The San Gabriel vineyard numbered a hundred and fifty thousand vines, from cuttings brought from Spain, and the making of wine and brandy (aguadiente) became an important industry. Its orchards, at their peak, contained over twenty-three hundred trees, most of them oranges, which the padres introduced, together with olives, pomegranates, and lemons. The gardens were surrounded with adobe walls or cactus hedges as a protection against marauding cattle or people, who, as one padre once quaintly said, “put out the hand too often.”
The first San Gabriel oranges were planted in 1804 by Padre Tomas Sanchez. Thirty years afterward the earliest grove in Los Angeles was set out by Don Luis Vignes, to be followed in 1841 by that of William Wolfskill, whose orchard later became famous as the largest in the United States. He was instrumental in bringing in many new plants to this country, and the beauty of his home place was great. His gardens gave way for the Southern Pacific Arcade Station, his orchard ground is covered by the city’s business, and no one thinks of Los Angeles as once the actual center of California’s orange growing industry.
And as these groves have been supplanted by the houses of trade, the Mission’s orchards have been transformed into homes. But when I was a little girl they still remained, had even been extended by those who came into possession after the secularization of San Gabriel.
Many of the names now familiar around Pasadena were the names of these estates. For instance, San Marino and Oak Knoll were the properties of Don Benito (Benjamin) Wilson, and his son-in-law, J. De Barth Shorb. Don Wilson was one of those Americans who came here during the Mexican rule, married into an old California family, and became identified with the land. It is for him that the astronomical peak is named, because it was he who at the expense of much money and labor built the trail to the top of the ridge. He had hopes of finding timber suitable for making of casks for his wine, but although he failed in this there was some lumber brought down on burro back.
Another familiar name is El Molino, the old mill which the mission built. It fell into disrepair, but was rescued by Col. Kewen, who made of it a charming home, while developing an estate about it. The story of Mrs. Kewen’s five hundred callas for an Easter at the Episcopal Church has come down. Callas were in better repute then than now.
Mrs. Albert Sidney Johnson called her new home in California Fair Oaks, the name of her Virginian birthplace. Los Robles (The Oaks), was the home of Governor Stoneman.
Old timers will recall the estate of L. J. Rose, Sunny Slope, famous both for its wines and brandies and for its stables of fine horses. Major Truman in his book, Semi-tropic California, dating from 1874, speaks of this district as a “fruit belt, two miles wide and ten miles long,” and calls it the California Lombardy.
It was just next door to this region of wine and brandy that the temperance people from Indiana started their colony on a portion of the old San Pasqual grant, the ranch where Flint, Bixby & Co. had pastured their sheep after the desert crossing in 1854. This colony devoted itself to oranges, not so intoxicating as grapes, and gave the name of the chief industry to the fashionable avenue. After a time they began to call themselves Pasadena, an imported name, and after a little more time we in Los Angeles began to know about the new settlement which was getting big enough to maintain a modest daily stage to the city,—a spring wagon. The road followed much the same route as is used today, down across the unbridged Arroyo Seco and over the flowery field that later became Garvanza, a field filled in spring with great masses of wild blossoms, poppies, and lupine, larkspur, tidy-tips, and pink owl-clover,—pink tassels we children called them; past the Sycamores, the popular country beer-garden, through the little settlement known as East Los Angeles, along Buena Vista street (North Broadway), so called because of its attractive outlook across the early gardens and orchards of Los Angeles, and on into the Plaza. The earliest name for this street was Calle de Eternidad—Eternity Street—because it was the road to the cemetery.
One of the places reached by this road was the hill near the point on the brink of the Arroyo where ostriches now congregate, which was a favorite place for the city picnickers,—far away when measured by hay-wagon speed and untouched by any “improvements.” It was there one spring day that my schoolmates and I, of that grade which studies American colonial history, acted out a recent lesson, “storming the heights of Abraham” up the steep hillside, pushing our way under the oaks, through brush, past great clumps of maiden-hair fern to the mesa atop where we found a million seeming butterflies, the mariposa lilies, hovering over the grass.
While Pasadena was growing up to the west of the old district, “Lucky” Baldwin was developing on the east that loveliest of all oak-clad ranches, the Santa Anita, and making of it a show place sought by the few hardy and intrepid tourists who were beginning to find their way into Southern California, making a name for it far and wide not only because of its beauty but because of his famous racing stables.