Guest author Paul R. Spitzzeri graciously contributed his article “No Place Like Home: Some Further History of John Rowland of the Rancho La Puente, 1854-1873” originally published on 21 July 2024 at The Homestead Blog. Paul is the Museum Director of the Workman and Temple Family Homestead Museum. The John Rowland in this article is John Albert Rowland, the most prominent known ancestor of Rowland DNA Group B.
No Place Like Home: Some Further History of John Rowland of the Rancho La Puente, 1854-1873
by Paul R. Spitzzeri
It is always a treat to be able to get a rare opportunity to visit the Rowland House, the 1855 neoclassical brick residence of John Rowland, his second wife Charlotte and their family standing nearly 170 years just about a mile southeast of the Homestead. This structure, which appears to be the oldest surviving brick building in southern California, is in its original location, tucked behind the headquarters of the Hacienda-La Puente Unified School District and, so, has long been largely hidden from public view.
Yet, the La Puente Valley Historical Society has worked for decades with dedication, enthusiasm and passion and not a great deal of money to maintain this amazing landmark, while also laboring to return it to some regular public access. For almost a quarter of a century until the 1990 Upland earthquake, it was open on a consistent basis, but opportunities to visit have been sparse since then, though a good deal of work has been done to the building over the years.
Yesterday, the Society partnered with House Museum, an organization led by artist and the organization’s founding director, Evan Curtis Charles Hall, for an event that included art installations tied to the structure, music and dance and other elements. When I arrived after supervising at the Homestead, there’d been about 150-200 visitors, and it was great to see these elements of activity and life at a building that has too long been obscured in the shadows.
After walking through the house, talking to volunteers as well as the Society’s president, Amy Rowland, a descendant of John Rowland and his first wife, María Encarnación Martinez, and then thinking about further collaboration with the Homestead, this seems an opportune time to share some more history of William Workman’s long-time friend and business partner, as well as co-owner of the Rancho La Puente, with a prior post here discussing other aspects of Rowland’s story.
Much like the difference between the two historic sites, there was a major variance in how much public involvement there was by Rowland compared to Workman, though there are some interesting and notable references to Rowland in local newspapers before his death in October 1873. For instance, about a dozen years after he settled at La Puente, for which he secured the grant by petitioning Governor Juan Bautista Alvarado and traveling to Monterey, the capital of the department of Mexican Alta California, the Southern Californian newspaper of 5 October 1854 reported,
Below we publish the proceedings of a meeting of the citizens of our county, for the purpose of organizing a County Agricultural and Horticultural Society. It was well attended by those feeling an interest in the permanent welfare of our county, and we hope they will follow the matter in a spirit worthy [of] the county of Los Angeles. This section of the state is entirely dependent on agriculture for its greatness, and until something of a stimulating nature is brought forward, we will follow on the old track, and never make any progress.
The timing was notable, as the Gold Rush was coming to an end and the boon to local cattle ranchers, who supplied animals for fresh beef to the hordes of miners and others who flocked to California in the previous half-dozen years, was also to diminish. For those who practiced agriculture, this may well have seemed a good time to start promoting that lesser part of the regional economy, and, given the remarkable climate, incredibly fertile soil and the success so far experienced with crops, particularly wine grapes, it is not surprising that this meeting was held.
It was testament, moreover, to Rowland’s enterprise in farming that he was elected chair of the meeting. He grew grapes on his portion of La Puente, irrigating them from a channel diverting water from San José Creek, and he was probably the first person to build a grist mill, this located off the creek east of his dwelling—the first Rowland residence was an adobe edifice on the north side of the watercourse, but the current house was soon to be completed on the south side. Having a mill, of course, meant that he had significant acreage devoted to field crops, presumably wheat, barley, corn and the like, while it would also be used by Workman and others in the area.
A committee was formed to create a constitution and by-laws for the proposed society and a motion was made by Sheriff James R. Barton, Rowland’s former son-in-law (Barton was married to Lucinda Rowland, who died in the late 1840s), and the chair then made the appointment of five attendees. These included Barton, the newspaper’s co-owner William Butts, Dr. William B. Osburn (a very active figure in Los Angeles), Mathew Keller (who was one of the area’s most active grape-growers and wine-makers), and Ezra Drown, an attorney who was a recent arrival from Iowa and who would be the county district attorney (after Drown’s 1863 death, the guardian of his only child, Walter, was Workman and the boy was raised by Workman’s daughter, Margarita Temple and her husband, F.P.F.)
