THE DISMAL SCIENCE DEPT./
THE DOWNTOWN BEAT

RIDE A PAINTED PONY, LET THE SPINNING WHEEL SPIN

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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:

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”