Tag Archives: Lemons

Pacific Beach Life – 1894

In 1894 the community of Pacific Beach had been in existence for six years and was home to a few dozen families (the 1895 San Diego City Directory listed 35 names with residences in Pacific Beach). Some of these families had first been attracted to Pacific Beach by the San Diego College of Letters, San Diego’s first college, which opened in 1888 on a campus near the community’s center that is now the site of Pacific Plaza. Rose Hartwick Thorpe was a world-renowned poet who had come to help establish the college (and whose daughter Lulo had been a student), and the Barnes, Rowe, Thresher and Cogswell families had also established residences near the college campus where their children studied.

Franklin and Phoebe Barnes at their home overlooking the former college buildings in Pacific Beach where their sons had been students

The college closed in 1891 but these families chose to remain in Pacific Beach where they found that their land was well adapted to ‘fruit culture for profit’ and began planting groves of lemon trees on their properties. The Pacific Beach Company, which had founded the community in 1887, encouraged this effort with an updated subdivision map creating ‘acre lots’ of about ten acres, suitable for small farms or ranches, in much of its undeveloped territory. After this new map was recorded in 1892 a number of these acre lots were acquired by ‘easterners’ and developed into lemon ranches. The Wilson and Bowers families from Tennessee jointly owned three adjacent acre lots around the intersection of Lamont and Chalcedony streets (then 11th Street and Idaho Avenue) where they set out lemon trees and built homes, one of which is still standing. Other newcomers, including the Honeycutt, Dammond and Ash families, acquired undeveloped residential blocks near the former college campus and turned them into lemon ranches.

Amended subdivision map of Pacific Beach from 1892. The larger units numbered from 1 to 75 are the ‘acre lots’ introduced in this map

For the former college students wishing to continue their educations the only option at the time was the Russ School, now San Diego High School, which they could reach with a half-hour train ride from Pacific Beach and a mile walk from the downtown station of the San Diego, Old Town & Pacific Beach railway. Several of the former college students did commute to the Russ School and Theodore Barnes and Evangeline Rowe, who lived on neighboring lemon ranches in Pacific Beach, were in the graduating class in 1894. These students made the news on Washington’s birthday, February 22, 1894, when the San Diego Union reported on special exercises conducted at the high school under the direction of Professor Davidson (who had been one of the founders and a professor at the College of Letters and was then principal of the Russ School). The highlight of the program was a debate; Resolved, that Washington was a greater general than statesman, featuring Theo. Barnes for the affirmative and Evangeline Rowe for the negative. According to the Union, the arguments were well chosen, showing careful and accurate historical research, and were generally well delivered, reflecting much credit on the young speakers (the debate was decided in the affirmative). A second debate – Resolved, that George Washington did not cut down the cherry tree – being of a lighter nature and calculated rather to amuse than instruct, was also decided in the affirmative.

Russ School class of 1894, including Theodore Barnes and Evangeline Rowe of Pacific Beach

Grammar school students attended the Pacific Beach school, which was then located at the northeast corner of Hornblend Street (then California Avenue) and Everts (5th) Street. In June 1894 the Union reported that a fine large flag secured through the efforts of G.H. Corey and F.W. Barnes had been presented to the Pacific Beach school by Charles W. Fairchild and formally received by the school superintendent. Rose Hartwick Thorpe, ‘the famous poetess’, was present and read an original poem of five verses appropriate to the occasion (about 24 students of all ages attended the one-room schoolhouse where they were taught by Miss Ella Waitneight). In addition to being a student at the school Charles Fairfield, 12 years old at the time, may have been the school janitor, a position he had applied for the previous year. George H. Corey was the husband of Martha Dunn Corey, the first physician in Pacific Beach. She was the owner of acre lot 19, west of Lamont and north of Beryl Street (then Georgia Avenue), across Beryl from the Bowers ranch on acre lot 34. Franklin W. Barnes and his wife Phoebe lived on a lemon ranch on acre lot 64, between Emerald and Diamond (then Vermont and Alabama avenues), Jewell (9th) and Lamont streets. The Barnes family, which included sons Theodore and Edward (another former college student) and daughter Mary, lived in a home at the corner of Lamont and Emerald.

Pacific Beach acre lots were still selling in 1894 and the Union noted in March that Frank J. Marshall of Kansas City had bought two ten-acre lots. He had plowed, piped and planted 1400 lemon trees, 200 prune trees, also orange, peach, pear and apricot trees and a hedge of Monterrey cypress would also be set all around his land (as a windbreak). Mr. Marshall would return to Kansas City but planned to return to Pacific Beach in the fall with his brother and both would build a handsome residence. During his absence Ed Barnes would have charge of the ranch, which was on acre lots 30 and 53, between Diamond and Beryl and east of Olney (14th) streets.

Marshall lemon ranch on Pacific Beach acre lots 30 and 53, seen from the east about 1906

Another note from Pacific Beach in July 1894 reported that Mr. Thorpe and Mr. Honeycutt had their houses freshly painted, Mr. Rutherford had completed threshing his grain and would bale the straw for hay, Miss Pearl Wagner from the city was spending a few days with Miss Mabel Rowe, and there would be an entertainment at the college building under the auspices of the Woman’s Aid Society for the purpose of paying insurance on the church. Also, orchard owners were beginning to realize the benefit of windbreaks and some were building high lath fences and individual windbreaks as protection for their young trees while the cypress hedges were growing. Not all the trees in Pacific Beach were lemons; this note added that other trees were loaded with apricots, peaches, plums, etc. and it was thought that there would be all the deciduous fruit needed by the residents this year. And delegates from some families benefiting from the reservoir contributed two days’ work to stopping the leakage and otherwise protecting the water stored there.

The Thorpe home on Pacific Beach block 167

Mr. Thorpe was Rose Hartwick Thorpe’s husband Edmond C. Thorpe, a building contractor who had completed construction of their house on block 167, between Emerald, Lamont, Diamond, Morrell (13th) streets with a fresh coat of paint (the Thorpe house burned to the ground in 1957). Sterling and Nancy Honeycutt had turned the four blocks surrounded by Grand and Garnet avenues and Jewell and Lamont streets into a lemon ranch in 1893 and in February 1894 had purchased the northwest quarter of block 214, across Lamont from their lemon ranch. The Honeycutts lived in the University Heights area of San Diego but stayed at a house on this new property when visiting Pacific Beach to manage their lemon ranch. That house, at the southeast corner of Garnet and Lamont and painted in 1894, remained standing until 1954.

Honeycutt house at the southeast corner of Garnet and Lamont streets

Phil Rutherford did not own property in Pacific Beach at the time but he did rent large sections of the mostly vacant land to plant and harvest grain (the Union had reported in October 1893 that he also rented over 1000 acres in San Marcos and would put it in grain for the coming season). Pearl Wagner was the daughter of Harr Wagner, the prime mover behind the College of Letters. When the college closed the Wagner family had moved back to San Diego, where Mr. Wagner was elected Superintendent of Schools in 1891. Pearl was paying a visit to her former college classmate Mabel Rowe.

Stough Hall

Although the college had closed, the college buildings remained and were used for ‘entertainments’ and other community activities. The original college building built in 1888 was a three-story structure which included ‘sleeping rooms’ for faculty and female students as well as offices and classrooms (male students lived in the ‘boy’s dormitory’ at the northeast corner of Lamont and Hornblend streets). In 1890 a second building was built next to the first, at the head of Kendall (10th) Street. Financed by Oliver Stough, majority shareholder of the Pacific Beach Company, it was known as Stough Hall. The college campus property had been foreclosed on after the college failed but the deed had passed to Stough after a sheriff’s auction at the courthouse door in 1892 and he made the buildings available to the public (they were demolished in 1958 to make way for Pacific Plaza). The community church requiring insurance was kitty-corner from the college campus at the southwest corner of Garnet (then College) Avenue and Jewell Street, the same location as today’s Presbyterian church built in 1941, and the Ladies Aid Society sponsored events to raise money for it.

Pacific Beach Church (right) about 1904, with Garnet Avenue and a lemon grove in the foreground

In 1893 the Pacific Beach Company had run a four-inch pipeline from the end of city water main at about Lamont and Chalcedony streets further up the hill to its 2,200,000 gallon reservoir located at the highest point in the subdivision. ‘Those benefitting from the reservoir’ would have been residents living above the level of the city main who would have depended on the water stored in the reservoir (the Pacific Beach reservoir was replaced by the housing development on Gordon Lane off present-day Los Altos Road about 2020, after having been inactive for decades). In its early years, before it was lined with cement, the reservoir required frequent service to manage leakage, and apparently relied at times on volunteer labor.   

The Woman’s Aid Society’s entertainment at the college building had netted $12, more than the $9 required to pay the insurance on the church, according to the Union’s Pacific Beach notes for July 25, 1894. Trees were making a fine growth and it was hoped that the windbreaks in course of building would prevent a ‘repetition of last year’s discouragement’. In social news, a party of young people, accompanied by a few older ones, enjoyed bathing in the surf and there was an ice cream party at Mrs. Fairfield’s. In the health report Bennie Bowers was in Los Angeles receiving medical treatment and Rufus Martin was quite ill. Bennie Bowers was the 17-year-old son of G.M.D. Bowers of the Wilson and Bowers lemon ranch (the Bowers family home is still standing at 1860 Law Street). Twenty-two-year-old Rufus Martin’s father John T. Martin owned a lemon ranch in block 179, between Morrell, Emerald, Felspar and Noyes (14th) streets.

Ice cream and surf bathing were again topics of the August 13, 1894, notes from Pacific Beach. There was an ice cream party at Mrs. Rowe’s on Wednesday evening and on Friday the young people went to Rose Canyon on a picnic at which ice cream was served with lunch. On Monday evening an ice-cream party was given to Theodore Barnes’ young friends at his home. They parted with him with expressions of sincere regret and he would be sadly missed in their circle (he sailed for San Francisco Tuesday morning on the steamer Mexico to attend the university at Berkeley). On Saturday several wagon and carriage loads of young people, together with a few older ones, went surf bathing. Also, Mr. Haight and family, who had been ‘camping’ on their ten-acre ranch during the summer, were preparing to return to Redlands for the winter. The Haight ranch was on acre lot 36, between Chalcedony, Jewell, Beryl and Ingraham (then called Broadway; at 100 feet it was wider than the standard 80-foot width of Pacific Beach streets).

In other news, Mr. Corey was having the Will Wagner house repaired and an addition built. Will J. Wagner had been a ‘breeder of fancy chickens’ and his house was on the north side of Diamond Street between Noyes and Olney (the address would be 2162 Diamond today), down the block from the house built for his younger brother Harr while Harr Wagner was leading the effort to establish the College of Letters (and which is still standing at 2104 Diamond). When Harr Wagner moved back to San Diego in 1891 the Wagner brothers’ youngest sister Jennie Havice and her husband George had moved into his former home while the Havices developed a lemon ranch on block 213, between Garnet Avenue and Noyes, Hornblend and Morrell streets (in 1891 there was nothing but vacant land in the three blocks between Garnet and Diamond and their ranch was said to be ‘opposite the Harr Wagner place’).

US Geological Survey map of Pacific Beach showing cultural features (roads, railroads, buildings, etc.) as of 1903. Features existing in1894 are highlighted and identified

Will Wagner moved to Los Angeles about 1893, where the 1900 census listed him as a chicken dealer. Mr. Corey was maintaining the Will Wagner house because his wife’s sister Elizabeth Dunn had purchased most of that block (block 140), including the two houses, from Harr Wagner in April 1894. Elizabeth Dunn never did take up residence in Pacific Beach and in 1905 she transferred the property in block 140 to her sister Martha Dunn Corey (the Coreys had divorced in 1899). There was also another Wagner brother, Rev. Dr. E. R. Wagner, who had been professor of German at the College of Letters and then became pastor of the First Lutheran Church in San Diego. He made news in 1890 when he conducted a double wedding, first marrying Flora Hieber and Thomas Carrol while her mother Mrs. Ella Heiber and Will Wagner stood with them, then ‘the couples changed places’ with the newlyweds acting as bridesmaid and best man and Rev. Wagner married them too, with Harr Wagner and Jennie Havice also in attendance at the ceremony.

A note from Pacific Beach a week later, August 22, added that the trees were beginning to need irrigation, Mr. Fairfield went to Los Angeles, and the Christian Endeavor Society met at the church to arrange for a series of entertainments for the purpose of paying off the old church debt. Also, E. C. Thorpe was building a barn with four gables on his 5-acre tract and Mr. Ash was steadily improving his 5-acre tract east of the college grounds. On the map these ‘five-acre tracts’ were actually city blocks, two rows of 20 25-by-125-foot lots separated by a 20-foot alley and surrounded by 80-foot-wide streets, totaling about 2 1/3 acres. Counting public property in the central alley and the surrounding streets, which were generally unmarked and unused, the owner of a Pacific Beach block might have the use of about 5 acres. Mr. Thorpe’s four-gable barn appears in a photo taken a few years later which also shows his house (and his grand-daughter) in block 167. William Ash lived with his wife Rebecca and son William on block 205, between Garnet Avenue and Felspar Street (then Massachusetts Avenue), just across Lamont from the college campus.