While the organization failed to last, it is a notable early attempt at establishing an agricultural association because, as the Southern Californian noted, agriculture would, after the cattle industry was decimated by the floods and droughts in the first half of the 1860s, become the dominant regional economic engine for decades to come.
Another example of Rowland’s efforts in viticulture is reflected in a report from the Los Angeles Star of 1 November 1856, which reprinted a San Jose newspaper’s listing of awardees of premiums at the recently concluded California agricultural fair. Rowland received $20 and a framed diploma for the second best vineyard in the Golden State, coming in behind William Wolfskill, whose tract was in an area that is now a gritty industrial section of Los Angeles.
Wolfskill also received recognition for specimens of grapes and oranges—he planted the first commercial orange grove in California in 1841 adjacent to the vineyard—as well as for the quality of his orange and walnut grove and for his lemons. Keller was honored for the fine quality of his grapes and wine, as well as pomegranates, sugarcane and tobacco. Workman received a framed diploma for the best brandy in the state and the aging of ten years shows he planted grapes very soon after settling at La Puente in 1842. Lastly, F.P.F. Temple earned his diploma for the best example of sugarcane.
After the aforementioned floods and droughts subsided and the raising of more grapes, but also of wheat and other field crops proliferated, a couple of examples were located relative to Rowland’s agricultural endeavors at La Puente. The 5 December 1868 edition of the Star reported that,
We understand the Don Julian Workman has planted several hundred acres of wheat already, and that Don Juan Rowland is making preparations for opening up a new wheat district in the high lands of his rancho. It is said to present every facility for wheat raising, and great expectations are formed of the success of the new field of operations.
Workman’s expansion of farming (he still had thousands of cattle, but would soon thin the herds considerably over the next few years) was largely concentrated north of the Homestead in the large plain then denoted as the La Puente Valley, where the community of Bassett and the cities of Baldwin Park and West Covina are now. Rowland’s “high lands” appear to mean the northeastern sections of the rancho, also within West Covina as well as Covina.
Additionally, 1868 was when the infant stages of greater Los Angeles’ first boom as underway. Post-Civil War western migration brought thousands of new residents, the Los Angeles and San Pedro Railroad (the region’s first rail line) would soon open, and business development was on the rise. Just prior to this report, Workman and Temple joined forces with the brilliant Jewish merchant Isaias W. Hellman to form the Angel City’s second bank, Hellman, Temple and Company.
While Rowland did not move into boom-related projects as his La Puente co-owner did, his initiative in expanding his agricultural enterprises on the ranch and doing so in his late Seventies is testament to his acumen as a rancher and farmer. Another crucial component of this is that, having finally received their federal patent, after fifteen years of legal wrangling in their mandated land claim, for La Puente, Rowland and Workman divided the ranch in 1868, taking equal amounts of hill and valley lands. After a quarter-century, the two were entering into the final phases of their long lives and this also meant making plans for their heirs by partitioning sections of the ranch, writing wills and setting up powers-of-attorney.
About a month-and-a-half after the above notice, the Star provided an update in its 23 January 1869 edition, commenting that,
Farming operations have been conducted with great energy and industry of the valley of the Puente, every advantage having been taken of the recent favorable condition of the land. In wheat and barley there will probably be fully two thousand acres planted.
Mr. Workman will have about a thousand acres in wheat and barley.
Mr. Rowland about 400 on his home farm, besides a large farm he has laid off on the side hills.
The “home farm” was the land around the Rowland House and “side hills” seems to refer to the San Jose Hills to the north and east, above which would be those “high lands.” Rowland’s son-in-law, John Reed (married to María Nieves), whose tract was just east of the Rowland House, where John Reed Court on both sides of Gale Avenue in the City of Industry is today, had another 400 acres in grain.
In 1867-1868, Workman built a grist mill at the southeast corner of La Puente, near where San José Creek then emptied into the San Gabriel River and, under the management of William Turner, it processed the expanding products of his employer’s fields as well as those of surrounding farmers. The article concluded by observing that, “Mr. Workman’s mill is running on his last year’s crop, turning out plenty of good flour. He has four or five thousand quintals [about 220 pounds] yet to work up.”
