Still Standing after all these Years

PART III: The Village Becomes a Town, 1890s to 1900

By Katherine Peters Yamada

The town of Glendale originated on a triangular piece of land considered prime property when the Verdugo rancho was divided in the ``Great Partition of 1871.’’

The northern tip was an old sycamore stump about a thousand feet north of ``Camino de Monterey,’’ the present Monterey Road, according to E. Caswell Perry and Carroll W. Parcher, writing in ``Glendale Area History.’’ (Just about where Glendale Avenue and Glenoaks Boulevard intersect today.)

The triangle, now very roughly bordered by Glendale Avenue, Chevy Chase and Windsor Road, was part of several thousand acres of Verdugo land that had been acquired by Alfred B. Chapman.

Alfred B. Chapman

Chapman, who graduated from West Point and served at Fort Tejon before leaving the Army in 1861, came to Los Angeles to study law with attorney Jonathan R. Scott. He married Scott’s daughter, Mary, and set up a partnership with Cameron E. Thom (see Part II).

Chapman later partnered with his boyhood friend, Andrew Glassell. According to Wikipedia, Chapman and Glassell focused on real estate transactions, specifically, large partition suits. Chapman took his compensation in land, and “nearly every final decree in partition would find that Glassell & Chapman had acquired more property.”

Chapman and Glassell led the Verdugo partition suit. Their legal fees were paid in substantial land transfers, according to Wikipedia.

 After Chapman obtained clear title, he sold 371 acres, including that triangular section, to Ozro W. Childs, who held on to it until 1882, when it was subdivided into more than thirty ten-acre parcels.

The next year, three men, E.T. Byram, B. F. Patterson and George W. Phelon, (all introduced in Part II), purchased thirteen of those parcels. The land had to be cleared of brush and cactus before houses and businesses could be built.

The Center of Town

The town site, laid out in 1887, as shown in Part II, was centered at Glendale and Third (now Wilson). The town plat indicates that a building already stood on the southwest corner.

George F. Dutton owned the building and operated a grocery store there, according to an article written by George S. Goshorn in a 1961 Glendale News-Press.

Elias Ayers Builds Glendale

Dutton sold out to a contractor, Elias Ayers, in 1892. Ayers, who had come to town a few years earlier, first opened a blacksmith shop and, later, a lumberyard. After he bought Dutton’s building, Ayers ran the grocery store—the only one in town at the time; he also became the postmaster and later built a number of houses.

When Ayers realized the residents needed a place to socialize, he remodeled the second floor of his building and rented it out for meetings, weddings and occasional theater shows.

Ayers Hall became a lively civic center, according to Goshorn.``All sorts of public meetings were held there, as well as dances. Church groups utilized it, fraternal orders convened in it.”

The upstairs hall was also a theater. As related by one old timer, ``a couple of fellows would come to town with picture slides and a lantern and hire the hall. They’d tell jokes, sing songs and do magic.’’

Churches, Schools and Services

Episcopalians Form a Church

In 1888, several Episcopalians gathered at the Adams Street home of Henry and Emma Moore to worship. The group soon outgrew the Moore’s parlor and began meeting in the Verdugo schoolhouse.

Some of the members played a significant role in developing Glendale. One was Erskine M. Ross, a participant in the town plat in 1887 and one of the investors in the Victorian Glendale Hotel.

After the hotel closed, it became the Episcopal Seminary for Girls, aka St. Hilda’s Hall. The growing Episcopal congregation began holding services there.

Later, they purchased an old building on Wilson. But, according to Bruce G. Merritt, author of ‘St. Mark’s Journey,’ a strong wind blew it down shortly after the deal was closed.

Ross donated a lot on Broadway and Isabel, opposite the former St. HIlda’s, and funds were raised for a new sanctuary. Nearly $1,000 later, the building was up, although the interior was not finished. Later, the ceiling was installed and a small corner porch with a peaked roof was added.

When a new doctor came to town, he and his wife joined the church and also purchased a 16-acre ranch in North Glendale. Charles and Nellie Bogue moved into the adobe house on the ranch (read more about the adobe, now a city park, in Part I) and he and his brother Homer opened a medical practice there. After Homer left town, Charles and Nellie bought a house, an ornate Victorian gingerbread built on spec by E.T. Byram. (It later became known as the Doctor’s House (see Part II.) Bogue reopened his medical practice there.

Nellie Bogue became one of the founding members of the Tuesday Afternoon Club.

The Tuesday Afternoon Club Ladies

Mittie Duncan and her husband, Joseph, came to California in 1892 and bought an eight-acre ranch near what is now Doran and Kenilworth.