Mr. Thorpe’s four-gable barn (on right, behind the Thorpes’ home and grand-daughter)

School opened on Monday with good attendance, according to the note from Pacific Beach on September 12; ‘Miss Waitneight has charge of the school again this year to the entire satisfaction of parents and pupils’. Dr. Martha Dunn Corey had several patients at La Jolla whom she had been visiting two or three times each week for some time. Dr. Cogswell and family contemplated moving into the city where they would remain during the rainy season and Mrs. Thresher was also looking for a house in the city; ‘The short days and anticipated rains made it unpleasant living so far from school and business’. Dr. Cogswell’s dental practice was in the Bon Ton Block at Sixth Avenue (then Sixth Street) and Broadway (then D Street) downtown, Mrs. Thresher was a stenographer at the county clerk’s office and her daughter Marian attended the Russ School; they would have taken the train to school and business.   

The Union noted on September 22, 1894, that George Havice and wife were rejoicing over the safe arrival of a son, and this new addition to the residents of Pacific Beach was heartily welcomed by all. Also, Mrs. Thresher was having repairs and improvements made on her place and the Woman’s Aid society held another entertainment after which cake and lemonade were served. All this for a dime to adults and five cents to children and the proceeds amounted to nearly seven dollars. And the people of this place, young and old, still kept up the practice of surf bathing every Saturday afternoon. The two or three who had unpleasant encounters with stingarees were as eager as any; ‘There is a fascination about surf bathing in large parties that is simply irresistible’. Capt. Wilson was about returning to Tennessee to look after business interests and it was rumored that his family would follow him some time in December for a protracted visit (the Wilsons lived on acre lot 33; their former ranch house was razed in 1947 but the Moreton Bay fig tree which once shaded it is still growing at 1922 Law Street).

More comings and goings of residents in Pacific Beach was noted on October 17, 1894. The Robertsons had moved into the hotel building and the Scott brothers took a ‘lively interest in whatever promotes the best welfare of the place’. Mr. Kyle’s mother and sister were coming from Scotland and Mrs. Ash’s parents and sister were contemplating coming to spend the winter with her. Rufus Martin was going to Los Angeles in search of employment and Misses Mabel and Evangeline Rowe were going there for the purpose of continuing their education. In addition, the reservoir was dry and those living on the higher lands were out of water a good part of the time. Mail delivery had changed from 9 o’clock to 2:30 and a good program was rendered at the young people’s entertainment held at Stough Hall on Friday evening where cake and lemonade were served at the conclusion of the literary exercises; ‘These entertainments are gaining in favor and reputation’.

Hotel del Pacific near the Pacific Beach railroad depot at the foot of Grand Avenue. The dance pavilion is also visible to the right and behind the hotel

Thomas Robertson was an engineer for the railroad which ran between San Diego and Pacific Beach, and which had been extended to La Jolla in the first months of 1894. The hotel was the Hotel del Pacific, built by the Pacific Beach Company in 1888 at the foot of Grand Avenue near the railroad’s depot and the beach. The hotel had not been a commercial success, especially since the newly extended San Diego, Pacific Beach & La Jolla railway allowed passengers to bypass it in favor of the fancier hotel further up the line. It was apparently being made available for longer term residents like Thomas and True Robertson and their two children, although the Robertsons soon moved on to La Jolla after the railway re-established its base of operations there. Mr. Robertson was still driving trains in 1908 when his engine derailed and overturned in Middletown, killing him and his fireman in what was the only fatal accident in the railroad’s history.

The Scott brothers, Theophilous, Frances, Harold and Henry were lemon ranchers on acre lot 35, between Chalcedony and Beryl streets, west of the Wilson and Bowers ranch and north of the Cogswell ranch. William Kyle’s mother and sister, both named Margaret, would return to Scotland but both later emigrated to Pacific Beach where his sister and her husband Alfred Roxburgh become lemon ranchers in 1899.

Another Pacific Beach Notes column arrived on November 6, 1894. Halloween had been celebrated by a party of young folks at Mr. Barnes’, Mr. Thorpe had contracted to build two or three cottages at La Jolla and Frank Hurlburt was at work on the cottages in course of erection there (Frank Hurlburt was a Pacific Beach carpenter who was employed building houses, presumably including some of those Mr. Thorpe had contracted to build). Theodore Barnes was interested in study and recreation at Berkeley university (i.e., the University of California); ‘He has already become favorably identified with some of the athletic sports connected with that institution’. A son was born to Mr. and Mrs. Gibbs (the San Diego city directory listed E. M. Gibbs as a laborer residing in Pacific Beach and in 1894 the  family already had a son and three daughters). There was also a meeting of the Woman’s Aid society at church and the young people had organized a dramatic club for the purpose of giving a series of entertainments.

In a note from Pacific Beach on November 15 the trees were making a fine growth, Mrs. Gridley had received word that her husband had been obliged to give up his employment on account of poor health (he had gone to join his brother in Buffalo, NY, in June), a number of young people were preparing for a moonlight ride to Roseville and the meeting at the Christian Endeavor on Sunday evening was very interesting. Best of all, the pumpkin social under the auspices of the Woman’s Aid Society at the college building on Friday evening had been a novel and most enjoyable entertainment. The maids and matrons who served the guests to generous triangles of golden pumpkin pie and English tea wore coquettish little head-dresses of orange puffs and bows of orange ribbon and white aprons decorated with orange ribbons. The literatary feature of the evening consisted of songs and recitations on ‘The Pumpkin’. The receipts of the evening lessened the church debt by several dollars.

On December 1 the Pacific Beach report was that Mrs. Gleason had the first olives grown at this place, Rev. Furneaux preached the Thanksgiving sermon on Sunday, Mrs. Dick at Eureka Lemon Tract had a little daughter born a few days ago, the young people met at Miss Thorpe’s home on Friday evening to arrange for a Christmas entertainment and Mr. Thorpe had a young pear tree, eighteen months from the nursery, that matured twenty-three large pears of excellent flavor this season. Also there was some talk of cementing the reservoir. There has been so much water wasted that is has been shut off from the reservoir for several weeks and trouble had been experienced in irrigating the high lands. Mr. Kyle had been employed by the new daily paper in San Diego and would reside in the city after the 1st of December. The notes added that he had been active in assisting at getting up entertainments, in the Christian Endeavor Society and in making the social gatherings among the young people pleasurable and all regret to lose him (a month earlier the Local Intelligence column of the San Diego Union had reported that William Kyle, a subject of Queen Victoria, had declared his intention of becoming a citizen of the United States).

Fannie Gleason lived in the house next to the lumber company on the north side of Balboa Avenue between Lamont and Morrell streets that is still standing and is now a restaurant, Mamma Mia’s. Rev. Hugh Furneaux was pastor of the Presbyterian Church, the community’s only church at the time, which met in a wooden building on the site of the present Pacific Beach Presbyterian Church which replaced it in 1941. The Eureka Lemon Tract was a subdivision east of what is now Mission Bay Drive, then the right of way of the Pacific Beach railway. It extended for about half a mile along what are now Brandywine, Bunker Hill and Ticonderoga streets. Robert and Christina Dick owned lots 6 and 28 of Eureka Lemon Tract, about 12 acres between the tracks of the Pacific Beach and California Southern (Santa Fe) railroads and south of what is now Garnet Avenue. Their little daughter, Mary Minerva Dick, was born on November 24 and delivered by Dr. Martha Dunn Corey.

Birth notice for Mary Minerva Dick, delivered by Martha Dunn Corey on November 24

The Union’s last note from Pacific Beach for 1894, published on December 22, announced that there was no Sunday mail and that the mail was now carried on the motor (i.e., the steam trains of the San Diego, Pacific Beach & La Jolla railway). Mrs. Ash’s father, mother and young sister had just arrived at her home from the east to spend the winter. Theodore Barnes, attending the State University at Berkeley, won a diamond-set medal valued at $75 at a foot race in San Francisco. The young people gave Miss Cogswell a surprise party on Thanksgiving evening and the next day participated in a candy pull at the Wilson’s. Mr. Shigley’s horses had become frightened while cultivating and ran away, up on the high trestle bridge near the old mail-catcher, where the cultivator catching in the rails threw the horses to the ground some twelve or fifteen feet below. They escaped serious injury.

Eureka Lemon Tract subdivision map, 1893

Jefferson Shigley was another rancher with property in the Eureka Lemon Tract. His ranch was on lot 5, south of the Dick ranch and between the Pacific Beach and the California Southern (Santa Fe) railway lines, about where Mossy Toyota is now. The high trestle would have been an early version of the bridge which now carries the Coaster over Garnet/Balboa Avenue at the foot of the grade leading up to Clairemont. Apparently there was still a ‘mail-catcher’ near the bridge, actually a ‘mail crane’, where the local postmaster could hang a ‘catcher pouch’ containing mail to be delivered up the line. A mail clerk on a passing train could deploy the train’s ‘mail-catcher’ arm to snatch the pouch hanging from the crane and swing it inside the mail car to begin sorting the mail (the clerk might also kick out a pouch of mail to be picked up and delivered by the local post office). Mr. Shigley’s property was adjacent to the ‘high trestle’ on the railway line and when his horses ran up on the bridge the cultivator they were pulling got tangled up with the rails and they fell off.        

1894 had been a good year in Pacific Beach; trees of all kinds were ‘making a fine growth’, including 1400 more lemon trees on two more lemon ranches established by another easterner on its acre lots. Windbreaks of cypress trees were going up around the acre lots to protect the young fruit trees. Families grew too, with the Havice, Gibbs and Dick families each adding a member. Two Pacific Beach residents (former students at the defunct college) were among the 28 graduates of San Diego’s high school in 1894. They departed at the end of summer to continue their education at out-of-town institutions, but not before enjoying surf bathing, ice cream parties and ‘entertainments’ in their hometown.

History would continue to be made in 1895; two prominent pioneer families would be united when one’s son and the other’s daughter, both former college students, got married and started a family (and lemon ranch) of their own. The easterners who had developed some of the first ranches would sell out (at a handsome profit) and return home, but more would arrive to take their places and continue to advance lemon ranching in Pacific Beach. And ‘cultured ladies’ meeting in their ranch houses would organize the Pacific Beach Reading Club, since renamed the Woman’s Club and still in operation.

To be continued. . .

PB’s First Family

The San Diego Union-Tribune recently published a Life Tribute for Franklin Lockwood ‘Woody’ Barnes, who had passed away in July 2021 at the age of 86. The tribute noted that Woody was born in San Diego but had lived most of his life in Julian, attending the Julian elementary and high schools. His family had operated an apple and pear orchard in Julian since 1906 and had built the Manzanita Ranch store in Wynola. He was very active in the agricultural life of Julian and believed that he was the only one who remembered most of that earlier era. He shared these memories in a 2020 book Woody Barnes – A Farmer’s Life in Julian, compiled by his son Scott.

Woody’s memories of earlier eras and the agricultural life also extended to another local community where his forebears had attended school, operated orchards, and had a store. In fact, his great-grandmother claimed to be the very first resident of that community — Pacific Beach – when she came to help start a new college that opened there in 1888. One great-grandfather was among its first lemon ranchers and owned the lemon packing plant at a time when lemons were the community’s main product. Another great-grandfather was a contractor who built many of the first homes there, including his own.

These pioneers came to Pacific Beach in part so that their children, Woody’s grandparents, could attend the new college. The college closed after a few years, but those former students married and started their own family in Pacific Beach, where Woody’s father was born and his grandfather became the community’s grocer and postmaster. Their days in Pacific Beach were limited, however, and by 1906 the family had relocated to uptown San Diego. Some, including Woody’s father, later moved on to Julian where Woody and his sister Jo grew up.

Although their family had left over a century earlier Woody and Jo were very conscious of their Pacific Beach roots. Both became members of the Pacific Beach Historical Society and have shared family photos and other memorabilia from those days that have enhanced our knowledge of PB’s early history, and their family’s prominent role in it.

Pacific Beach began in 1887 when a group of San Diego businessmen bought most of the land north of Mission Bay (then known as False Bay), drew up a subdivision map, and began selling lots. Their plan was to attract residents by making it the site of San Diego’s first college. The San Diego College of Letters opened in 1888 on a campus where the Pacific Plaza shopping center is now located. There were 37 students in the inaugural class, 15 young ladies and 22 young men, including Woody and Jo’s grandparents Lulo Thorpe and Edward Barnes.

