The Valley Village View
Andrew Martin
Posts about Don Abel Stearns written by Andrew Martin
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The Valley Village View
THE DISMAL SCIENCE DEPT./

THE DOWNTOWN BEAT

RIDE A PAINTED PONY, LET THE SPINNING WHEEL SPIN

The pobladores, I’ve read, awoke at dawn’s first light singing the Alabado: the first riser, singing out to the sky, would wake the others who joined in. The whole pueblo was up and singing by the end, praising God for the day just beginning. Then, a shot of aguardiente for the short walk from their casa to their allotments across the river. These were happy farmers; and at least one of their fields was put into wheat or barley. Patient Reader, close your eyes and hear the Alabado, courtesy of the monks of St. Anthony’s Seminary.

In 1825 an earthquake shifted the course of the LA River south, away from the cradle of the bluffs. It was a gift from San Gabriel of the Temblors to the Queen of Angels. LA was safer from flooding and had all this fat wet arable bottomland with southern exposure a sombrero’s toss away from the farmers’ corredores. With the river gone south, the Zanja Madre was re-engineered. The exposed wetlands were ditched and dredged and channeled, and by the 1830s the citizen-farmers filled this bottomland with vineyards, fruit orchards, the staple grains, and corn and bean and squash fields. The zanja had a big wheel upstream, relentlessly hauling the water up to the high point of the bluff. From there, it flowed downhill along the line of bluffs to the Plaza.

The first commercial grist mill in the Pueblo de Los Angeles was set up on North Spring Street sometime in the 1830s; it was traditionally known as “Stearns’ Mill.” Its power came from the flowing water of the Zanja Madre, and its name came from the power and wealth of Don Abel Stearns. Long tradition holds the mill was one of his ventures. He had arrived from Boston in 1831, with excellent credit connections in Monterey, to start a career as a mercantile tycoon, land baron, and Anglo-Mexican powerbroker. Eventually in 1839 he became a naturalized Mexican citizen, no longer just a resident foreign concessionaire. Which meant he could own land and businesses, and be eligible for land grants if they came up (they did). AND, he could marry 14-year-old Arcadia Bandini, the most vivacious and brilliant of the hijas del pais, who had huge…tracts of land. They became the richest folks in town; their adobe casa was dubbed “El Palacio;” it had a hundred-foot ballroom! The “de Stearnses” were social doyennes the city long remembered.

But Abel Stearns was not a miller, or a hydro-engineer. On the other hand, there WAS a local who knew all of this, so today historians believe the millwright was the famous…

Don Jose must actually have been the one who built and ran the mill, and probably owned half of it. He was California’s most famous millwright, well-married, resident in LA for a few years already, Mexican by naturalization, well connected and trusted. In the 1830s, Chapman is growing Mission grapes right down in the river bed there already. Almost certainly, he dressed his vines while figuring in his head how the Zanja, if they put it up there on those bluffs, could be harnessed for irrigation and power. It could have been only he, who could have engineered the mill run from the Zanja, and set up the machinery. “Chapman’s Mill” — as we might call it — was an entrepreneurial idea he probably nursed for years. But it remained “a project” while there was no capital in Los Angeles, only cow-hides. Capital and international credit only arrived in LA with Horse-Face (as the Californios dubbed Stearns, Cara de Caballo.)

Records are scanty, but it seems likely that Stearns must have been the backer of the mill, and Chapman probably the owner; it was a year before Stearns would even have the legal right, yet, to undertake a civic venture. I haven’t yet found any record that Stearns and Chapman were associated in business, but they were both successful Angelenos transplanted from Boston and married into important Californio families. It seems likely in fact, that a friendship with Chapman must have eased Stearns’s introductions to, and success with, the Californians from his first arrival in 1831. Dona Guadelupe was charming and popular and social; she would have been quick to host a newly-arrived fellow Bostonian.

In 1835 under Gov. Pio Pico, Los Angeles emerged as the provincial capital, and officially La Ciudad de Los Angeles, the City of the Angels. It was a power shift away from Monterey; political activities and commercial prospects were enhanced in LA. Pico was intent on breaking the economic power of the Missions and secularizing their assets. It was the new civic regime, I hazard, that gave Stearns and Chapman the approvals to re-jigger the zanja and set up the mill in town. We know it was finished and operating in 1838. By then, San Gabriel Mission was already in serious decline anyway, and a new mill in town must have been a huge capital improvement. It seems like a tiny step, but it firmly and, forever, sealed LA’s role as the economic and industrial and distributional center of Southern California.

To ease shipping of goods, including flour from the mill, Stearns invested capital in building a road to the port at San Pedro. This is today the Alameda Corridor — and Alameda Street just happens to run right next to the mill. Stearns established stores — shops — LA’s first — one in town and one at the port, with a horse-drawn wagon haulage service in between to meet the Boston ships. (No more sluggish ox-drawn caretas.) Don Abel thus established LA’s future policy of exploiting San Pedro as the only deep-water port it had access to.

