Tag Archives: Rancho Ex-Mission San Fernando

Van Nuys — a Viewing

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A new series applying history’s tire-iron to the rusty Hub of the Valley

*Millard Sheets, 1965. HSFC Bank on Van Nuys Boulevard, now Bof*A

PART ONE: ‘WHEN ALL THIS WAS FARMLAND’

In the photo below, the sun-baked middle ground is today’s Van Nuys. Van Nuys is unusual in America in that the historian can’t sanctimoniously intone in the opening paragraph “For time immemorial People of the Ancient Ways called this land home, at one with Nature’s Ways.” Nobody called Van Nuys “Home” until Isaac Newton Van Nuys. And for the Tongva, the Chumash and the Tataviam who lived in the surrounding hills, the way to be at one with Nature’s Ways was to hot-foot it across the Valley as fast as you can in the dry seasons; and avoid it completely during the dangerous wet times when it swamped and Tujunga or Pacoima Wash could rampage. Of the two pleasant spots where natural wells and pools spring up, and the Indians had mixed-tribe rancerias, neither of them is Van Nuys. One was Encino [Siutcanga]; the other of course was San Fernando [Achoicomenga], where the Mission was built. But Van Nuys belonged to the antelopes. When the Indians were almost gone and the Mission was secularized the Valley was heavily ranched. Gen. Andres Pico took his interest in San Fernando and the northern half of the Valley, and his brother Don Pio Pico, the last Californio governor who had signed the original grant in 1846, by the 1850s had somehow come to own the southern half himself — including the cattle-tramped hardpan we call Van Nuys, that nothing in the middle:

Mission San Fernando and the vast San Fernando plain.hoto 1875 by a railroad surveyor; taken from SF Pass looking toward Cahuenga.

Don Pio Pico, executing rights from a complicated chain-of-title victory from the Land Commission, sold his half of Rancho Ex-Mission San Fernando to the Yankees because beef prices had collapsed. Around 1865, the 15-year Gold Rush boom waned, then busted. The days were bygone of Valley rancheros driving thousands of cattle up to San Francisco and Sacramento to be slaughtered for twenty-dollar beefsteaks. The problem of a sudden oversupply of lowing stock solved itself, when a searing drought gripped the Southland, leaving the Valley full of cattle bones by 1868. The land sale was pervaded with ironies; Col. Fremont had made the Mission the headquarters for his California Battalion, and across these very plains had ridden in triumph to receive the sword of capitulation from Gen. Andres Pico, who claimed the Mission and its lands for his own. In 1848, Pico capitulated to save the Californios’ ranchos. Now the Picos were selling theirs off to the Yankees. But Pio Pico was the wiliest California land-jobber of them all. Realizing a profit from the switch of allegiances to Norte America, even so land could be liquidated legally, was their triumph. Pio was was certainly shrewd enough to realize a Hotel on the Plaza would bring steadier returns, and more genteel social connections, than running stock on the hoof. It was a brilliant trade for Pico, one of his canniest bets, for it kept him in good credit. It was also a decisive investment in downtown Los Angeles; the first moment when the dusty pueblo earned any notice at all in the world. Pio Pico put the Merced Theatre in back of the Pico House, with a door to the lobby; and put Jules Harder in the hotel kitchen; and made LA a city on the map.

**1880s**: **the combine and twenty-mule team.**

And it was a great deal for Van Nuys, who was the partner responsible for actually running the farm operation. Lankershim had tried dry wheat farming for a couple of seasons but had busted. Van Nuys said he could do it, and he did; with true Yankee luck, the middle of 1870s when he experimented brought some good El Niño rains, and by the 1880s Van Nuys was harvesting boatloads of grain with Lankershim’s capital, and shipping it overseas at a branded premium. Thus it was a great return for the San Franicsco investors, too. Lankershim had found this land destroyed by heavy cattle ranching and failed to work it; it was Van Nuys who made it into a productive monocrop that brought other wheat farmers to make fortunes here too. He was one of the greatest farmers who ever lived.