San Diego College of Letters in Pacific Beach (San Diego History Center Photo #9800)

Lulo’s mother, Rose Hartwick Thorpe, was a poet, perhaps the most popular poet of her day, world-famous for the ballad Curfew Must Not Ring Tonight which she had written at the age of 16. The Thorpes had been living in Texas when the promoters of the college invited Mrs. Thorpe to come to Pacific Beach to assist with its creation. Lulo’s father, Edmund Carson (E. C.) Thorpe, had been a carriage maker but in San Diego he joined the real estate boom then underway by becoming a provider of small portable cottages, put together with removable pins rather than nails. Mrs. Thorpe later claimed they became the very first settlers in Pacific Beach when they set up their own portable house on a lot near where the college was being built.

Edward Young (E. Y.) Barnes had come from Nebraska, where his father Franklin Wile (F. W.) Barnes had been a banker before moving to California for his health. They settled in Pacific Beach where Edward and his brother Theodore enrolled in the college. The Barnes family was among the first to build a house in Pacific Beach, at the northwest corner of what are now Lamont and Emerald streets, just across Emerald from the college campus.

Phoebe and Franklin Barnes at their home, with the college buildings, Mission Bay and Point Loma in the background (Barnes family photo)

Pacific Beach, and the college, had been founded during San Diego’s ‘great boom’ when rapid population growth fueled an apparently limitless demand for residential real estate. The developers of Pacific Beach endowed the college with hundreds of building lots with the expectation that they could be sold to fund its operations, but the great boom collapsed in 1888 and despite several auctions complete with a free barbecue lunch few lots were sold and the college closed in 1891. Most of the academic community departed but the Thorpe and Barnes families remained and found that their property on the ‘sunny slope’ in the vicinity of the college campus was ideal for lemon cultivation. The developers of Pacific Beach encouraged this new industry by re-subdividing much of the area into ‘acre lots’ of about 10 acres which were sold to potential lemon ranchers.

The Barnes’ property was included in one of these acre lots, 9.32 acres surrounded by Emerald, Jewell, Diamond and Lamont streets, on which F. W. Barnes planted 600 lemon trees. By 1897 these trees were yielding 1400 boxes of lemons annually (a box contained about 40 lemons and sold for about one dollar). The Thorpes did not get an entire acre lot but did buy the city block across Lamont from the Barnes on which they planted lemons and other fruit trees, and in 1894 E. C. Thorpe built a house there that they named Rosemere Cottage in honor of Mrs. Thorpe. In 1895 E. Y. Barnes built a house at the southwestern corner of his father’s acre lot, the northeast corner of Emerald and Jewell, and named it El Nido, or the nest.

Edward and Lulo Barnes home – El Nido (Barnes family photo)

In July of that year the San Diego Union reported that the most interesting event at Pacific Beach was the marriage of Miss Lulo Thorpe and Edward Y. Barnes, impressively performed at the home of the bride’s parents. According to the Union a lovelier bride could hardly be imagined, and the happy couple were then escorted to their handsome home El Nido, recently built by the groom, which was but one block from both of their parents. A year later the western half of F. W. Barnes’ acre lot, including El Nido and several hundred lemon trees, was transferred to Edward Y. and Lulo Barnes.

E. Y. and Lulo Barnes’ children, Hartwick, Margaret and Franklin, at their Pacific Beach home El Nido. The former college buildings are in the background (Barnes family photo)

The Barnes not only grew lemons on their ranch but were also responsible for handling and shipping much of the local lemon crop. In 1897 a large building which had been built as a dance pavilion at the beach was moved to the corner of Hornblend and Morrell streets, adjacent to the railroad line that ran between San Diego and La Jolla over Balboa Avenue. The building was converted into a lemon curing and packing plant and the railroad company put in a new siding to allow fruit to be shipped directly from its rear doors. Later in the year F. W. Barnes and another rancher purchased the plant and E. Y. Barnes was put in charge of its operation. In December 1897 the Union reported that Barnes & Son had the most commodious packing and curing house in the county and were shipping between 75 and 100 boxes of lemons weekly.

F. W. Barnes was also an enthusiastic promoter of the local lemon business, describing Pacific Beach in an 1898 Union article as the natural home of the lemon, one of the few localities in the whole country where conditions were almost perfect for its successful culture. When the county horticultural society held its quarterly convention that year in Pacific Beach the stage was decorated with ‘festoons’ of lemons and F. W. Barnes gave the featured address on ‘How We Handle Our Lemons’. He was nominated for president of the society for the coming year and declared elected.

F. W. Barnes had also been elected to the San Diego Board of Delegates (a predecessor of San Diego’s city council) in 1897 and in 1900 he was the winning candidate for the 79th State Assembly district, representing the city of San Diego in Sacramento. With the added responsibilities of political office he divested his business interests in Pacific Beach, selling his share of the lemon packing plant in 1901. In 1904 he and Phoebe left Pacific Beach altogether, selling their home and lemon ranch and building a new home at 4th and Upas streets in the uptown area. After three terms as an assemblyman he resigned and was appointed Collector of Customs for the Port of San Diego by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1905.

The E. C. and Rose Hartwick Thorpe home in Pacific Beach – Rosemere Cottage (Barnes family photo)

The Thorpes owned the city block between Diamond, Morrell, Emerald and Lamont streets in Pacific Beach, directly across Lamont from the Barnes’s ten-acre ranch. Although there were lemon trees on the property lemon ranching was not their primary occupation. The 1900 census listed E. C. Thorpe as ‘Contractor and Rancher’ and he had become one of the principal home builders in Pacific Beach and La Jolla. One home he built in 1896 was for the Gridley ranch, just across Diamond Street from the Barnes ranch and about a block from his own property. In an 1896 diary passed down to her great-grandchildren Mrs. Thorpe wrote that her husband ‘Ned’ had secured the contract and started building Mrs. Gridley’s house on January 13. There were rainy days when Ned couldn’t work but on March 11 she noted that house was finished and Ned had gone to San Diego to pay the bills. The Union’s Pacific Beach Notes confirmed on March 15, 1896, that Mrs. Gridley was moving into her new house. The Gridley house stood until 1968 at 1790 Diamond Street (next door to the house I grew up in).

The former Gridley ranch house, built by E. C. Thorpe in 1896, was still standing  in 1968

The Thorpes had also listed their own home for sale in 1896; Mrs. Thorpe’s diary entry for January 8 noted that the advertisement had appeared in the paper for several days. That day’s Union did include an ad for a home, ‘substantial and beautiful, for I built it for myself’, consisting of a 7-room house and the finest, best located 5-acre tract of lemons in the city. However, the house was not sold and the Thorpes remained there for several more years.

Rose Hartwick Thorpe continued to publish poems in literary magazines and to hold ‘recitations’ of her work. One poem, Mission Bay (‘now blue, now gray’), is often cited as the origin of the current name for what was then False Bay. Her husband often joined her performances, assuming the character of ‘Hans’ and affecting the ‘broken English of a Dutchman’ to recite his own poems such as ‘Dot Bacific Peach Flea’ (‘Vot schumps und viggles und bites . . . Und keepen me avake effry nights’). In 1896 the couple went on a six-month tour giving ‘entertainments’ in churches and other meeting halls around the country. Rose Hartwick Thorpe, Phoebe and Lulo Barnes and other local women started the Pacific Beach Reading Club in 1895 and Mrs. Thorpe was elected its first president. Before a clubhouse was built in 1911 meetings were held in members’ homes, often those of the Thorpe and Barnes families. The club, now known as the Pacific Beach Woman’s Club, is still active and its logo, a lemon branch, pays tribute to its lemon-ranching founders.

By 1901 most of Mr. Thorpe’s business was in La Jolla and the Thorpes purchased lots on Girard Avenue and built another home there, Curfew Cottage. In 1902 they transferred Rosemere Cottage and their block of land in Pacific Beach to their daughter Lulo and son-in-law Edward (E. Y.) Barnes. The Barnes and their three children, Hartwick Mitchell (1897), Franklin Lockwood (Woody and Jo’s father, born in 1899) and Margaret (1901), moved the two blocks from El Nido to Rosemere.

E. Y. Barnes had managed operations at the curing and packing plant for several years after its conversion in 1897, shipping carloads of lemons east. When his father sold his interest in the plant in 1901 it closed briefly but at the end of 1901 Barnes & Son rented and reopened it and were soon shipping more carloads to eastern destinations. Later that year E. Y. diversified his business interests by taking over the community’s general store at the northwest corner of Grand Avenue and Lamont Street, and in 1904 he sold the lemon ranch and exited the lemon business entirely. The San Diego Union reported that he would greatly enlarge his store and give his entire attention to it. The Barnes store also served as the community’s post office and E. Y. Barnes became postmaster. In addition, the polling place for municipal elections was Ed Barnes’ store and he was the inspector.

There were less than 200 people living in Pacific Beach at the turn of the twentieth century and their activities, particularly the activities of the prominent and popular Barnes and Thorpe families, were noted in weekly Pacific Beach Notes columns in the local papers. Some of the photos passed down from those days appear to illustrate items that also appeared in these columns. One family photo showed Mr. and Mrs. Thorpe and their daughter Lulo and her three children seated in a vintage automobile (with two other children standing in the back).

Thorpe and Barnes families in E. C. Thorpe’s new Cadillac (Barnes family photo)

Automobiles were making their first appearances in the early years of the century and the Union found it newsworthy to report in July 1903 that Assemblyman F. W. Barnes and E. C. Thorpe, of Pacific Beach, had each purchased a handsome French-make automobile in Los Angeles and rode down in them to their homes, covering the 125 miles in comparatively short time and without mishap. These latest arrivals brought the total number of cars in San Diego to 19. The Union later clarified that the two vehicles were actually Cadillacs and that in view of the popularity of these machines the San Diego Cycle and Arms company had secured the agency for them so that it would no longer be necessary to purchase them in Los Angeles. They cost only $950, were able to make almost any road or hill with perfect ease and could attain a speed of forty miles an hour (the car in the photo was indeed a 1903 Cadillac runabout, the very first Cadillac model, with a single cylinder engine and chain drive). In another photo Mr. Thorpe is apparently making repairs, probably to the chain, while Mrs. Thorpe holds an umbrella.

Although it was said these early Cadillacs could attain a speed of 40 MPH there were few improved roads in the vicinity where such a speed would actually be attainable. Pacific Beach provided an alternative, a hard, flat, miles-long beach which at low tide was hundreds of feet wide, and a September 1903 Pacific Beach Notes column reported that F. W. Barnes and E. C. Thorpe had ‘raced’ their automobiles on the beach. They made the entire length in eight minutes, about 30 miles per hour over the nearly 4-mile distance (in 1912 ‘Wild Bob’ Burman covered a mile course on the same beach in 28 seconds, nearly 130 MPH).

The Evening Tribune reported (in a ‘Newsy Letter from Pacific Beach’ in July 1903) that Mr. E. Y. Barnes had also ordered an automobile from the east, but apparently it hadn’t arrived when another of the Barnes family photos was taken, showing him and his children in a carriage on Emerald Street in front of Rosemere Cottage.

The Barnes and Thorpes may have been responsible for introducing automobiles to Pacific Beach, but cars were not necessarily welcomed there at the time. One Tribune dispatch from Pacific Beach in 1903 noted that the horses didn’t seem to fancy them. Another said that people had given up pleasure driving (i.e., horse and carriage) for fear of the automobile.

May pole celebration at the Barnes’ Pacific Beach home in 1906 (Barnes family photo)

Another century-old family photo captured of a group of children around a May pole in what appears to be the Barnes’ front yard, between Rosemere Cottage and Emerald Street. Although the photo is undated, the San Diego Union’s Pacific Beach Notes column reported on May 4, 1906, that Hartwick Barnes, the little son of Mr. and Mrs. E. Y. Barnes, had entertained sixteen friends with a party, the greatest enjoyment being found in weaving the many colored ribbons into a perfect braid around a May pole, singing appropriate songs while skipping and dancing in and out (the ‘artistic’ pole was then used to test the agility of the boys in climbing). The Union article included the names of those present, who in addition to the Barnes children were from the Hinkle, Richert, Dula, Scripps, Corey and other pioneer Pacific Beach families.