In early 1869, Rowland still had his long-standing vineyard east of Alameda Street and on the west side of the Los Angeles River “opposite Wolfskill’s vineyard,” according to an advertisement in the Los Angeles News taken out by Jean Marie Vignes, of a prominent viticulture and wine-making family. This distinguished him from Workman, who looks to have confined his grape-growing to his vineyard adjacent to the Homestead, and would have given Rowland direct access to buyers like the prominent Charles Kohler and John Frohling for his grapes.
Another issue in the late Sixties in which Rowland was a featured participant was what the Star of 22 May called “The Revenue Frauds.” The La Puente wine-maker gave a deposition to federal commissioner James H. Lander on 24 April 1868, in which he noted that he’d been a resident of the area for 27 years, had 60 acres of vineyards and first paid a federal tax in early 1865 for nearly 3,000 gallons sold the prior two years. He sold nothing for a few months “until April, 1865, when a quantity of wine being sour, I sold about 5,000 gallons to E[mile] Vaché at a low price, for distillation [for brandy].”
After remarking that Kohler and Frohling and Jean-Louis Sainsevain passed on acquiring the product, Rowland told Lander, “I did not think sour wine was taxable,” adding that Vaché told him that the only levy to be made was for the brandy and that the assistant federal tax assessor, future banker and mayor, James R. Toberman, did not make an assessment. Toberman’s boss Richard Savage and Lucian Curtis, the revenue inspector for the Pacific Coast, met with Rowland, who stated,
Mr. Savage appeared very friendly towards me; he talked with me about my family, my business, my cattle, my vineyard, and finally about my wine; but he said nothing about assessing me for the wine sold to Vaché . . . [he] said he had a son at West Point [later Col. Richard Henry Savage, who was a noted writer in the late 19th century]; but that he [the elder Savage] had no money, and, said he, “I have come to Los Angeles to busca [look for] some. He did not ask me for any money; but soon after this conversation Mr. Curtis sent for me and said I was liable to a penalty for selling wine to Vaché without paying the tax. He said [a] suit had been commenced against me in the United States Court . . . if I wished I might deposit $1,000, and he would have the case dismissed.
Rowland continued that friends advised him he could not fight the issue, so he borrowed $1,000 from Isaias W. Hellman and gave it to Toberman, who put the money in a safe for Curtis to collect later as he and Savage left Los Angeles. Curtis then told Rowland the money would be returned to him if the government found him not liable to the tax, but the rancher reminded him of the sale to Vaché on condition that the distiller would pay the levy. Curtis shrugged that the matter was now up to the officials at Washington.
Rowland then stated that Savage informed Toberman that the rancher had to go to Lander and sign a document that “was a confession of fraud” on Rowland’s part, but that “as Mr. Savage was my friend, I believed it was necessary for me to sign it to help me get back my money.” Rowland signed and paid the $20 cost involved, but heard no word until Toberman told him, “Uncle John, the only way you can get your money is for me and [another deputy, William K.] Potter to pay you $500 apiece.”
Rowland had someone write a letter to Savage (this may be suggestive of Rowland’s low level of formal education?), but the latter told Toberman, “I am powerless,” which led the rancher to tell Lander, “then I knew I should never get my money, because my friend Savage could do nothing more for me.” Special federal revenue agent Samuel Purdy issued a report on these “revenue frauds” and the paper reminded readers of “the pompous and haughty demeanor of the great Mr. Savage” and who purportedly was “horribly shocked at the charges preferred by himself against our unoffending fellow citizens.”
This man-made disaster of sorts, assuming Rowland never got his $1,000 back, could also, at times, be paralleled with natural disasters, with one example being the terrible “Noah’s Flood” of December 1861 and January 1862, during which it is estimated that some 50 inches of rain fell on California. The massive flooding was terrible for houses and other buildings, loss of livestock, damage to crops and other consequences.