The Home Ranch was the Van Nuys’ farmhouse, where he and Susannah (Lankershim) raised three kids and a million bushels of wheat.

But who was Isaac Newton Van Nuys? He wasn’t the founder of Van Nuys, but it was named for him when he sold in 1909. (The town was founded in 1911). Speculative towns are usually named after the developer’s signature on the front of the check, not the farmer’s name on the back. Significantly, also, the name ‘Van Nuys’ is practically the only one of the developers’ original town names not to have changed; meaning, Van Nuys never actively voted to change its identity, as did social-climbing Toluca to Lankershim to North Hollywood, or Zelzah to Northridge, or Marian to Reseda, or Owensmouth to (the equally unappealing) Canoga Park. In the next part we’ll take the man, and his name, and his Life, in View, to glean what civics lessons we can.

Where Are They Now? San Fernando’s Fan Palms

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Recall, Patient Reader: the very first palm trees in Los Angeles were those Canary Island date palms (below), planted at San Fernando Mission. This once-famous pair were planted, probably by Fr. Lasuen and Fr. Dumetz themselves, at a solemn mass at the 1797 dedication of the cemetery. These were the palms to be used on Palm Sunday, the emblems of triumph, martyrdom, and resurection, Phoenix canarensis. These palms, which were admired by travelers and painted and photographed as beloved relics, even after the Mission had crumbled, somehow disappeared from history without a trace.

But there were other, equally famous palms at San Fernando: that towering row of California Fan Palms that were planted out in the olive groves, just south of the Convento, probably sometime in the mid-1820’s. Since the first Spanish contact with the Agua Caliente band, whose canyons at Palm Springs engendered the palms, seem to have been in 1822, it need not have been long after that a few of those palms ended up at San Fernando.

…tourists, note the car…
…tourists…
Abbot Kinney and H.H. Jackson

[Intriguingly, an artist depicted Don Andres Pico in the 1850s, at home on the Convento corrida, with a view south over the olive grove. The artist notes both kinds of palms out there, the bushy fan palms on the left, and date palms, center and on the right, toward the ranch house.]

I hunted around Mission Hills to find old Washington filiferas, and tried to triangulate distance by the hills. There were some stately trunks the south side of Brand Blvd. that gave pause, especially this one:

Maybe it was put in when Brand Park and the P.E. station were developed, i.e., 1913? Plus it’s too close to the Convento; the historic trees were out in the groves, not close to the road.

Then I found…

The corner of Los Olivos Street and Burnett Avenue, I was amazed to spot the following battered but hardy specimen, which seems to have lived a life of incident. Is it the right trunk size and shape to maybe be the small palm to the east? Suspiciously off plumb from the street grid, the base has been (recently!) encased in concrete. It was common just before WWI, in the Valley, for developers to build rail-adjacent tracts sold as small farm plots, with only dirt roads and no sidewalks (low taxes, rural feel). Could this palm have survived simply because it fell on a strip of “public” land at the back of an old farm lot, and a sleepy lane? One that was, in the ’50s, subdivided and graded, but never (until recently) put to sidewalk? Yes, theoretically; this sequence is typical of the Valley.

The land south of the Convento seems to have been an open wheat field until after the turn of the century. When the Red Cars came in along Sepulveda/Brand boulevards, about 1913, the P.E. laid out six streets just south of the Convento and the station, for a sub-division tract. This neighborhood is right on top of the olive grove, directly adjacent to the old mayordomo’s house (i.e., the Pico Adobe). There are still many olive trees in the vicinity. But only one big filifera.

Modernity may diminish this specimen in photographs. Those white pickups are monster vehicles compared with, say, the Tin Lizzie in the tourist shot above.

Its height roughly triangulates with the hills and the Convento, following the treeline and the electrical tower. I hazard the guess that this may be a last survivor of the historic San Fernando fan palms; or at least, it is on the spot and may be kin to one of those trees. Any reader suggestions on how to pin this down further?