Chapman died in 1848, soon after the U.S. conquest. I conjecture here that Stearns, surviving partner, or possibly acting on behalf of Guadelupe, arranged, In 1850, the sale of the mill on the Zanja to Americans who named it “Eagle Mills.” During the half-century the mill ground flour under the Eagle emblem, Los Angeles blossomed as America’s most productive, most industrially advanced, farm town, with among other crops, a massive wheat industry. The mill was sold again in 1883 to Jacob Loew, who re-launched the complex as “Capitol Milling.” This is when most of the complex was built, surrounding, absorbing, and superseding the structures built in the 1830s, 1840s, 1850s and 1860s.

During this time, the railroads moved into the old river bed to get access to LA’s produce at the source. This was a cash cow for the lucky mill owners, but it became a grim example of the Machine In The Garden, a cautionary tale about extracting so much “value” from productive land, that we destroy it. More on the railroads, in the next and last part; but here’s what that gentle bend of bluffs and wet bottomland looked like by the dawn of the 20th Century:

The Loew family ran and grew the business for 110 years, only finally closing it in 1998 when the Southern Pacific closed the adjacent railyards that were, partly, built to serve it. It sat derelict while the Cornfield site was developed into the park and the re-development of the area began.

The derelict mill-site was bought by the Riboli family, the good people of San Antonio Winery, founded in 1917. They are the last vintner left in the once-vineyard-laced, then once-railroad-laced, bottomland where Jose Chapman founded the wine industry, and set up LA’s first mill.

It’s amazing and heartening that a family food business is investing in a sensitive and imaginative downtown historical redevelopment in downtown LA. This series on milling came about because I was so delighted by the way the architects, Workshop Design Collective out of So. Pasadena, handled the renovations of this complex and I wanted to know more about the old building.

The main feature is supposed to be a great food hall, with mixed office and retail and dining. Unfortunately, of course, the building was to have opened in the spring this year, but that was just when Covid-19 was rearing its coughing head. For now, the building sits in suspended animation, beautiful and empty and waiting, like all of us, for its next phase of life.

NEXT PART: “The Los Angeles Farming and Milling Co.”

OLD STOCK: I visited here back in December; I had a great time, but I thought the pics were too gloomy to share. Well, today we’re having the same gloom, and if I went today it would look just like this; so enjoy this post AS IF it were today. [“It’s Today!” — Mame Dennis.]

Down on what was once the sloping bank of the LA river, just above, and north, of where it used to flow past the LA Plaza; and right off the shoulder, as it were, of Chinatown; lies a length of land along the railroad tracks that was used by the Santa Fe Railroad for a half century or more, to store old rolling stock.

Here’s the State Parks’ history; and another from the DWP — both fascinating, fascinating.

https://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=25964

https://waterandpower.org/museum/Early_City_Views%20(1800s)_Page_1.html

Early, the site had been used by the pobladores to grow maize, which consistently still sprouted there; or else, alternate legend went, the early 20th c. Mexican population in nearby Aliso Gardens would guerrilla-farm maize, on plots scratched between the tracks. The two legends don’t conflict; nor does the legend that the left-over kernels from box cars used to haul corn sprouted (though much less likely to me; wheat, not corn, would sprout there.) But whatever, this long agro-industrial lot was called alternately, one of the two epithets in the title above.

Then the railroad was going to sell it for a 66-shed shipping warehouse complex. The citizens of Chinatown, and other nearby struggling neighborhoods like Chavez Ravine and Frogtown, fought and fought and (this a damn RAILROAD, remember, even in the 21st century they are thieves) fought and fought and fought for YEARS, and finally three years ago they won, and as of about a year ago, this is the emerald they have won for all Angelenos, Los Angeles State Historic Park. Ole.

Archaeologically, this site is very important, for they discovered the original Zanja Madre, the “Mother Ditch” of Los Angeles, the original 1781 waterworks channel laid out by the pobladores to channel water from tanks upstream, near Elysian Park, along the wide but dry bed of the river, and into (and out of) a cistern the center of the Plaza.

Because of the upstream advantage, there was a huge water wheel somewhere here for power-pumping. And the site was chosen by Don Abel Stearns to build the first flour mill in California, 1828 (?) right there on Spring Street with its wheels in the zanja channel, somehow contrived. (Don Abel; Yankee; not Jewish.) It continued as “Capitol Mills,” got generally absorbed into Chinatown for 80 years, and is now being renovated for condos. Thank the Angels they didn’t tear it down.

Thrilling to me, is that they have given downtown a glimpse of a re-wilded stream course, very chic, with granite benches down in the stream bed (instead of river boulders) and plenty of native plants, including tules, above.