E. Y. and Lulo Barnes’ home at 4th and Upas streets (Barnes family photo)

Hartwick Barnes’ May Day party turned out to be one of the Barnes family’s last appearances in Pacific Beach. In September 1906 the Union reported that Mr. and Mrs. E. Y. Barnes and family had moved into San Diego to superintend the building of their new home there. The new home was just across Upas Street from his parents’ home, at the southeast corner of 4th and Upas, and the Barnes children continued to celebrate May Day there. After relinquishing his retail produce business in Pacific Beach E. Y. Barnes joined Jarvis Doyle to form the Doyle-Barnes wholesale produce company at 326-336 5th Avenue, a warehouse that is now Cerveza Jack’s Gaslamp. He also leased and later bought property in the Pine Hills area of Julian where his son Franklin moved in 1922 and where Franklin’s children Woody and Jo grew up. The home at 4th and Upas streets is still there, although extensively remodeled, and the family still owns Manzanita Ranch, the property in Pine Hills.

Doyle-Barnes wholesale produce warehouse (Barnes family photo)

Back in Pacific Beach, few of the landmarks seen in the Barnes photos are still in existence. The college which had originally attracted the families to the area and where E. Y. and Lulo Barnes had been students closed in 1891. In 1905 it was refurbished and reopened as a resort hotel, the Hotel Balboa. The hotel was also unsuccessful but in 1910 Thomas A. Davis acquired it and founded the San Diego Army and Navy Academy, later Brown Military Academy. In 1923 Davis expanded the academy campus by purchasing what had once been the Barnes lemon ranch on the other side of Emerald Street. The Barnes families’ former homes became residences for academy staff. Col. Davis’ brother, the academy commandant, also purchased the Thorpes’ former home at Lamont and Emerald in 1924 and the Davises’ mother lived there until 1954. That house burned down in 1957 and is now the site of the Lamont Emerald apartments. Two years later the academy itself relocated to a new campus in Glendora and the original college buildings and the former Barnes homes were demolished. The site of F. W. and Phoebe Barnes’ home is now a parking structure for the Plaza condominium complex and E. Y. and Lulo Barnes’ home, El Nido, is an employee parking lot for the Pacific Plaza shopping center.

1938 aerial view of Brown Military Academy in Pacific Beach. The original college buildings, the former homes of the Thorpe and Barnes families and the Gridley house built by E. C. Thorpe were all still standing at the time (San Diego History Center photo #83:14603-1)

Other landmarks associated with the Barnes are also gone. The former dance pavilion moved to Hornblend and Morrell streets and converted to a lemon packing plant, owned by F. W. Barnes and operated by E. Y. Barnes, underwent one more conversion in 1907, this time into a Methodist church. The church operated there until 1922 and the site was then cleared and is now covered with houses and apartments. Ed Barnes’ store and post office at Grand and Lamont was taken over by Clarence Pratt when the Barnes left Pacific Beach. In the mid-1920s Pratt opened a new store and post office two blocks north on Garnet Avenue and the former Barnes store was abandoned. The site of Ed Barnes’ store is now a strip mall.

PB’s Lemon Era 1892-1906

The Pacific Beach lemon packing plant, about 1900. The names of lemon ranchers C. F. Belser and S. Honeycutt (and Honeycutt’s initials, SH) can be seen on some of the boxes (San Diego History Center photo #89_17221)

In 1887 a group of San Diego businessmen acquired most of the property north of Mission Bay (then called False Bay) and founded a community they christened Pacific Beach. Their Pacific Beach Company’s original subdivision map platted the entire area into residential blocks separated by streets (running north and south) and avenues (running east and west), with the widest avenue, Grand, also the route of a railway between downtown San Diego and a depot near the beach. The founders also set aside space for a college campus on what is now Garnet (then College) Avenue, between Jewell and Lamont (then 9th and 11th) streets, which they hoped would attract a nucleus of refined and cultured residents.

Original 1887 map of Pacific Beach

The San Diego College of Letters opened in 1888 and college students and their families were some of the first residents of Pacific Beach. Among the students were Edward and Theodore Barnes, Mary Cogswell, Evangeline and Mabel Rowe and Lulo Thorpe. The Barnes brothers’ parents, Franklin and Phoebe, moved to Pacific Beach in 1889 and bought several lots at the northwest corner of Lamont and Emerald (Vermont) streets, across Emerald from the campus, where they built a house. Dr. Thomas Cogswell was a dentist with a practice in downtown San Diego. He and his wife Elizabeth lived at the northwest corner of today’s Jewell and Diamond (Alabama) streets, a short distance from the college. Mary Rowe, mother of the Rowe sisters, had recently returned from India after her husband, a missionary there, died of typhoid. The Rowes lived in a house on the ocean front at the foot of Garnet. Lulo Thorpe’s mother was the then-famous poet Rose Hartwick Thorpe who had come to Pacific Beach to help establish the college. Lulo’s father, E. C. Thorpe, was a carpenter and building contractor.

Phoebe and Franklin Barnes at home with the college buildings behind them and Mission Bay and Point Loma in the distance

As an inducement to locate in Pacific Beach the founders had endowed the college with a number of city lots to be sold to finance its construction and administration. However, 1888 turned out to be the end of San Diego’s ‘great boom’ and despite several auctions held on the college campus few lots were sold. Unable to pay the architect’s construction bill the college closed in 1891 and most of the faculty and students moved away. With the departure of many residents and downturn in the residential real estate market the Pacific Beach Company reoriented its sales toward larger plots of land suitable for agrarian uses. An amended subdivision map was drawn up which eliminated many of the streets and avenues north of Diamond Street and south of Reed Avenue and transformed the former city blocks in these areas into ‘acre lots’ of about 10 acres. The amended map was recorded in January 1892 as map 697 (the numbered streets and state-themed avenues were renamed in 1900 to avoid conflicts with other numbered and state-themed streets in the city).

Map 697 – Filed January 1892

Writing for the San Diego Union in 1896, E. C. Thorpe recalled that by 1891 only three or four families remained from the college community but that the tract had then been placed upon the market as acreage property and in a few weeks a force of workmen were clearing the first hundred acres preparatory to planting lemon orchards — ‘Rabbits and rattlesnakes were driven back to mesa and canyon and the sunny southern slopes were soon clothed in fragrant lemon foliage’. The acre lots were sold for $100 an acre and one of the first to be sold was purchased by Franklin Barnes. Map 697 had incorporated his 8 lots at the corner of Lamont and Emerald into a larger acre lot 64, 9.3 acres enclosed by Lamont, Emerald, Jewell and Diamond streets, and in January 1892 he acquired the entire acre lot for $930. Mary Rowe bought acre lot 49, 8.6 acres west of Lamont Street between Diamond and Chalcedony (Idaho) streets, in April 1892 for $860. In 1893 she had her house moved from the ocean front to a location on her lemon ranch later to become Missouri Street. The Cogswells also acquired property for a lemon ranch, purchasing the western half of acre lot 48, 5.45 acres across Jewell Street from their home, for $545.

Altogether about a dozen purchases of acre lots on the ‘sunny slopes’ north of the college campus were recorded in the first half of 1892. Ida Snyder acquired acre lot 20, north of Beryl (Georgia) and east of where Lamont runs today (streets did not extend north of Beryl on Map 697).  According to the Union Miss Snyder, of Omaha, immediately made arrangements to have her property put out to lemons. A contiguous group of 3 acre lots, lots 33, 34 and 50, which met at Chalcedony and Lamont streets, were sold to R. C. Wilson and G. M. D. Bowers from Tennessee in February. The Union reported that Wilson and Bowers, who had been business partners in Tennessee, were having 4,000 feet of water pipe laid over their thirty acre tract and that the property was to be put into lemons in the next few weeks. They also built houses on their properties, the Bowers family on acre lot 34, west of Lamont Street in 1892 and the Wilsons on lot 33, east of Lamont, in 1893. Wilson and Bowers also later purchased acre lot 51, north of Diamond and west of Noyes (13th) streets. Acre lots 19, 35, 36, 47 and the east half of acre lot 48, all north of Diamond Street, were also sold in the first half of 1892.

South of Reed Avenue, acre lot 61 was acquired in April 1892 by C. H. Raiter, a banker from Minnesota who had spent the winter in Pacific Beach. Mr. Raiter returned to Minnesota but left instructions to have his ten-acre tract put equally into lemons and oranges and to reserve a good building site. The property was to be piped, fenced and broken and planted as soon as possible. The Raiters never did build on their ranch but did add the adjoining acre lot 62 in 1894.

The acre lots were located in what were then undeveloped outlying areas of Pacific Beach but much of the land in more central areas of the community was also undeveloped and some city blocks in these areas were also turned into lemon ranches. The Thorpes purchased block 167, across Lamont Street from the Barnes ranch, in February 1892 for $466 or $150 an acre. Sterling and Nancy Honeycutt bought lot 205, across Lamont from the college buildings and the four blocks around the intersection of Hornblend and Kendall streets in 1893 for a lemon ranch. J. L. Holliday acquired a pair of adjacent blocks between Garnet Avenue and Ingraham (then Broadway), Emerald and Jewell streets, blocks 183 and 202, and set them to lemons in 1895. The Holliday lemon ranch was sold to Nathan Manning in 1898.

Lemon ranches in blocks 216 (left) and 202 (right) are at opposite corners of Garnet Avenue and Jewell Street about 1904 in this photo from the college buildings. The community’s church and schoolhouse (with bell tower) are just beyond the intersection. (San Diego History Center #266)

E. C. Thorpe reported from Pacific Beach in 1894 that ‘Lemons do nicely here, and Pacific Beach expects much from its future lemon culture’. He noted that Pacific Beach had a great diversity of soil and that the sandy soil nearer the bay was not considered as valuable as the heavier soil on higher lands where the trees make the best growth and require less water. In March 1894 Frank Marshall of Kansas City bought two ten-acre lots in these higher lands, paying $2150 or $150 an acre for acre lots 30 and 53, 8.6 acres each between Diamond and Beryl and east of Olney (14th) Street. According to the San Diego Union he had plowed, piped and planted 1400 lemon trees and a hedge of Monterey cypress would be set out all around his land as a windbreak. He had returned to Kansas City but would come back in the fall with his brother and each would build a handsome residence. In his absence the ranch would be managed by Edward Barnes.

The Marshall lemon ranch in acre lots 53 and 30, seen from the east (San Diego History Center photo #283)

Mr. Marshall did not come back in the fall of 1894 but did return in June 1895 and built a handsome residence on acre lot 30 where he lived with his wife May. His brother, T. B. Marshall, finally arrived in Pacific Beach in January 1895 and in April moved into a handsome residence on acre lot 53 that the Union’s correspondent called the ‘finest in our colony’. Frank Marshall’s brother-in-law Victor Hinkle also followed in December 1895 — Carrie Hinkle was May Marshall’s sister; the couples had been married on the same day in 1889. In February 1896 the Hinkles purchased acre lot 36, 10.2 acres lying between Chalcedony, Ingraham, Beryl and Jewell streets, paying Alzora Haight $2000 or nearly $200 an acre for what was then a developed lemon ranch. Although the Haights had owned acre lot 36 since 1892 they had ‘camped’ on the property rather than building a house and the Hinkles had another fine residence built there in 1896.

The Hinkle house, now at 1576 Law Street

In 1895 the Wilson and Bowers families decided to move back to Tennessee and put the four acre lots of their lemon ranch up for sale. The eastern 3.5 acres of lot 51 had been sold for $500 in 1894 but between September and November of 1895 they sold lot 33 to Ozora Stearns and lot 34 to William Davis for $5500 each, lot 50 to Lewis and Elizabeth Coffeen for $3000 and the western five acres of lot 51 to B. F. Colvin for $1000 (lots 33 and 34 each came with houses while lots 50 and 51 were unimproved). The Coffeens had a house built on acre lot 50 and had moved in by December but when they were compelled to return east for business reasons in 1897 their 10 acres in bearing lemons with water under pressure and a 6 room house was sold to Maj. William and Henrietta Hall.

The Franklin Barnes family lived in a house at Lamont and Emerald streets, at the southeast corner of their lemon ranch in acre lot 64. In 1895 their son Edward built another house at the southwest corner of lot 64, the corner of Jewell and Emerald, which he named El Nido (the nest). Also in 1895, E. C. Thorpe and his family moved into the house he built on block 167, across Lamont from the Barnes and named Rosemere Cottage for his wife Rose Hartwick Thorpe. In July 1895 the Thorpes’ daughter Lulo and Edward Barnes were married at Rosemere and moved the two blocks west to El Nido. In 1896 ownership of El Nido and the west half of acre lot 64, 4.5 acres, was transferred to Edward and Lulo Barnes.

