Alice Taylor Eaton: Remembering Altadena Before It Was
by Michele Zack
We arrived in the Pueblo de Los Angeles on a sunny May morning,
1861. The Civil War had begun whilst we sailed around the
Horn of South America from New York to California. We’d
known war was coming.... had it not been for that and my
new husband’s need to get back to his children, Benjamin
Smith Eaton and I might not have married in such haste.
My first impression of Los Angeles was of... dust... Low
adobe buildings, chickens scratching, and cows lolling about
the streets. Fields surrounded by willow trees growing so
close together they formed a living fence to keep livestock
and others out. Mexicans, or Californios — I
didn’t know the difference then — shouting
to each other in the hubbub of unloading cargo and people
from light boats at Wilmington. These plyed back and forth
from ships anchored more than a mile out where the water
was deep enough for them not to run aground. It was low tide
so we had to scramble the last hundred yards or so across
sandy mud to reach the solid ground of Los Angeles. It was
then I noted again the mountains to the northeast. From out
at sea they hadn’t seemed so tall.
* * *
I’d fallen in love with Benjamin Smith Eaton just
six months before, the winter afternoon he came home to Plainfield,
Connecticut after being away for 15 years. He was 38 and
I was 23. No one could talk me out of him.
My strict New England upbringing in one of Providence, Rhode
Island’s oldest families had made me what some folks
called “biggity.” Two of my ancestors, Peter
Brown and Richard Warren, were signers of the Mayflower Compact.
Ben’s family was also of our class of people; he’d
come from landed gentry in England but his grandfather had
fought in the Revolutionary War against the British and his
father in the War of 1812.
I remember so clearly the day Ben returned. It was gray
and cold. Old Mrs. Eaton was poorly. But she used to sit
up by the fire in her rocker. Our families were connected
and I was visiting in Plainfield, where I had several cousins
and some school friends. The Eaton house was on a small rise
set back from the valley road; its parlor overlooked fields,
bleak and frozen. I looked up from my needlepoint and watched
a figure on horseback advance along the valley, and turn
off onto the drive leading up to the house. Mrs. Eaton
looked up too, but her eyes were not good and she asked me
to describe the rider.
“I can’t see much more than he looks.... cold...
seems to be carrying more than one would require for an afternoon’s
ride,” I said, straining to see.
I almost remembered Ben myself, although I was
only nine years old when he’d left the East. I’d
heard about him all my life. As his older brother would inherit
the farm, not Ben, his attachment to Plainfield was diminished.
After leaving home he’d taught school in Massachusetts,
then had gone to Harvard to become a lawyer, and then on
to Missouri. He worked there as a newspaper man, got married
and went to California... like so many, looking for gold.
I’d hear of his doings from Mrs. Eaton or other family
connections. When he didn’t strike it rich in the gold
fields, he moved south to Los Angeles where he had family
connections. His wife’s brother Judge Benjamin Hayes,
as well as his wife’s sister Louisa, married to a Dr.
Griffin, were already established there. One year we’d
hear he was building an irrigation ditch, the next he was
a judge, or the District Attorney or a farmer. To live in
California seemed to require one to be flexible. I knew Ben’s
wife Helena had died the previous Spring after a long illness;
he’d left his two children in the care of her sister,
Mrs. Dr. Griffin, so he could visit his mother.
Then he was standing in the parlor in front of us. Old Mrs.
Eaton was overwhelmed at seeing her son after so many years.
From the twinkle in his blue eyes, you’d never guess
he’d just spent six months crossing the continent
on horseback. He had sandy hair and a beard, and an ironic
face. Not just handsome. It was his well-spokeness,
the pleasantness of his conversation, that attracted me.
Life amused Ben Eaton... and in turn he amused others with
droll observations. When he told me of his encounters with
grizzlies and greenhorns, of the Californios...the
sunshine, the great mountains. (SIGH...) It was all
so exciting and fresh compared to my privileged, constrained
life... and all the grim forecasts of war. My romantic notions
of California had been fed by stories and illustrations of
California in the pages of Forbes Magazine... so
I fancied I knew quite a bit about the life in California
Ben described.
The solicitude Ben showed his mother bespoke an inner goodness.
Indeed, some said Ben brought his mother back from the brink
of death, indeed she recovered and lived a good many years
more. But I held my head high and ignored a few unchristian
comments about the economy with which Ben Eaton had buried
a wife, cured a mother, and married a new bride.
Our courtship and wedding were expeditious and
simple. Ben had to get back to his children, and the country
was on the brink of war.