A writer, subscribed as “La Puente,” took a particularly flowery approach in a letter to the Star of 15 February 1862 in stating how, as a newcomer to the area, a break in the foul weather, allowed for “a view from an eminence among the [Puente] hills to the South of La Puente.” Seeing how the name “city of the Angels” was bestowed on Los Angeles, “La Puente” waxed poetic about the valleys and canyons in the hills and the San Gabriel Mountains and noted that wouldn’t anyone getting the view that he did “would call it the country of the Angels, and even look for those happy beings, and listen for the rustling of their wings?”
After more purple prose, “La Puente” then recorded that “from the virtue of the people, or the impregnability of the place, La Puente has come off as safe as its neighbors” following the deluge. Accounts were that
The vineyard of Mr. John Rowland, Jr., was very nearly destroyed [this along San José Creek a couple of miles east about where Nogales Avenue crosses it]. Mr. John Reed’s losses were moderate, principally lambs, perishing from the damp chilly weather. Mr. John Rowland’s also moderate, some fencing, a bridge, and some injury to his mill race and dam.
The account also noted that flooding “has retarded plowing and sowing.” If true, it may well be the Rancho La Puente escaped the types of damage that affected others in greater Los Angeles. What was to follow were two years of debilitating drought, during which Workman slaughtered some 2,000 starving cattle and one wonders what Rowland had to do. Fortunately, the two, along with F.P.F. Temple, were invited by Wolfskill to pasture their remaining herds at a location, in of all places, the high desert at the north end of the San Bernardino Mountains, where water and grass were sufficient to sustain them.
The fact that Workman and Rowland still maintained large herds of livestock in the late 1860s is attested to by an ad they took out in Star in March 1869 warning “all owners or managers of stock now running at large, and pasturing upon the lands of the ‘Puente Rancho’” were given notice to remove their animals within twenty days or face legal consequences.
Rowland’s investments in local business appears to have been limited to his holding stock in the Los Angeles Water-Works Company, which was headed by his long-time friend, William G. Dryden. Dryden was a representative of the Republic of Texas in 1840 when he nominated Rowland and Workman to be agents to assist in a proposed annexation of most of New Mexico, being the area east of the Río Grande, including Santa Fé, Albuquerque and Taos, the latter being where Rowland and Workman resided. The two men, who left for Los Angeles, were soon replaced in advance of what turned out to be an invasion, badly bungled, by Texas.
Dryden migrated to Los Angeles and became a lawyer, including representing Rowland and Workman in some of their La Puente land claims proceedings, and then, for thirteen years, served as a highly colorful county judge. So, it was no surprise that Rowland, as well as F.P.F. Temple, was a share-holder, and there was a new water company formed in 1868 that had a 30-year contract until the City of Los Angeles took over the handling of water distribution.
Rowland’s political involvement was also occasional, though he did run, unsuccessfully (as Workman did the prior year) for county supervisor in 1860 under a pro-Union faction of the Democratic Party—he was born in the northern section of the border state of Maryland. He returned to the mainstream party fold after the Civil War and, along with Workman, was a vice-president of an 1868 rally before the fall election.
Not quite five years later, at age 82, according to his memorial in El Campo Santo Cemetery at the Homestead, Rowland died at his residence. The Star of 15 October called him “one of the oldest and one of the most esteemed of our pioneers,” noting that he succumbed to “a combination attack of old age, asthma, and general debility.” The paper concluded that he died “without an enemy in the world.”
A new paper, the Los Angeles Herald, had a much longer obituary than its contemporary, which existed for most of twenty years to that date, and it mostly covered his life and adventures in New Mexico, including the many scars his body bore from “several Indian fights in which he was wounded.” Adding that Rowland was “eminently a home man” who, during more than three decades at La Puente, “seldom absented himself from his home and family” and who was “by nature of an unassuming and retiring disposition.” The account ended with the statement that,
he was universally esteemed by all who had become intimate with him, and thus had opportunity to become aware of his many good qualities as a man, a friend, a neighbor and a citizen.
Because there is so much we lack in understanding people like Rowland and Workman, given the limited sources we have for them, we interpret what we can from the information that is available to us and always hope that more material will become available to help us more fully flesh out their personalities.
Visiting the Rowland House yesterday was a reminder of this and we at the Homestead look forward to future collaboration with the La Puente Valley Historical Society in further exploring the long, strong link between the two long-time owners of Rancho La Puente.