Edward and Lulo Barnes home in acre lot 64 – El Nido

Also in 1896, Edward Barnes built the first lemon curing house in Pacific Beach. Tree-ripened lemons tended to be too large and were graded down by commercial buyers. Better grades and prices could be obtained by picking the lemons before they were fully grown, and still green, then ‘curing’ them for 30 – 60 days until they reached a lemon-yellow color. Cured lemons not only had a more acceptable and uniform appearance but also thinner rinds and better keeping qualities. In January 1897 the San Diego Union reported that Mr. Barnes had picked 72 boxes of lemons in December alone from 280 4-year-old trees and that for the year his yield had been 1,200 boxes, netting $1 per box (a box held about 40 pounds of lemons).

In 1888 the Pacific Beach Company had built a hotel and dance pavilion near the railroad depot at the foot of Grand Avenue but neither had been very successful. In 1896 they were sold to Sterling Honeycutt with the provision that they be moved to property he had purchased in block 239, the south side of Hornblend between Lamont and Morrell streets and adjacent to his lemon ranch. The move was completed in early 1897; the hotel was set down on the southeast corner of Hornblend and Lamont streets and the pavilion on the southwest corner of Hornblend and Morrell. At the time the railroad between Pacific Beach and downtown San Diego ran over Grand Avenue from the depot near the beach to Lamont Street, where it turned toward the northeast on what is now Balboa Avenue, passing close to the new location of the pavilion (the raised ‘island’ in the center of these streets was once the railroad right of way). Mr. Honeycutt and other lemon ranchers including Franklin Barnes and Frank Marshall turned the pavilion into a lemon curing and packing house and the railroad added a siding where boxcars could be parked while being loaded with boxes of lemons. On August 13, 1897, the Evening Tribune reported that Pacific Beach reached an important event in its history when the first full carload of lemons loaded in Pacific Beach was shipped east, directly to Duluth. Later in 1897 Honeycutt sold the property, with the ‘most commodious packing and curing house in the county’, to Barnes and Marshall. Edward Barnes was placed in charge of packing and shipping and initially shipped from 75 to 100 boxes of lemons weekly.

The packing plant in the former dance pavilion building is the large structure in the center of this photo. The large structure on the right is the hotel building. Left of the packing plant is the Honeycutt home at the corner of Garnet and Lamont with his former lemon orchard in blocks 205 (left) and 215 (right) on either side. Taken from the college building about 1904 (SDHC #23535)

In February 1898 Franklin Barnes reported that there were about 25,000 lemon trees in bearing and that during 1897 he had picked 1,400 boxes from 600 trees and was then picking from the same trees 200 boxes per month. The leading varieties were Lisbon, Villa Franca and Eureka and about 7,000 boxes were shipped in the last year. Mr. Barnes was also a featured speaker when the County Horticultural Society met in October 1898 at Stough Hall, a former college building and then the principal meeting place in Pacific Beach (the front of the stage had been very prettily decorated with festoons of lemons). He told the delegates that his expenses for cultivation and water had averaged $200 a year for five years and that the orchard had paid over $1000 the previous year.

Many participants in the Pacific Beach lemon industry were women. Mary Rowe, Martha Dunn Corey and Ida Snyder had been among the first purchasers of acre lots in 1892. The San Diego Union noted in 1897 that Mrs. Rowe’s ranch had been developed from the raw condition to one now valued at $9000 and that the ladies of Pacific Beach were justly proud of their ranches. William Davis, who purchased the lemon ranch on acre lot 34 in 1895, was a mining engineer who spent much of his time at the Arizona mines leaving the ranch in the hands of his sister Louise. The Union reported in June 1896 that Miss Davis had shipped 84 boxes of choice lemons from Ondawa ranch (many ranchers in Pacific Beach gave their ranches names). Ozora Stearns had purchased the ranch in acre lot 33 in 1895 but he died in 1896 leaving it to his widow Sarah. Their eldest daughter married in 1897 and her husband John Esden took over operation of the lemon ranch, making improvements including what the Union called an ‘up-to-date curing house’. J. D. Esden & Co. became one of the largest lemon producers in Pacific Beach, shipping carloads of lemons in 1898. When acre lot 33 was sold again in 1899 the buyer was also a woman, Carrie Belser Linck, and her son Charles Belser assumed management of the ranch and the curing and packing operation.

Location of Pacific Beach lemon ranches in 1900. 2-digit numbers represent acre lots and 3-digit numbers are city blocks.

Maj. William Hall, who had acquired the lemon ranch in acre lot 50 in 1897, was the author of the San Diego Union’s New Year’s Day report from Pacific Beach in 1900. According to Maj. Hall about three hundred acres of lemon groves from three to seven years old and from 2 ½ to 10 acres were clustered at the center of this beautiful spot, dotted here and there with fine residences with well kept yards, beautiful with every variety of flowers and in bloom all year round. The Pacific Beach lemon groves were not only attractive but productive; during the past year thirty carloads of lemons (and two of oranges) had been raised and shipped (a carload was about 600 boxes, or twelve tons of lemons). A few months later, in July 1900, Maj. Hall profited by selling a portion of his investment in this beautiful spot, the north half of acre lot 50, ‘with 12 rows of trees running east and west’, to Alfred and Margaret Roxburgh for $2500. After a few years living in houses on neighboring lemon ranches the Roxburghs built a home on their own ranch in 1904, described by the Evening Tribune as both substantial and artistic looking, being built largely of stone.

An enumerator for the United States census visited Pacific Beach in June 1900 and counted a total of 54 dwellings and 185 residents. For the ‘head of the family’ in each of these dwellings the ‘occupation, trade or profession’ column listed twelve as ‘Lemon Rancher’ (or ‘L. Rancher’) and two more as ‘L. Packer and Rancher’ (F. W. and E. Y. Barnes). Lemon rancher Francis Manning was listed as ‘Carpenter and Rancher’ and E. C. Thorpe was a ‘Contractor and Rancher’. Dentist Thomas Cogswell and Dr. Martha Dunn Corey were both listed as ‘Physician’, but both also owned lemon ranches. Some family heads listed as ‘Rancher’ (Gridley), ‘Farmer’ (Williams) or ‘Farming’ (Hodges) and some with no occupation listed (Conover) were also actually lemon growers. Two other heads were listed as working in packing houses. Other family members and lodgers in these dwellings included a packing house laborer and farm laborers and farm help, some of whom presumably labored or helped on lemon ranches. Altogether at least 23 of the 54 households counted in the 1900 census in Pacific Beach were involved in the lemon business.

1900 may have been the lemon industry’s best year in Pacific Beach. Reports from Pacific Beach in the Evening Tribune invariably described the activities of lemon ranchers and packers in superlative terms. Belser and Co. lemon packers were doing a land office business, shipping cars east at the rate of two a week. F. W. Barnes and Son shipped two carloads of lemons one week. The price of lemons has reached a point where growers will soon be wearing diamonds and saying ‘ither and nither’. However, some growers apparently were not as convinced about the future of the lemon business. The Snyder lemon orchard was for sale at less than half cost, Maj. Hall had sold half of his ranch to the Roxburghs and Sterling Honeycutt sold one of his five-acre lemon ranches to Mr. McConnell. In December 1900 Frank Marshall sold his ranch in acre lot 30 and also his half interest in the packing house at the former pavilion to R. M. Baker.

Mr. Baker continued his acquisitions of lemon properties in 1901. In January he bought out Franklin Barnes’ half interest to become sole owner of the packing house (Barnes had been elected to the California state assembly and took office on January 1). In March 1901 the news was that the packing house had been running full handed since it changed ownership and was handling lemons by the ton as the lemon trees were bearing wonderfully; a dozen carloads were packed waiting for cars. Mr. Baker also bought the other Marshall lemon ranch on acre lot 53 and the southern half of Maj. Hall’s ranch in acre lot 50.

Although the lemon trees were ‘bearing wonderfully’ the Tribune also noted that the price of lemons stayed in the depth because of cold weather in the east and importation of foreign lemons which, in the words of its correspondent, were ‘loaded with the germs of bubonic plague and delirium tremens’. In July they were selling for 2¢ a pound, which would be about 80¢ for a 40 pound box, down from $1 a box in 1896. The turnover of the ownership in lemon ranches continued into 1902 as the Raiters sold their ranch in acre lots 61 and 62 in April and the Gridley five-acre lemon ranch on the east half of acre lot 48 was sold to ‘eastern people’ for $5500 in July. Still, the Baker packing house was shipping two cars a week and the Tribune added that a class in physical culture had been started that would get the muscles in fine shape for picking lemons. One grower was trying out a new market, paying $5 a box freight in advance to ship lemons to the Klondike. The papers speculated that he would need to get a good-sized nugget for every lemon shipped. Edward Barnes was trying out a new crop, putting out several thousand tomato plants on the old Snyder ranch on the hill.

The packing house was still running full-handed in 1903 and the February and March crop of lemons were said to be simply immense; Mr. Baker had picked from his lower ten-acre ranch 1600 boxes at 40 pounds a box or 64,000 pounds of lemons, which the Union called the record picking off a ten-acre ranch so far (Baker’s lower ranch, presumably meaning in elevation, was acre lot 53). Recent rains had made the fishing in False (Mission) Bay very good and ‘that attraction was keeping anglers busy when not employed in the orchards’. Still, ‘lemon prices not all that could be wished for’ and in November 1903 Mr. Baker sold the packing house to Sterling Honeycutt. The new packing house firm, Honeycutt & Pike, was doing business at the Honeycutt Hotel building and had shipped a carload of lemons to Kansas City.

The lemon business that had sustained Pacific Beach for the decade after the college failed in 1891 continued to decrease after 1903. Markets for lemons were mostly in the East where lemons from foreign sources, particularly Sicily, could often be delivered at lower cost and undercut growers on the west coast. In Pacific Beach the diminished profits from lemon cultivation also coincided with a resurgence of residential development, providing an incentive for lemon ranchers to turn their acreage property back into building lots or to sell it to real estate operators. One major operator, Folsom Bros. Co., had acquired much of Pacific Beach in 1903 and implemented improvements like grading streets and pouring concrete sidewalks to stimulate sales to potential home buyers. Folsom Bros. also purchased and refurbished the college and reopened it as a resort hotel, the Hotel Balboa. There were persistent rumors that the steam railroad would be upgraded to a fast electric line, improving access to downtown San Diego (in 1907 the route was shortened and straightened to run over today’s Grand instead of Balboa Avenue east of Lamont Street, but it was never electrified).

Sterling Honeycutt was one lemon rancher who made a successful transition into the real estate business. His lemon ranch had been located on the four city blocks around the intersection of Hornblend and Kendall streets. In 1901 he sold block 216, north of Hornblend and west of Kendall, and by 1904 several houses had been built on the north side of Hornblend Street in this block. In 1903 Honeycutt also sold block 238, south of Hornblend and east of Kendall, to William Pike and Pike built his home on the south side of Hornblend. In 1904 Honeycutt sold Pike block 237, south of Hornblend and west of Kendall, and also sold several lots in block 215, north of Hornblend and east of Kendall, where more houses were built along Hornblend. In less than five years Hornblend Street went from lemon ranch to the first residential neighborhood in Pacific Beach, and some of these first homes can still be seen. In 1905 Pike sold the western quarter of block 237 to Charles Boesch and in 1906 Boesch built the house at the southwest corner of his property, Grand Avenue and Jewell Street, that is still standing and was restored in 2021.

Honeycutt’s brother-in-law W. P. Parmenter and the Parmenters’ sons-in-law Charles and Frank McCrary moved to Pacific Beach in 1903 and were also involved in making former lemon ranches into residential homesites. In December 1903 Frank McCrary purchased Edward and Lulo Barnes’ lemon ranch and their home, El Nido, on the west half of acre lot 64. Edward Barnes had opened a store at the corner of Grand Avenue and Lamont Street and had transitioned from the lemon business to storekeeping; his family had moved into the Thorpes’ home on block 167 after the Thorpes moved to La Jolla where E. C. Thorpe was busy building houses (in 1906 the Edward Barnes family moved again, leaving Pacific Beach for 4th and Upas streets in San Diego where Assemblyman Franklin Barnes had moved the previous year).

Parmenter and Charles McCrary also acquired block 213, the lemon ranch of John Berkebile between Garnet Avenue and Noyes, Hornblend and Morrell streets. Parmenter sold the north half to Madie Arnott Barr, another major Pacific Beach real estate operator, and McCrary sold the south half to H. J. Breese, who in 1904 built the home still standing at the northeast corner of Morrell and Hornblend (in the 1920s this property became the site of H. K. W. Kumm’s passion fruit ranch). Also in 1904, Parmenter and Frank McCrary purchased acre lot 20, formerly the Snyder lemon ranch, northeast of Lamont and Beryl streets. They passed it on to Honeycutt who in 1906 had it subdivided, returning it to its original configuration as blocks 53 and 66 of Pacific Beach. In 1907 Andrew and Ella MacFarland bought corner lots in block 66, at Lamont and Beryl streets, and built the classical revival home still there today.

