum Barracks. As this had been one of the chief sources of revenue for our small community, the loss was severely felt, and the immediate effect disastrous. About the same time, too, Samuel B. Caswell (father of W. M. Caswell, first of the Los Angeles Savings Bank and now of the Security), who had come to Los Angeles the year before, took into partnership John F. Ellis, and under the title of Caswell & Ellis, they started a good-sized grocery and merchandise business; and between the competition that they brought and the reduction of the circulating medium, times with H. Newmark & Company became somewhat less prosperous. Later, John H. Wright was added to the firm, and it became Caswell, Ellis & Wright. On September 1st, 1871, the firm dissolved.
CHAPTER XXV
REMOVAL TO NEW YORK, AND RETURN
1867-1868
The reader may already have noted that more than one important move in my life has been decided upon with but little previous deliberation. During August, 1866, while on the way to a family picnic at La Ballona, my brother suggested the advisability of opening an office for H. Newmark & Company in New York; and so quickly had I expressed my willingness to remove there that, when we reached the rancho, I announced to my wife that we would leave for the East as soon as we could get ready. Circumstances, however, delayed our going a few months.
My family at this time consisted of my wife and four children; and together on January 29th, 1867, we left San Pedro for New York, by way of San Francisco and Panamá, experiencing frightfully hot weather. Stopping at Acapulco, during Maximilian's revolution, we were summarily warned to keep away from the fort on the hill; while at Panamá yellow fever, spread by travelers recently arrived from South America, caused the Captain to beat a hasty retreat. Sailing on the steamer Henry Chancey from Aspinwall, we arrived at New York on the sixth of March; and having domiciled my family comfortably, my next care was to establish an office on the third floor at 31 and 33 Broadway, placing it in charge of M. J. Newmark, who had preceded me to the metropolis a year before. In a short time, I bought a home on Forty-ninth Street, between Sixth and Seventh avenues, then an agreeable residence district. An intense longing to see my old home next induced me to return to Europe, and I sailed on May 16th for Havre on the steam-propeller Union; the band playing The Highland Fling as the vessel left the pier. In mid-ocean, the ship's propeller broke, and she completed the voyage under sail. Three months later, I returned on the Russia. The recollection of this journey gives me real satisfaction; for had I not taken it then, I should never again have seen my father. On the twenty-first of the following November, or a few months after I last bade him good-bye, he died at Loebau, in the seventy-fifth year of his age. My mother had died in the summer of 1859.
It was during this visit that, tarrying for a week in the brilliant French capital, I saw the Paris Exposition, housed to a large extent in one immense building in the Champ de Mars. I was wonderfully impressed with both the city and the fair, as well as with the enterprising and artistic French people who had created it, although I was somewhat disappointed that, of the fifty thousand or more exhibitors represented, but seven hundred were Americans.