Most exciting of all, is that they gave over a long stretch of (well-irrigated) ground to planters holding an orchard of Valencia oranges, only a mile upstream from William Wolfskill’s Orchard, where the strain was developed in the 1860s, out of old Mission stock and fancy, smuggled strains brought by the Chinese. That there is a Valencia grove here, thriving for the community, within the very same river bottom and microrhyzal network from which the fruit first sprung, makes my heart sing.

They have graced the outside of each planter with a pithy reminiscence from the old-time locals who lived here, and who fought for this place, and who came to Los Angeles and made it better. Bless them, Angels.

On August 13, 1846, Commodore Stockton led his footsore Marines, joined almost at the last minute by Maj. Fremont’s mounted California Battalion, into the nearly deserted capital of Alta California, El Ciudad de Los Angeles. Ten years later, in 1856, Fremont was the popular hero, a gold millionaire, a former California Senator, and running for President — the first, and very controversially anti-slavery, candidate of the Republican Party. During that election year, Stockton threw out a ghost-written pamphlet telling his own story as Fremont’s (nominal) commanding officer, and highlighting his own role as the true kick-ass hero of the California Theatre of the Mexican War. From the moment he took command of the Pacific Squadron in Monterey Bay, Stockton began planning his conquest of California. (Note that the following account of Stockton’s “pivot to aggression” was intended to be highly flattering of the Commodore’s independent character:)

“It must be admitted that it took great moral courage to assume the responsibility of the enterprise which Cmdr. Stockton thought it his duty to undertake. He had no precedent in U.S. history to guide him. He had no instructions which applied to the emergency. And we are informed that he held no council, with whose deliberations he might divide the responsibility of his decisions. His decisions were the result of his own patriotic sense of duty. Indeed, we have been informed that he has said, that from his departure from the United States, in the fall of 1845, to the close of his career in California, he never asked the advice of anyone, nor took any counsel in relation to any measure of importance…Having determined upon the most decisive measures, Commodore Stockton, assuming the command-in-chief, civil and military, issued his proclamation (at Monterey, July 23, 1846) placing the country under martial law.”

— A Sketch of the Life of Commodore Robert F. Stockton, With an Appendix, Etc. 1856

Stockton’s Monterey martial-law proclamation shocked the Californios. It came on the heels of Commodore Sloat’s friendly proclamation of American possession-as-protectorate. California had been abandoned by Mexico, and Monterey had accepted Sloat’s gunboats without a murmur of resistance. But suddenly the benign, reassuring Sloat retired, and was replaced by Stockton. Acting entirely on his own initiative and out of his own prejudice against the Mexican nation, Stockton immediately insisted Alta California had committed bellicose outrages against the United States, chief amongst which was that:

“General [Jose] Castro, the commander-in-chief of the military forces of California, has violated every principle of international law and national hospitality (sic) by hunting and pursuing with several hundred soldiers, and with wicked intent (sic), Captain Fremont, of the United States Army, who came here to refresh his men, (about forty in number), after a perilous journey across the mountains on a scientific survey.”

[In other words, California deserved conquest, because her officers had dared to defend her against conquest. Remember, Patient Reader, that Capt. Fremont’s brigade had spent the last few months taunting Castro, refusing to leave the territory, leading him on a wild goose chase around Northern California, massacring and stirring up the Indians, and then stirring up any American “emigrants” they could find with tales that Castro and the Indians were planning to slaughter them. Fremont even seized the heights of Gavilan Peak, in sight of Castro’s camp, to run up the Stars and Stripes as a pre-emptive act of conquest-by-discovery — tee hee! — then pulled the flag down and – tee hee! — slipped away into the tules.]

“On assuming command of the forces of the United States on the coast of California, both by sea and land [a presumptuous assumption, Gen. Kearny of the Army would later declare] I find myself [sic] in possession of the ports of Monterey and San Francisco, with daily reports from the interior of scenes of rapine, blood and murder…I am constrained by every principle of national honor…to put an end at once, and by force, to the lawless depredations daily committed by General Castro’s men upon the persons and property of peaceful and unoffending [American] inhabitants…I cannot, therefore, confine my operations to the quiet and undisturbed possession of the defenceless ports of Monterey and San Francisco, while the people elsewhere are suffering from lawless violence, but will immediately march against those boasting and abusive chiefs, who…unless driven out, will with the aid of the hostile Indians, keep this beautiful country in a constant state of revolution and blood, as well as against all others who may be found in arms, or aiding and abetting General Castro.”

The Californios thus discovered they were not, in fact, going to be brought into the Union by a peaceful stroke of republican independence, which had been promised by Cmdr. Sloat, and anyway long-since negotiated between Gen. Vallejo and the U.S. consul Thomas Larkin. Stockton overruled all that patient diplomacy, in favor of a full-scale invasion and ravaging of the country, at his own behest and under his own personal direction, hostilities to be ended only upon his own personal satisfaction.