That’s how I came to be standing on Wilmiington’s
mudflats on a sunny May morning in 1861, barely two
weeks after Confederates had fired at Fort Sumter in Charleston,
South Carolina.
I heard the musical Spanish language roll off my husband’s
tongue for the first time as he engaged a wagon and helped
load up our trunks. Not far from the port we stopped at a
spacious adobe that opened to a huge courtyard with
fullgrown trees and lots of flowers, and in one corner, an
untidy pile of farm implements. A dark-skinned man with a
large mustache greeted Ben like a lost son... again, in Spanish.
His senora took me off to a sort of privy with no
roof, where I washed off the long, salty months with buckets
of cool water from a barrel. We had a meal of flattened little
corn cakes and beef stewed with chili peppers. My tongue
burned and I had to ask for water.
California was more than hard: we skipped the honeymoon
and delved into pioneer life. I admit there were days I wished
I’d never set eyes on Benjamin Smith Eaton. Our first
home was an old adobe jailhouse on Ft. Moore Hill. It had
a dirt floor and no shade; cactus was its main horticultural
embellishment. My Ben had taken the property in exchange
for building a road up to the pueblo’s Temple Street
Cemetery on the other side of the hill. He wanted me to be
comfortable, and pointed to improvements he made, such as
plastering up the hole left in our main room by cannon ball
shot in the Mexican-American War. The fact that we were on
high ground saved us the very first winter, 1861-62, when
horrific floods washed away other adobe structures all over
the pueblo and down to the coast, including the very substantial
one near the port we’d visited our first day.
But our roof still dripped tar in hot spells, and soon water
became precious as Southern California moved from floods
to drought by 1863. Water had to be fetched up from the ever-shrinking
river, and the only company or help I had was from Mexicans
and Indians. These were but trivial domestic details to my
new husband, who simply adored the challlenges of
life in the pueblo. He was off every day, leaving me to myself
as he met with old friends and compadres. It was
not until we arrived in California that I learned of our
true financial state; this news was not felicitous. But Ben
obtained a judgeship at the Court of Sessions, and soon he
became engineer of Los Angeles new water works. He also oversaw
construction of an irrigation ditch to the woolen mills during
that madness. Although these enterprises all seemed important,
money in our home was always a scarcity.
Ben soon increased his association with Don Benito Wilson
and Dr. John Griffin in helping them to bring water to their
14,000-acre rancho way out in the country near the mountains.
Dr. Griffin, in particular, caused me great discomfort. Like
most of Los Angeles’ leaders. . . . he was “Southern
Minded.” It didn’t matter that California
was a free state and we were in the middle of an abominable
war, he supported the South and slavery. To give you an idea
of what sort of a man he was, when Lincoln was assassinated
a few years later — he got drunk and
danced in the street. The rare few letters I received from
home were full of sad news of lost cousins and friends and
neighbors, my brother was badly wounded... I was a
Yankee through and through, and just couldn’t abide
these people. I’d grown up in a church that abhored
human slavery as a sin against our Creator. Don Benito at
least was a gentleman and an independent Democrat who did
not actively support slavery and had moved away from Los
Angeles to the country because, as he said, “It was
no place to raise a Christian family.”
But my Ben was much in the company of Dr. Griffin, his brother-in-law
through his first wife, Helena. Helena’s siter Louisa
was married to Dr. Griffin, and she took over the rearing
of Ben’s older children Mary-Alice and Fred when they
were quite young and their mother had first became ill; this
arrangement continued when Ben traveled back east after her
death. They were, after all, her niece and nephew. When we
first arrived back in California, Ben thought they might
live with us; but Louisa was of course fond of them, and
they had grown accustomed to a finer sort of life in her
grand house built up on a proper foundation. We were supposed
to be very grateful, of course, since we couldn’t keep
them in such style.
This put me in difficult position. When my first children,
Olive and Belle, came into the world, they had little to
do with their half-siblings who lived in that well-feathered
Southern nest down on First Street. We struggled along, poor
but proud, in the jail house up the hill. When small pox
broke out in the pueblo, it was all I could do to stop myself
from running away; if we’d been in a better financial
situation I might have taken the girls with me back to Rhode
Island.
The shame I endured these first years was almost unbearable.
I didn’t want to deny Ben’s older children their
father after losing a mother, but there I was alone most
of the time with two babies and living in virtual squalor
with no social equals. His daughter, whom I had imagined
would become as my younger sister — was... not well
disposed toward me.
I had envisioned a very different life for myself in California,
back in Providence.