Duncan was widowed just two years later and after two years out in the country with her three young girls, she sold the ranch and built a house on B Street, north of Wilson. She befriended a neighbor, Edith Nourse, also widowed with three daughters.

The two women longed to meet other women on a regular social basis. In January 1898, Duncan invited Nourse and several others to her home for a birthday party. Two weeks later, Nourse returned the favor. Their gatherings became so popular that they formed a club, limited to 12 members.

But Duncan couldn’t attend very many meetings. In 1899, the buyer of her ranch defaulted and she and her daughters moved back there.

Glendale was then a very small hamlet out in the middle of fruit orchards and vineyards and her ranch was near San Fernando Road and the railroad tracks. Some nights, when Duncan heard men walking nearby, she locked the girls into the bedroom and stood at the door with a pistol in her hand. One night, she fired her gun, scaring away thieves stealing fruit from their little orchard.

In 1900, she sold the ranch again, and returned to B Street. By that time, so many more women wanted to join the club that they lifted the 12-member limit and in 1904 organized themselves as the Tuesday Afternoon Club. They met in a new hall on East Broadway.

(Katherine Yamada, Verdugo Views, Glendale News-Press, Saturday, March 6, 2004)

A Tourist Hotel, A School and then—a Winery

Around 1886, an ornate, brick-clad tourist hotel went up on San Fernando Road, near where Verdugo Creek flows into the Los Angeles River.

The hotel, which quickly went bankrupt, was in West Glendale, which then had its own school district. (The boundary between the two districts was Central Avenue.) For a few years, the West Glendale school held classes in the former hotel.

In 1895, the West Glendale students moved to a new two-room school at Doran and Remington (now Columbus).

In 1911, West Glendale was annexed by Glendale and the school was renamed as Remington Street School. As the enrollment increased, further changes were made. In 1926, it became Columbus School.

The brick building was empty for some time after the students left, then became a family home and winery. Charles B. Pironi, a pharmacist who came to Los Angeles in 1880, was so successful that he bought the former hotel/school and moved in with his wife (a granddaughter of Spanish ranchero Jose Sepulveda) and their three children.

Their new home was in the midst of an “Italian area” of wineries and vineyards, according to Stuart Byles, of the Stone Barn Vineyard Conservancy, Deukmejian Wilderness Park. The Pelanconi vineyards were just across Verdugo Creek. Pironi joined his fellow Italian immigrants in producing wine. His winery flourished and he bought grapes from his neighbors and from as far away as Santa Cruz Island.

In 1901, as Pironi, age 69, was nearing his Los Angeles office, bystanders saw him “clap his hands to his head,” cry out, and tumble headfirst out of his buggy. He died thirty minutes later.

H.S. Baer bought the winery and changed the name to Los Angeles Wine Co. around 1905. It is probable that winery operations ceased during Prohibition. The building was torn down in 1971.

Still Standing

None of the structures described above have survived. However, the church and the school still exist, although in different structures and places.

The winery on San Fernando Road was torn down in 1971. But, the memory of the area’s winemaking history lives on in the neighborhood designation: Vineyard; roughly bounded by San Fernando Road, Broadway, Central and the Ventura (134) Freeway.

In the 1890s, the intersection of Glendale and Wilson was the center of town. For many years, a variety of businesses moved in and out of the historic, wood-frame Ayers Hall. In the early 1950s, Virgil’s Hardware occupied the lower floor. (They moved to the corner of California and Glendale Avenue in the early 1960s.)

Ayers Hall was torn down about that time and a Richfield Service Station took its place. The station eventually gave way to a parking lot and, later, to the Perkins Building, part of Glendale’s Civic Center.

References

Our local history was studied extensively by early historians, including John Calvin Sherer, who authored ‘History of Glendale and Vicinity’ in 1922. Carroll W. Parcher incorporated much of that information in `Glendale Community Book,’ published in 1957. A later version, ‘Glendale Area History,’ was published in 1974 and expanded in 1981. Unless otherwise noted, much of what is included here is from these books and from “Glendale, A Pictorial History.”

Wikipedia contributors. "Alfred Chapman." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 24 Apr. 2022. Web. 12 May. 2022.

St. Mark’s Journey, A History of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Glendale, California, 1888-1989, by Bruce G. Merritt, Melwood Press, Los Angeles, 2013

For more on Glendale’s founding, visit the City of Glendale’s historic preservation element of the general plan, found online at https://www.glendaleca.gov/home/showdocument?id=12478

Note: All images Courtesy of the Glendale History Room, Glendale Public Library unless otherwise noted.

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