Former lemon ranches on acre lots 35 and 34 were also re-subdivided into city blocks with their original block numbers. The Scott brothers were from England and since 1895 had grown lemons on acre lot 35, between Chalcedony, Jewell, Beryl and Kendall streets (they also had a lemon ranch in Chula Vista) and they subdivided it as blocks 89 and 106 of Pacific Beach (and Kendall and Law streets) in 1904. Acre lot 34 had been part of WIlson and Bowers’ original lemon ranch and had since been owned by the Davis, Jowett and Boycott families and, since 1903 the Mannys. On New Year’s Day in 1907 an advertisement appeared in the San Diego Union for an elegant Pacific Beach residence and also lots in the choicest residential location of Pacific Beach, with fine fruit trees and water on each lot, all in acre lot 34. The entire acre lot was purchased four days later by Robert Ravenscroft and in October 1907 Ravenscroft had it subdivided as blocks 90 and 105 of Pacific Beach (and an 80-foot strip between them for Law Street). After Mary Rowe sold her lemon ranch on acre lot 49 to John and Julia Hauser in 1903 the Hausers also subdivided it into two blocks identical to what had appeared on the original 1887 Pacific Beach map. The street between the two blocks was even derived from the original map’s Missouri Avenue. However, their subdivision was officially recorded in 1904 as Hausers Subdivision of Acre Lot 49.

Other acre lots were not subdivided but instead were sold off piecemeal as homesites. In 1906 Sterling Honeycutt bought the east half of acre lot 48, excepting the southeastern corner where E. C. Thorpe had built a ranch house for Orrin and Fannie Gridley in 1896. The Gridleys had left in 1902 and their five-acre lemon ranch had since been owned by J. W. Stump. Strips of land were reserved and dedicated to the city for Missouri Street and two alleys and the remainder divided into parcels of various sizes for building lots. The southeast corner lot and house was offered for sale in 1907 for $4000. That house stood at 1790 Diamond Street (next door to where I grew up) until it was demolished in 1968.

The former Gridley ranch house on acre lot 48 in 1968

Most of acre lot 50 was also never subdivided and lots there are still described in terms like the east 50 feet of the west 150 feet of the south 135 feet of acre lot 50. A strip of land 52 feet wide between the northern and southern portions of the lot was granted to the city in 1916 for an extension of Missouri Street. The portion on the south side of Chalcedony Street was subdivided as Picard Terrace in 1950.

In 1904 Estes and Margaret Layman, from Des Moines, Iowa, paid $15,000 for the lemon ranch in acre lot 33 (and changed its name to Seniomsed, Des Moines spelled backwards). This ranch had always been one of the most productive in Pacific Beach and the Laymans continued that legacy, at least for a few more years. In 1906 the Union reported that Mrs. Layman was ‘busy as a bee in a tar barrel’, picking, packing and shipping a carload of lemons (to Des Moines). However, that carload of lemons may have been the last shipped from Pacific Beach, and later that year the landmark pavilion building which had been the main lemon packing plant since 1897 was closed. Many of the lemon ranchers were Methodists and their congregation had outgrown the ‘little chapel’ then in use. Sterling Honeycutt was a founding member of the Methodist church and he also owned the packing plant, which had been experiencing a decline in business. In August 1906 he donated the building and the five lots surrounding it to the church under the condition that $2000 should be raised to cover the necessary alterations. By September the news was that the great building known for so long as the packing house was rapidly assuming the graceful lines and sober colors of a church. The handsome new structure was dedicated in February 1907.

Transition of the former lemon ranches into housing developments occurred over many decades and was not complete until the 1950s, and a few continued with agrarian activities in intervening years. Victor Hinkle turned acre lot 36 into a general farm and also specialized in beekeeping. The former ranch houses in acre lots 33 and 50 were rented to Japanese families who operated truck farms on the fertile land there. Others were subdivided when Pacific Beach experienced periods of population growth in the 1920s and again in the 1940s. Kendrick’s subdivision of acre lot 47 occurred in 1925, and Pacific Pines on acre lots 61 and 62 and C. M. Doty’s Addition on acre lot 19 were subdivided in 1926. Portions of acre lot 36 became Chalcedony Terrace and Chalcedony Terrace Addition in 1947, although the portion that actually fronts on Chalcedony was not included and lots there are still described as portions of acre lot 36. 1947 was also the year that acre lot 33 became part of the Lamont Terrace development. In 1941 most of Pacific Beach east of Olney Street, including the former Marshall and Baker ranches in acre lots 30 and 53, was expropriated by the federal government for the Bayview Terrace housing project. Most of this property remains under government ownership, now known as the Admiral Hartman Community.

In 1910 the census enumerator again made the rounds of Pacific Beach. This time there were more than twice as many residents counted but none mentioned lemons in their occupation, trade or industry, or in the general nature of their industry or business. Instead, the pendulum had swung decidedly from lemon ranching toward residential development. Ten residents were described as real estate agents, including Sterling Honeycutt, eleven listed contractor, carpenter or stonemason as their trade, and building or houses as the general nature of their business, and another five were concrete or cement workers in the ‘street’ business. Of the few former lemon ranchers still living on their ranches Victor Hinkle was listed as a farmer and E. H. Layman as ‘own income’.

The 1910 census was held in April; just a few months later, in November 1910, Capt. Thomas A. Davis leased the Hotel Balboa and turned the former college campus back into an educational institution, this time as a military academy. Beginning with 13 cadets and himself as the only instructor Capt. Davis’ San Diego Army and Navy Academy grew steadily. In 1922 he expanded the campus into the former lemon ranches in acre lot 64 to the north and blocks 183 and 202 to the west for athletic fields and a parade ground. The former homes of the Franklin and Edward Barnes families were put to use as residences for academy staff. In 1924 Davis’ brother John also purchased the former Thorpe home across Lamont Street in block 167 and the Davis’ mother lived there into the 1950s. The academy, later called Brown Military Academy, also survived into the 1950s until it too declined and was turned into a shopping center.

Aerial view of Pacific Beach about 1938. The locations of former lemon ranches in acre lots (red) and city blocks (blue) are outlined. Arrows point to ranch houses still standing at the time. The former college campus was then occupied by Brown Military Academy. Houses line Hornblend Street, foreground, also a former lemon ranch (San Diego History Center photo #83:14603-1)

The lemon trees and packing plant have been gone for over a century but there are still signs of the lemon era to be found in Pacific Beach. On what was once Wilson and Bowers’ lemon ranch around the corner of Chalcedony and Lamont streets the Bowers’ original house on acre lot 34, built in 1892, is still standing at 1860 Law Street (although it was moved from its original location on the other side of Law in 1912). In acre lot 50, also once part of the Wilson and Bowers ranch, the house built by the Coffeens in 1895 remains at 1932 Diamond and the Roxburghs’ home from 1904 is on the alley at 4775 Lamont. When acre lot 33 was cleared in 1947 to make way for the Lamont Terrace development the only thing spared from the former Wilson ranch house there was the Moreton Bay fig tree still growing between 1904 and 1922 Law. A Moreton Bay fig spared by developers of the Bayview Terrace (1941) and Capehart (1960) housing projects is also the only sign of Frank Marshall’s ranch in acre lot 30, now the corner of Chalcedony and Donaldson Drive. A palm tree between apartments at 1828-1840½ Missouri once stood in front of Mrs. Rowe’s ranch house in acre lot 49. And the house built by the Hinkles on acre lot 36 in 1896 was moved in 1926 across Ingraham Street to where it now stands at 1576 Law Street.

The lemon era in Pacific Beach is also recalled in less tangible forms. In 1895 a group of women including Rose Hartwick Thorpe, Phoebe Barnes and Elizabeth Cogswell formed the Pacific Beach Reading Club. The club was initially led by Mrs. Thorpe and met at the homes of club members, most of which were lemon ranches at the time. After Sterling Honeycutt sold a portion of his lemon ranch to William Pike and Mr. Pike sold the western quarter of his portion to Charles Boesch, Mr. Pike and Mr. Boesch, whose wives were both Reading Club members, donated the two lots on Hornblend Street where their properties met for a clubhouse. Workers donated free labor, Mr. Pike, the former lemon packer, supervised construction, and the clubhouse had its formal ‘housewarming’ in October 1911. Club members had always been women and it became known as the Pacific Beach Woman’s Club, a name that was officially adopted in 1929. The club is still active, although the lemon-yellow clubhouse at 1721 Hornblend was sold in 2021, and the heritage of its lemon-ranching founders is commemorated in its lemon-themed website.

Marshalls and Hinkles in PB

The Hinkle house, built in 1896 on a lemon ranch a half-block to the east and moved to 1576 Law Street in 1926

On September 16, 1889, two sisters appeared before a notary in Kansas City, Missouri, to sign applications for marriage licenses. Application No. 2511 was filled out for May E. Goff, who solemnly swore that she was of the age of 24 years, single and unmarried, and could lawfully contract and be joined in marriage to Frank J. Marshall, who was also 24, single and unmarried. Application No. 2512 was for Carrie Goff, who swore she was 22, single and unmarried, and could lawfully marry Victor A. Hinkle, who was 32 years of age. The brides were stenographers or ‘typewriters’, living in Kansas City with their widowed mother. The grooms were both salesmen for the Mosler Safe Company, where Frank’s older brother Thomas B. Marshall was manager.

In March 1894 the San Diego Union reported that Frank J. Marshall of Kansas City had bought two ten-acre blocks in Pacific Beach and had them plowed, piped and planted to trees; 1400 lemon trees and also prune, orange, peach, pear and apricot trees. A hedge of Monterey cypress would also be set out all around his land. Mr. Marshall would be returning to Kansas City in April but would return to Pacific Beach early next fall. He would bring his brother with him and each would build a handsome residence. The Union explained that Mr. Marshall had come from Kansas City to Los Angeles and wrote to a San Diego resident for information regarding climate, land, etc. He was advised to come and see for himself and was fully satisfied with what he saw in Pacific Beach.

The ‘ten-acre blocks’ that Frank Marshall purchased in February 1894 were laid out in the amended Pacific Beach subdivision map of 1892, on which the area north of the College Campus (now Pacific Plaza) and Alabama Avenue (now Diamond Street) had been divided into ‘acre lots’ of about 10 acres each, intended for agriculture. Mr. Marshall had paid $2150, or $125 an acre, for acre lots 30 and 53 (which were actually 8.6 acres each). On the map these lots were between 14th (now Olney) and the northern projection of 15th (Pendleton) streets and were separated by Idaho Avenue (Chalcedony Street), with lot 30 extending north to Georgia Avenue (Beryl Street) and lot 53 south to Alabama (Diamond; although the area is now part of the Admiral Hartman Community, where this street no longer exists).

In 1895 the San Diego Directory contained only 37 listings in Pacific Beach, half of whom were described as farmers or ranchers, many of them growing lemons on ranches developed on the acre lots. Lemon ranching was the principal economic activity in Pacific Beach and the Union’s weekly column of news from Pacific Beach regularly reported on developments affecting the lemon business. In February 1895 the column announced that the Marshalls, who owned twenty acres of fine lemon ranch at this place, were preparing to come to California and build on their ranch and make their homes there. In May the news was that the Marshalls expected to have their arrangements completed for removal to this place shortly. Their 20-acre ranch was looking well. They arrived in Pacific Beach in June and the Union reported that they had rented the Wilson house until they could build on their lemon ranch; ‘They come fully equipped for business and pleasure, having brought with them no less than four vehicles, and an abundance of home-making necessities’.

The Marshall lemon ranch on acre lots 53 and 30 of Pacific Beach from the east (San Diego History Center Photo #283)

The Wilson house was the lemon ranch house on Acre Lot 33, a few blocks west of the Marshalls’ property, but the Marshalls didn’t occupy it for long. In September 1895 the Union reported that Mr. Marshall’s new house made a fine showing against the hills (and that Gen. Stearns, an ex-United States senator, had purchased the Wilson place). A few weeks later the paper reported that the Marshalls were moving into their new house and added that Mr. Marshall’s brother and brother-in-law were making arrangements to come to California and would locate at this place. The two families expected to reach Pacific Beach before winter.

Mr. Marshall’s brother arrived in January 1896; according to the San Diego Union T. B. Marshall and family of Kansas City had arrived from the east and were at the Horton House hotel downtown. The February 1, 1896, Union announced that T. B. Marshall was building on his ten-acre tract. Construction must have been rapid because by February 24 the paper noted that several artistic cottages had been built at this place during the year but the architecture of T. B. Marshall’s new house was a decided change. In April the report was that T. B. Marshall had moved his family into his new residence and a month later that Mr. T. B. Marshall’s new home was ‘the finest in our colony’. Photos of house, located at the corner of Olney and Diamond streets, do indicate that the architecture was a decided change from the plain frame houses on other lemon ranches at the time, such as the one built in 1892 on acre lot 34 and still standing at 1860 Law Street. The T. B. Marshall home included Queen Anne-style design features like bay windows and a square tower topped with a decorative widow’s walk.