Ben, or “the Judge” as he was commonly called
around the Pueblo, was unusually tolerant toward both southern-mindedness
and the lawlessness of Los Angeles in those days. This caused
me great pain and annoyance. But he could usually shake me
out of my self-pity or foul temper with amusing stories of
the banditos and Frenchmen and fly-by-nighters he
encountered in court, or at the Bella Union Hotel. This hotel
was a watering hole for many men of the pueblo. Los
Angeles was wild in those days; saloons and drunkards everywhere.
Killings almost every day, too, and lynchings: even our vigilante
committee could not control the grifters and bands of Mexican
thieves.
Water, first the flood and then the drought, was the constant
theme of conversation my first years in California... and
indeed, the theme of our lives. As soon as it went wanting,
people began stealing it from one another to water crops
and for livestock. There were constant fights, and even murders,
over water. All of Ben’s work involved engineering
projects to get more water, or lawsuits over water rights.
The the Los Angeles River dried up completely in 1864, and
we lost our little heard of cows. Cattle were dying all over
Southern California, and that traditional industry died with
them — there was not enough water to keep the poor
beasts alive. First their rotting carcasses, and then their
bones, were everywhere out in the county side where they’d
been slaughtered where they stood for beef and hides. Roaming
packs of dogs, some rabid, added a new danger to our lives,
and men would go out to shoot them. It was at this time that
water became my husband’s obsession, not just his work.
He began experimenting with what he called dry-farming, looking
for crops that weren’t as thirsty, and finding places
to plant where underground streams ran closer to the surface.
I would dream of green, tidy fields overlooking the sea,
and my family’s pretty farm... but would wake to hot
and cranky children. We often couldn’t spare water
for a proper bath, I’d just wipe them down with a wet
rag, thinking, “I can’t sink any lower than this.”
What saved my sanity was the move we made away from the
pueblo. It came out of someone else’s tragedy. Ben
was building a large irrigation ditch for Don Benito Wilson
and Dr. Griffin on land far from Los Angeles at the old Rancho
San Pasqual. Before we were married he’d lived with
his first family on a different part of this land in a fine
old adobe built by the Garfias family. He loved the rancho,
and we both wanted a better place to rear our children than
Los Angeles.
The San Pasqual was an old Spanish land grant of 14,000
acres whose northern border was marked by those huge mountains
I’d noticed my first day in Los Angeles. Except by
its canyons, the upper half was like a desert for months
of the year, barren and treeless. Chaparral made parts of
it impossible to ride across. But we moved there, next to
Precipice Canyon, in springtime, when a thousand acres of
golden poppies and rain-fed rivulets brought the plain to
beautiful life.
We moved our family to the rancho in 1865 at the end of
the Civil War to the northeast corner by Precipice
Canyon and the mountains. The drought had ended, and although
we were isolated, there was a nice, almost new cottage there.
My husband had overseen its construction for Dr. Griffin’s
sister, Mrs. Eliza Johnston, soon after we’d come to
California. She was the widow of the famous Confederate General
Albert Sidney Johnston killed at the Battle of Shiloh. She’d
settled there in 1862, but stayed only a few months and never
made any other improvements. When her son died in the Ada
Hancock steamship disaster at San Pedro, she moved away.
Many prominent people were lost in that accident, including
Don Benito’s sister-in-law and one of the owners of
the neighboring Santa Anita Rancho. Cold ocean water had
splashed on the ship’s boiler and blew it completely
out of the water. Nothing but floating debris and a few survivors,
some with horrible burns, were left.
Ben’s connections with the Griffin family and Eliza
Johnston became even more entangled around this time: his
eldest daughter Mary Alice, just 17, married one of Eliza’s
surviving sons, Hancock Johnston. Hancock was quite the Southern
dandy, and worked with Dr. Griffin in real estate development
in Los Angeles.
Eliza Johnston’s house gave me back my dignity and
I will always be grateful to that poor woman. While her house
was smaller than the one I’d grown up in, it was comfortable,
set in a woodland of ancient oaks near the canyon’s
edge. Mrs. Johnston had named it Fair Oaks Ranch, after her
home in Virginia. It was clapboard, with four nice big rooms
downstairs, a good kitchen, and two above with sloping ceilings.
We had large open fireplaces in three of the downstairs rooms,
all with very pretty wall paper. Mrs. Johnston was a gifted
water colorist, and I put up two wildflower pictures she
had left behind. She had spared no expense building her house;
when Ben was involved in its construction a few years earlier,
I admit I’d been jealous.
Even though Ben killed a dozen rattlesnakes our first year,
and we lost a horse to a mountain lion, I preferred these
perils to those of Los Angeles. Frankly, I was happy that
Ben wasn’t spending as much time at the Bella Union
Hotel.