“An Early Map of the San Fernando Valley”

“…the vast San Fernando Plain”

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I discovered this evocative photograph of the Valley (thank you KCET).

The view, taken on a cool drizzly day in 1875, is south, looking over what had been lands of the Mission San Fernando Rey de Espana, toward Mt. Cahuenga and the Cahuenga Pass. Los Angeles lies just over the hill.

The Valley was, in the Mexican period, historically contested land, the buckle of Alta California. One army could camp at San Fernando and the other at the Cahuenga Pass, and they could lob cannonballs and race squadrons of cavalry at each other across the Valley floor.

John C. Fremont would have seen it looking much like this on the rainy January morning in 1847, as he rode from the Convento toward Campo de Cahuenga to receive the surrender of Gen. Don Andres Pico, and end the Mexican War in California. In fact, as Fremont knew, the whole plain was Pico’s land, Rancho Ex-Mission San Fernando. It must have especially galled Don Andres that Fremont and his Battalion of Bear Flag ruffians were camping there.

This view also was important to Gov. Juan Bautista Alvarado in 1836, during his coup d’etat. Southern Californios, led by the Pico Brothers and the Carrillo clan, had camped with their militia at San Fernando Mission. The rebels hoped to sever Southern California from the tyranny of Monterey, and to spite the treachery of Alvarado; but to do so they had to defend their capital of Los Angeles, and head off Alvarado’s Norteno army at the Pass. Bloodshed on this plain by fathers and sons on both sides was a real threat, but the Surenos finally acquiesced to Alvarado’s rule. Soon after, the land grants began, and the loyal Surenos weren’t stinted.

This strategic plain was also the site of the Californio rebellions against the Mexican Governors Micheltorena and Victoria. These Battles of Cahuenga and Providencia were violent and explosive, and they had real political consequences. But casualties were almost nil, intentionally, of course.

The land was shaped this way by the Franciscans, with orchards, arable, and rangelands. It was then managed by Don Andres Pico, and his mayordomo Valentin Lopez. Tongva and Tataviam Indians were the vaqueros and orchardmen who worked the ranch. It appears here roughly in the condition in which it was sold off by the Picos to Isaac Lankershim for his huge dry-wheat farms and farmstead tracts; and to Charles Maclay for his City of San Fernando. The line of oaks in the center marks the San Fernando Road.

This is the landscape as Collis P. Huntington and his SPRR engineers saw it. In fact this may have been a surveyor’s photograph: a year later, in 1876, they and thousands of Chinese workers drove the tracks of the Southern Pacific Railroad right down that line of oaks, along San Fernando Road, and changed this view forever.

The Mission lands ran to the line of mist before the hills. This is roughly the line of the Los Angeles River. Here, in the cool shade of Cahuenga, the beautiful mountain that looks like a lady lying down, was the Tongva Council Grove of Sycamores (by the Gene Autry National Center in Griffith Park.) Beyond the River, most of the hill-scape you see was Col. Griffith J. Griffith’s portion of the old Rancho Los Feliz. Today it is Griffith Park.

The Convento of the Mission appears still in good shape, but the church, the farmyard and outbuildings (including possibly the Andres Pico Adobe?) are muddy piles. Charles Fletcher Lummis would find the ruins in even worse shape ten years later. Appalled by the decrepitude of California antiquities, Fletcher founded the Landmarks Club to rally public forces in Los Angeles and across the nation to preserve San Fernando, and three other Missions.

Land that became North Hollywood and Valley Village appears here, at the center far right, between the orchards and the low-sloping Cahuenga Pass.

The Valley Village View

Welcome to the blog of writer and musician Andrew Martin. Here I'll post original photographs and observations as I encounter the history and culture of the San Fernando Valley, the City of the Angels, Alta California and the far-flung Pacific Rim… but mostly the Valley.