Thomas B. Marshall home on acre lot 53 (Pacific Beach Historical Society Photo)

Frank Marshall’s brother-in-law, Victor Hinkle, with his wife Carrie, May Marshall’s sister, were the other family that had made arrangements to locate at ‘this place’ and expected to arrive before winter. In December 1895 the Union reported that Mr. and Mrs. Hinkle had moved into the Will Wagner cottage (on Diamond Street a half block west of where the T. B. Marshall house would be built). In February 1896 the Hinkles purchased acre lot 36, 10.2 acres lying between what today are Chalcedony, Ingraham, Beryl and Jewell streets, paying Alzora Haight $2000 or nearly $200 an acre for a developed lemon ranch. Acre lot 36 had originally been purchased by George Tutton in January 1892 but had been owned by Mr. and Mrs. Haight since September 1892. The Haights apparently never built a home on their property; a news item from 1894 reported that Mr. Haight and family had been ‘camping’ on their ten-acre ranch. In May 1896 the news was that Mr. Hinkle, who had bought the Tutton ten acres set to lemons, was building a fine residence there. Early photos show that the architecture of the Hinkles’ new residence was also in the Queen Anne style of the T. B. Marshall home, including a square tower with a decorative widow’s walk.

Frank and Thomas Marshall were joined in Pacific Beach by another brother later in 1896 when Clifford Marshall and his wife took up residence in Martha Dunn Corey’s cottage, also on Diamond Street in the block west of the new T. B. Marshall home. Like most Pacific Beach residents, the extended Marshall family and the Hinkles joined the Presbyterian Church and participated in church and community activities. When Miss Marian Thresher, the soprano in the church choir, departed for Jamul for a year in November 1896 Mrs. Clifford Marshall gave her a farewell party and her place in the choir was taken by Mrs. Hinkle (Miss Thresher was a former student at the San Diego College of Letters in Pacific Beach). Choir practice was held every Saturday afternoon at Mrs. Clifford Marshall’s residence.

Frank Marshall had purchased two Pacific Beach acre lots and had them plowed, piped and planted to trees while he returned to Kansas City, leaving the ranch in charge of Ed Barnes, another local lemon rancher (and another former College of Letters student). It was more than a year later that Frank and his brother Thomas moved from Kansas City with their families and built impressive homes on the ranch, and still much of their time was spent away from Pacific Beach, leaving day-to-day operations of the lemon ranch to others. In April 1897 the local news was that T. B. Marshall and family had returned to their beautiful home and young lemon grove after a prolonged stay in Los Angeles. They had also come down from Los Angeles to spend the holidays at their Manjessa ranch (presumably named for their two daughters, Maude, or Mandy, and Jessie). In July 1897 the news was that T. B. Marshall and family were to leave for Los Angeles for a year and in January 1898 Mr. Dorst and wife moved into T. B. Marshall’s elegantly furnished house. In April and again in July 1899 T. B. Marshall spent a few days in Pacific Beach looking after his interests before returning to Los Angeles, where he was listed in the 1900 census as general agent for Mosler Safe Co.

The lemon business depended on growing and harvesting lemons but also on curing, packing and shipping them to distant markets, mostly in the Midwest. In December 1896 Sterling Honeycutt, also a lemon rancher, made a deal with the Pacific Beach Company in which he acquired the north half of block 239, south of Hornblend between Lamont and Morrell streets, and also the company’s hotel and dance pavilion on the ocean front near the foot of Grand Avenue. The agreement required Honeycutt to move the hotel and pavilion from the beach to block 239, where the hotel ended up at the corner of Hornblend and Lamont and the pavilion at the corner of Hornblend and Morrell, adjacent to the tracks of the San Diego, Pacific Beach and La Jolla railway, which then ran along what is now Balboa Avenue. Honeycutt refurbished and reopened the hotel, but the dance pavilion was converted to a facility for curing and packing lemons and loading them onto railroad cars at the adjacent siding. In November 1897 Honeycutt sold the northeastern quarter of block 239, including the packing plant, to F. J. Marshall and F. W. Barnes, who each acquired an undivided half-interest in the property (F. W. Barnes was Ed Barnes’ father and was also a lemon rancher).

Although Frank Marshall owned a lemon ranch and a half-interest in the community lemon packing plant, he also remained connected to the safe company in Kansas City and at the end of 1897 he returned to resume his former position there (the 1899 Kansas City directory listed Frank and Thomas Marshall, both working for Mosler Safe Co. and living at the same address). Clifford Marshall moved from Dr. Corey’s house into Frank Marshall’s house in January 1898. The Union reported that Mrs. Marshall and daughter Verna would spend the winter in San Diego and would remain until spring, then would return to Pacific Beach to make their future home. In October 1898 Frank Marshall returned from Kansas City to ‘make quite a visit’ and in April 1899 he returned once again ‘with the intention of making his home in San Diego’ (the 1900 federal census listed Frank Marshall, rancher, living with wife May and daughter Birdie at 1460 3rd Street in San Diego). In the absence of the Marshall brothers Mr. Lewis Martin had been in charge of the ranches in 1899 and Mr. Jacobson took over their care in 1900.

In December 1900 Frank and May Marshall sold acre lot 30 as well as their undivided half-interest in the packing plant in block 239 to Robert M. Baker and in 1901 Mr. Baker also bought the adjoining acre lot 53. The Frank Marshalls moved to Los Angeles and later to Riverside. The Thomas Marshalls remained in Los Angeles, although in September 1904 the Evening Tribune reported that T. B. Marshall of the Mosler Safe and Lock Co. was in San Diego to oversee the work of hanging the four big doors upon the vaults of the National Bank of Commerce building. And when T. B. Marshall’s automobile won a prize in the floral parade at the Los Angeles Fiesta in 1906, Mrs. Hinkle of Pacific Beach was a passenger.

Unlike the Marshalls, the Hinkles had adapted to the semi-rural lifestyle of late nineteenth-century Pacific Beach and continued living in their ‘commodious and elegant’ home on acre lot 36 well into the twentieth century. A Horticultural Notes column in the Union in 1899 noted that V. A. Hinkle of Pacific Beach was one of the ranchers who ‘lives on the ranch’ and the result was deep cultivation, fine fruit and clean trees. When lemon ranching became uneconomical after the turn of the century Mr. Hinkle transitioned into general farming but also specialized in beekeeping. In 1911 the city council amended the city bee ordinance to allow hives to be kept to within 100 feet of highways after V. A. Hinkle appeared before it and declared that bees did not use their stingers on people except to protect against interference. It was necessary to bother them at their hive before one could experience the ‘stinging rebuke’ which made them so feared. He placed ads in the Evening Tribune offering to sell ‘strong and healthy’ bees, in addition to ads offering a Jersey cow cheap, a large ranch horse – bargain, and two fine young milk cows.

Mrs. Hinkle became a member and later an officer of the Pacific Beach Reading Club, and often hosted meetings at the Hinkle home. In 1914 the reading club opened the library in its club house to the public and made its collection of books available for circulation. Mrs. Hinkle was appointed to oversee the library and is considered the community’s first librarian. The Hinkles had two daughters, Lucille and Mildred, who went to the Pacific Beach school and, like their parents, were active in community affairs. Lucille, born in 1896, entertained Reading Club meetings with mandolin and guitar selections and later attended Stanford University. Mildred, born in 1899, played the violin and sang and went on to Northwestern College in Chicago.

A January 1921 ad in the San Diego Union listed a house of 8 rooms, bath and sleeping porch for sale – $3000, easy terms, Mrs. V. A. Hinkle, telephone Pacific Beach 264. The home faced south, had a good garage, gas, electricity, fireplace and a fine view. The home did not sell in 1921 but Mr. Hinkle died in January 1922 and in September 1922 Mrs. Hinkle sold acre lot 36, with the Hinkle home, to Lawrence Adams. Mrs. Hinkle moved to New York City where in 1927 Mrs. F. T. Scripps, embarking for England on the Leviathan, spent a few days with friends, among them Mrs. Carrie Hinkle, an oldtime resident of Pacific Beach.

In January 1924 Mr. Adams also bought lots 21-24 of block 87 of Pacific Beach, the northwest corner of Ingraham and Law streets, and in 1926 he had the Hinkle house moved there, where it is still standing today, one of the oldest and best preserved historic homes in Pacific Beach. Adams sold both properties in 1928. In 1947 the portion of acre lot 36 now facing Law Street was subdivided as Chalcedony Terrace and the portion facing Beryl Street became Chalcedony Terrace Addition. The southerly 125 feet, the portion facing Chalcedony Street, has not been subdivided and lots there are still described as portions of acre lot 36, although the lemon trees and bees have long since been replaced by houses and apartments.

The Marshall ranches in acre lots 30 and 53 were among the properties in the eastern portion of Pacific Beach that were taken by the federal government and incorporated into the Bayview Terrace federal housing project for defense workers in 1941. They are now within the Admiral Hartman Community for military families, and although the Frank Marshall family’s house on acre lot 30 is no longer standing the site is still marked by a huge Moreton Bay fig tree that once stood over it. The T. G. Marshall house on acre lot 53, once considered the ‘finest in our colony’, is also no longer standing. It burned to the ground after being struck by lightning on Christmas Eve in 1940.

Hidden History in Acre Lot 50

Acre Lot 50, Pacific Beach, in the 1930s (San Diego History Center 83:14603-1)

In February 1892 R. C. Wilson and G. M. D. Bowers, brothers-in-law and business partners from Henning, Tennessee, purchased Acre Lots 34 and 50 of Pacific Beach and in March 1892 added Acre Lot 33, lots that met at the corner of what are now Chalcedony and Lamont streets. The price was $100 an acre; $1850 for lots 34 and 50 and $990 for lot 33. These acre lots originated in an amended subdivision map recorded by the Pacific Beach Company in January 1892 that partitioned Pacific Beach north of Diamond Street (and south of Reed Avenue) into ‘acreage lots’ of approximately 10 acres, intended for agricultural use. By the end of March 1892 a six-inch water main had been laid up Lamont as far as Chalcedony and the San Diego Union reported that Wilson and Bowers were having 4,000 feet of water pipe laid over their 30-acre tract. The Union added that the property was to be put in lemons during the next few weeks. Other purchasers also acquired acre lots in the vicinity and Pacific Beach soon became a thriving center of lemon cultivation. On Acre Lot 34, west of Lamont between Chalcedony and Beryl streets, the Bowers built the first lemon ranch house in Pacific Beach in 1892, a house which is still standing at 1860 Law Street. The Wilsons built in 1893 on Acre Lot 33, on the other side of Lamont. Their ranch house was razed in the 1940s but a large Moreton Bay fig tree that once stood over it still marks its location.

In 1895, having developed their properties into a profitable lemon ranch, the partners sold them and returned to Tennessee. Lot 33, including the Wilsons’ home, was sold for $5500, lot 34, with the Bowers’ home, also sold for $5500 and lot 50, with no improvements at the time, went for $3000. The purchasers of Acre Lot 50, east of Lamont Street between Chalcedony and Diamond streets, were Lewis and Elizabeth Coffeen, recent arrivals from Michigan. They built a ‘fine cottage’ on their new possession which the city assessed at $100 and in December 1895 the Union reported that they had moved into their new house. This house is also still standing, at 1932 Diamond Street. However, the Coffeens did not live in the fine new cottage for long; he was compelled to return east for business reasons and the ranch was sold in March 1897 to Major William D. and Henrietta Hall.

According to the Union, Maj. Hall, a new arrival who spent three years in Phoenix, Ariz. seeking restoration to health, was induced to visit Pacific Beach to examine a ten-acre improved tract by an advertisement in the Union. Three days after first sight, Maj. Hall was the proud possessor of a four-year-old lemon grove, beautiful for situation, commanding a view of Mission Bay, the breakers at Ocean Beach, Point Loma, San Diego city and Coronado. He had already erected a curing house and had a hundred boxes of lemons packed therein. Maj. Hall was reportedly delighted in the soil, location, climate and environment and especially the price of water, for which he said he paid as much for his ten acres as he would have paid for an acre and a half in Phoenix. At the end of 1897 the Union reported that Maj. Hall had received $200 from the abandoned orchard that he took charge of ten months earlier and in June 1899 it reported that he netted $100 from a picking of four acres of lemons. Presumably he used the proceeds for the ‘quite important additions and improvements’ made to his house in December.