Soon I was expecting what I thought was our third child,
which turned out to be twins George and William! Our growing
family filled the house and the next years were better for
us. The rains returned, and I was busy with the children
(our fifth came along two years later, then one more after
that). Still, it seemed we were always just scraping by.
But I was glad to get away from Los Angeles with its saloons,
violence, and Southerners. The war was over, but not their
cockiness.
My husband became busy experimenting with ways to farm using
less water. To a chorus of guffaws from Don Benito, and other
vineyardists around Los Angeles, he cleared chaparral sufficient
to plant 5,000 grape vines, even though he knew he could
give them very little water. They survived the summer, and
he planted another 30,000 in the fall. Soon, everyone was
wanting to come and see for themselves how he’d done
it. Wilson and Griffin, who he’d been building an irrigation
ditch for on the Devil’s Gate side of the rancho to
the west for a real estate scheme were especially interested.
Ben’s experiments were a great success. We produced
our first wine in 1867 — and the prices it brought
made all the old producers open their eyes. Immediately,
ours became well-known the best locally produced wine, and
Fair Oaks Ranch became Eaton’s Vineyard. The next year,
1868, we had incredible rain again: the canyon bottom turned
into a torrent for months, and wine production in the county
topped a million gallons. We had to build a help house for
all the Chinese who worked the vineyards for us. Ben could
finally afford to buy our farm outright, even though Wilson
and Griffin’s “San Pasqual Plantation” real
estate scheme failed in 1870.
Honestly, they’d lost the war, but Griffin and all
were still waving the Confederate flag, calling the land
a “plantation.” Well I didn’t want any
plantation for a neighbor, and anyhow, no one bought the
land because they didn’t believe you could farm or
grow citrus so high above sea level; only we and a few squatters
and jack rabbits could stand to live in such a remote spot
with “water problems.”
Ben had built a water system running from Precipice Canyon
sufficient for our household and crop needs. He surely had
a smart head on him when it came to figuring water. We had
60,000 vines and quite an operation going by then. After
Griffin and Wilson’s fancy plantation with its San
Francisco money failed, Dr. Griffin was crying poor all over
Los Angeles. Oh, he was on the verge of financial ruin, I’m
sure. It was at this time that he engaged Ben as his agent
to sell off the rest of his San Pasqual land. Ben brought
out all sorts of greenhorns to visit, nothing came of it
for a few years. Finally he interested a group from Indiana
through a consumptive fellow named Mr. Berry. They didn’t
have anywhere near enough money and started falling out among
themselves, but Ben found them new investors in Los Angeles
so that Griffin could get his sale. First Ben had to promise
he would build them a water system, and before we knew it
he was president of the newly formed San Gabriel Valley Orange
Grove Association. The Association bought a strip of land
along the arroyo in the southwest part of the rancho miles
from our farm. And Don Benito threw in a 1,400 acre-swath
of desert land across the top of the rancho to the west of
our place to sweeten the deal. This land later became Altadena.
My husband, who had purchased 60 acres in what eventually
became South Pasadena, was the only one of them who knew
a thing about farming or engineering water pipes, the rest
were very genteel and several of them were sick. For years,
beginning in 1874, Ben was entirely wrapped up in establishing
the new colony. He had to build them a new, completely different
water system, which fortunately took much less time than
the ditch because it used iron pipe and pressure instead
of men and shovels. It was the first of its kind in Southern
California, that brought water from the Arroyo Seco down
to a reservoir from whence it was piped around the new settlement
that soon named itself Pasadena. Don Benito had refused to
sell his water rights on the old ditch that brought us out
to the rancho and that brought water to its center, and he
and Griffin fought like cats and dogs over it because Griffin
was desperate to sell. Don Benito wanted to hold on to the
land in the center, and sell it for more later since he’d
invested so much money in that ditch.
With water, the land, and the kind of lives people could
live on it, was transformed. Land prices went sky high, and
since the new settlers were chiefly people who loved beauty,
they immediately began planting trees and ornamental gardens
in addition to crops. The settlement expanded quickly, and
Don Benito was able to sell off the rest of his rancho land
at a big profit. Within ten years, Pasadena became known
as the garden of the west. They also cared about books and
libraries and schooling. Five of the colony’s first
19 pupils were my own children, and I finally began to meet
the kindred spirits that had eluded me my first years in
California.
The pioneer phase of my life was over, and although now
I can look back with nostalgia, at the time I promise you
that I was fully ready to rejoin civilization.