The Californians were further alarmed by the report that, at a party that night on the quarterdeck of the U.S.S. Congress, over cigars and brandy, Stockton got expansive, stared up at the stars twinkling through the lacy Monterey pines, and outlined his plans to punish, chastise, put the boot to, and in every way scorch the earth of California. If the Southern Californians dared keep up an insolent resistance, Stockton boasted, he looked forward to hoisting the flag over the capital of the territory, even if he had to wade through the Los Angeles Plaza with the blood of slain Mexicans lapping at the top of his boots. Or words to that effect. This report came from the Mexican officer Juan Maria Flores, who was standing right there when Stockton said it.

“On the 1st of August Commodore Stockton sailed with the Congress to…San Pedro, on the coast about thirty miles distant from the Ciudad de Los Angeles. He landed at once 350 sailors and Marines, established them in camp, and commenced drilling them for the service contemplated. [Upon receiving Castro’s offer of a parley and a truce until Washington and Mexico City worked out a peace, Stockton] …directed the messengers to return to their master, and inform him that the American commander intended to march immediately to Ciudad de Los Angeles; that General Castro should prepare to surrender his arms, disperse his forces, and require his men to return to their homes and demean themselves peaceably, under penalty of being dealt with in the most rigorous manner. He ordered them to tell Castro that he would not negotiate with him on any other terms than those of absolute submission to the authority of the President of the United States. Having, through an interpreter, delivered this message in the most fierce and offensive manner, and in a tone of voice significant of the most implacable and hostile determination, he waved them from his presence imperiously with the insulting imperative, “Vamose!”

On the 11th of August, Stockton commenced his march upon Delos Angeles. The enemy were often in sight, hovering on the brows of adjacent hills. The artillery and ammunition carts were dragged along by the sailors over hills and through tedious valleys of sand, but without complaint or reluctance. [The Marines camped that night at Rancho Cerritos, owned by American Jonathan “Don Juan” Temple.] On the 12th, as they approached within a few miles of Castro’s position, another courier arrived…with a pompous message: “that if he marched upon the town he would find it the grave of his men.” “Then,” said Stockton, “tell your general to have the bells ready to toll in the morning at eight o’clock, as I shall be there at that time.” He was there at that time; but the California general of couriers and despatches was unwilling to risk a battle. Evidently panic-stricken, without firing a gun, Castro broke up his camp, dispersed his forces…and fled in the direction of Sonora. His artillery fell into the hands of the Americans. His principal officers…Don Andres Pico and Don Juan Maria Flores, surrendered, and were set at liberty on their parole of honor not to serve against the United States in the war. Ciudad de Los Angeles capitulated without any specifications of terms, and on the 13th of August, Commodore Stockton took possession of the capital of California.”

— A Sketch of the Life of Commodore Robert F. Stockton, With an Appendix, Etc. (Derby & Jackson, 1856)– A Sketch of the Life of Commodore Robert F. Stockton, With an Appendix, Etc.

Thus Stockton took Los Angeles quietly, in the morning, without firing a shot. He marched his Marine band around the Plaza; did the honors with the colors; and set up his H.Q. in “Government House,” the old Isaac Williams adobe on Main Street. This casa had been bought by Pio Pico when he removed the political capital to LA in 1845, so the administration would have offices. It was also conveniently next door to “El Palacio”, the grand courtyard adobe of the wealthy American Don Abel Stearns, who was at that time serving as L.A.’s alcalde. Doubtless Dona Arcadia offered the Commodore and his officers the fine bedchambers. That evening the band took formation in the Plaza, and gave a lengthy pops concert. The music lured the wary Angelenos back from the hills and ravines where they had fled, and LA slept quietly that night,

But things would not remain quiet; Stockton’s rude taunts and baseless accusations of crimes against humanity, his self-serving saber-rattling, and his deliberate insults to their patriotic honor, had hardened the Southern Californios’ hearts to Yankee rule. They endured a month under the thumb of the officer that Stockton left in charge of the city, Marine Capt. Archibald Gillespie; then hot-head Sebula Varela issued his pronunciamiento, Generals Flores and Pico responded by renouncing their parole, and the Californios revolted against their overlords. It has been argued that Gillespie was no martinet, but that he was just following Stockton’s gall-and-wormwood orders: prohibiting LA’s duennas from accompanying their muchachas on the traditional posada around the Plaza, for instance, because it was “unlawful assembly.” The California Lancers constituted themselves under Flores, besieged the Marines up on treeless, waterless, Fort Hill, received their surrender, and marched them at gunpoint back onto their ships and out of the harbor at San Pedro. Stockton had underestimated the Californios, and over the next four months, this mistake would be paid for with American blood, as well as Mexican.