On New Year’s Day the San Diego Union regularly featured articles celebrating each of the outlying communities and on January 1, 1900, the article from Pacific Beach was written by Wm. D. Hall. According to Maj. Hall, Moses’ view of the promised land from Mount Pisgah could not be compared with the view of Pacific Beach from Point Loma, and nearly in the center of this beautiful spot were clustered about three hundred acres of lemon groves from three to seven years old and from 2 ½ to 10 acres, dotted here and there with fine residences with well kept yards, beautiful with every variety of flowers and in bloom all year round. He noted that the Pacific Beach lemon groves were not only attractive but productive; during the past year thirty carloads of lemons (and two of oranges) had been raised and shipped. However, like Wilson and Bowers, Maj. Hall apparently decided that there was more profit to be made selling the groves than the lemons and in 1899 the Halls sold about half of Acre Lot 50, the northern 298 feet, with 12 rows of trees running east and west, to A. F. and Margaret Roxburgh. In 1901 the Halls sold the other half, the southern 322 feet including their home, to R. M. Baker.

The Roxburghs were from Scotland and had come to Pacific Beach to join her brother William Kyle who had established a poultry ranch in Pacific Beach, specializing in ducks. Kyle was also an elder and Sunday School superintendent at the Pacific Beach church; the Union reported that the Santa Claus who entered through a church window and distributed gifts to the children on Christmas Eve in 1896 had a broad Scotch accent. His sister and her husband arrived in February 1899 and in June of that year Mr. Kyle’s and Mrs. Roxburgh’s mother also arrived from Scotland. Kyle, his mother and the Roxburghs initially rented rooms at the College Inn, originally the home of the San Diego College of Letters but used as a rooming house after the demise of the college in 1891. Once they had acquired their ranch in the north half of Acre Lot 50 the Roxburghs moved out of the inn and for several years lived in houses on neighboring lemon ranches including Mary Rowe’s on Acre Lot 49 in 1900, R. P. Dammond’s in Block 180 in 1902 and Harold Scott’s on Acre Lot 35 in 1903. In 1904 they built a house on their own ranch which the Evening Tribune described as both substantial and artistic looking, being built largely of stone. This house is also still standing, at 4775 Lamont, although it is set back from the street and nearly hidden by surrounding structures.

The Roxburghs did not live in their new home for long either; in 1906 they sold their portion of Acre Lot 50 to M. F. Chesnut, a real estate investor, who sold it the following year to Folsom Bros. Co. At the time Folsom Bros. owned most of the property in Pacific Beach and was engaged in improvement projects, particularly grading streets and pouring concrete sidewalks, which they hoped would attract purchasers and increase the value of their holdings. In 1912 the property was purchased by Alfred Hatch Brown, who also extended his ranch with a strip of land 125 by 250 feet just across Chalcedony Street in Acre Lot 33. Mr. Brown and his wife St. Claire Brown lived in the stone ranch house until they moved downtown in 1918, after which they rented out the house and land. The lemon boom had faded years earlier but this irrigated ranch land was ideal for vegetables and the tenants were mostly truck farmers, some of them Japanese immigrants. Arthur Yamaguchi occupied the house in 1920 and Yatoro Yamaguchi and his family lived there between 1929 to 1931, paying $40 a month rent. The Y. Yamaguchis and their American-born children were still living in Pacific Beach in 1942 and were among those sent to the Poston relocation center for ‘enemy aliens’ in Arizona during World War II.

The south half of Acre Lot 50 had been sold in 1901 to R. M. Baker, who had also acquired two other lemon ranches and a half-interest in the main lemon packing plant on the Pacific Beach and La Jolla railway line at the corner of Hornblend and Morrell streets. However, he also didn’t hold that property for long and in July 1902 sold it to Peter and Mary Vessels. In May 1908 the San Diego Union reported that Mrs. Vessels attended a city council meeting and spent half an hour asserting her rights over the removal of a hedge fence which stood in the way of the grading of Lamont Street being carried out by Folsom Bros. Co.  According to the San Diego Union she told the councilmen that she would position herself on the fence and the only way they could get her off would be to push her off and plow her under. After a ‘spicy encounter’ between the fence owner and the vice-president of Folsom Bros. and a ‘long and tiresome debate with Mrs. Vessels in the lead’, the council passed a resolution directing the city engineer to enforce the grading of Lamont Street to the full width thereof including the sidewalks (and presumably any hedge fences that encroached on it). Lamont Street was graded, apparently without injury to Mrs. Vessels, and in October 1909 cement sidewalks were laid along Lamont, including a section in front of the Vessels property between Diamond and Missouri streets that still exists today .

In 1911 the Vessels began selling off portions of their property in the south half of Acre Lot 50, first the southeastern quarter and then the northeastern corner. Unlike most other acre lots in Pacific Beach, Acre Lot 50 was not re-subdivided into blocks and lots and these transfers were described as the easterly 275 feet of the southerly 135 feet and the easterly 100 feet of the northerly 135 feet of the southerly 270 feet of Acre Lot 50 (most property within Acre Lot 50 is still described in this manner). In 1916 the Vessels granted the city a strip of land 52 feet wide at the northern edge of their property, intended as a continuation of Missouri Street. The city did not receive a corresponding grant from the owner of the north half of the lot and as a result the continuation of Missouri Street today is not aligned with the street to the west and is much narrower (also, unlike most Pacific Beach blocks, there is no alley in the south half of Acre Lot 50). In 1917 the Vessels sold the southwestern 200 feet along Diamond Street and the northwestern 455 feet along Missouri Street, about three-quarters of their property, to Jesse and Lena Pritchard, leaving the Vessels with a 105-foot lot on Diamond which went to their daughter Blanche Vessels Lane. The house originally built for the Coffeens was included in the southwestern 200 feet of the lot but the Pritchards did not live in it. Instead it was rented, including, in 1919, to Yataro Yamaguchi, the Japanese truck farmer who later moved into the Roxburgh house.

In 1920 the southwest corner of the acre lot, including the Coffeen ranch house, was sold to George and Mary Churchman, who took up residence there and remained for over fifty years. George Churchman was a San Diego police officer who began with the bicycle detail and advanced to be head of substations in Ocean Beach and La Jolla and for a time during the prohibition era was in charge of the police vice squad. In one sensational 1921 incident (‘Bluecoat shoots 2 in dark store’), Patrolman Churchman shot a pair of burglars, killing one, after being struck in the head by a tire iron and threatened by a shotgun, which fortunately wasn’t loaded. While trying to ‘dry up’ the Sunset Supper Club while in charge of the Ocean Beach substation in 1925 Sergeant Churchman found a 23-year-old woman sitting on a bottle of gin and a 26-year-old woman with a bottle of gin ‘parked’ between her feet. A 26-year-old man approached, showed him a roll of bills, and offered him $50 to ‘forget about it’. All three were placed under arrest.

In April 1929 Churchman was elevated from sergeant to lieutenant and put in charge of the vice detail. A few months later, in August, the ‘dry squad’ led by Lt. Churchman raided a storeroom downtown and seized 4500 quarts of whisky, gin and other liquors worth $27,000. The illicit beverages had apparently been brought in for an American Legion state convention and there was a widespread belief that the Legion’s ‘irrigation committee’ thought that the police had been ‘fixed’. At the trial a witness testified that ‘someone got sore at the Legion’ and gave a tip to Churchman; if the tip had gone to the mayor or the chief of police the raid would never have happened. Churchman also led a raid that uncovered an illicit 200-gallon still and two 800-gallon mash vats in a house in Loma Portal.

However, in 1931 the vice squad came under attack by the bar association after a woman was arrested and held in jail over the weekend without being permitted to post bail. The San Diego Union reported that Lt. George Churchman, head of the vice squad, had determined that she was a ‘woman of a disreputable character’ and deemed it wise to hold her without bail until he could check up on her story (she was eventually charged with vagrancy but the charge was dismissed). The bar association threatened damage suits against the vice squad members, including Churchman, involved in what it called illegal arrests. Two members of the city council joined in denouncing the police department and demanded a general vice cleanup. The police chief resigned, claiming that his job had been made impossible by political interference, and Churchman was reassigned to head the La Jolla substation. After he also resigned from the police department he continued to be involved in security work, including the security of Camp Callan, on Torrey Pines Mesa, during the war years. He also continued to live in Acre Lot 50 until the early 1970s when he moved a block down the street to the new Plaza apartments.

By the mid-1930s the south half of Acre Lot 50 had been divided into a number of separate parcels and there were 5 residences existing along Diamond, Lamont and Missouri streets. However, the northern half had remained intact with the Roxburgh ranch house as the only residence. In 1937 the northern 125 feet, including the house, was sold to a construction company, but no additional homes were built until the 1940s. In 1940 Consolidated Aircraft began production of its B-24 Liberator bomber and hired tens of thousands of workers for its factories around the San Diego airport, creating a  demand for housing in nearby areas like Pacific Beach. In 1941 the federal government built over 1000 temporary homes in the Bayview housing project just a few blocks east of Acre Lot 50 and commercial developers also began building affordable homes in the area for the new workers. There were still only 9 homes in Acre Lot 50 in 1941, 4 on Diamond, 2 on Lamont and 3 on Missouri but 6 more were built by 1945. By 1950 there were 20 homes, 9 on Diamond, 5 on Lamont and 6 on Missouri, but still none on the south side of Chalcedony Street. In 1950 Pacific Beach contractor Stanley Picard acquired this property, the northern 125 feet of Acre Lot 50 except for the 75-by-130 foot space around the Roxburgh ranch house, and in 1950 this parcel was subdivided as Picard Terrace. By 1955 eight homes had been built along Chalcedony Street in Picard Terrace and more than 20 addresses were listed in the 1900 block of Missouri. Like most of the rest of Pacific Beach, Acre Lot 50 was fully built out before 1960 and since then many of the first generation of single-family residences have been converted to multi-unit apartments and condos, but Acre Lot 50 has the distinction of having preserved not one but two of its original lemon ranch houses, even if they are well hidden.

Acre Lot 50 today (Google Maps satellite view)

Hauser’s Subdivision in PB

Aerial photo showing Hauser’s subdivision (and military academy barracks) in the 1930s  (from San Diego History Center photo 83:14603-1)

In October 1889 the San Diego Union reported that Mrs. Mary E. Rowe and her charming daughters Miss Mabel and Eva were stopping at the Horton House hotel downtown. The Rowes were on their way to Pacific Beach, where the girls, then in their mid-teens, would become students at the San Diego College of Letters. Pacific Beach had been founded in 1887 and was not even two years old at the time. The college, which the founders hoped would become the nucleus of a refined and cultured community, had opened in 1888 and was beginning its second year. It was located on what was then College (now Garnet) Avenue where the Pacific Plaza shopping center is today.

The Rowe family had spent years in India, where Mrs. Rowe’s husband served as a missionary and where Evangeline (Eva) and her younger sister Nellore (Nellie) and brother Percy had been born. They returned to the United States after Rev. Rowe died of typhoid, and once in Pacific Beach acquired a home on the ocean front at the foot of College (the site that was later Maynard’s bar and is now the See the Sea condominiums). In the summer of 1890 the college newspaper reported that the students were enjoying their vacations in ‘divers and sundry ways’, including an evening passed pleasantly telling ghost stories at Mrs. Rowe’s ‘cottage by the sea’, with Misses Mabel and Evangeline doing the honors.

However, the college’s second year turned out to be its last. Its financial position had deteriorated and many in the administration and faculty resigned over the summer. The college did begin the fall term in September 1890 but it never reopened after the Christmas holidays. After the collapse of the college many of the people it had attracted to Pacific Beach moved on, but some remained and were instrumental in relaunching Pacific Beach as a center of lemon cultivation. One who remained was E. C. Thorpe, whose daughter Lulo had also been a student (and whose wife, Rose Hartwick Thorpe, was famous as the author of the poem Curfew Must Not Ring Tonight). Mr. Thorpe remembered those times in an article for the San Diego Union in 1896:

At the close of the college as an institution of learning in 1890 many of those to whom this had been the attraction moved away, and the following year but three or four families remained in the college settlement. In the fall of 1891 the tract was placed upon the market as acreage property, and in a few weeks a force of workmen were clearing the first hundred acres preparatory to planting lemon orchards. Rabbits and rattlesnakes were driven back to mesa and canyon, and the sunny southern slopes were soon clothed in fragrant lemon foliage.

Among those families from the former college settlement that settled on the sunny southern slopes and became lemon ranchers was the Rowe family. As Thorpe had recalled, an amended map of Pacific Beach was filed in 1892 that re-subdivided most of Pacific Beach north of what is now Diamond Street (and south of Reed Avenue) into ‘acre lots’ of about 10 acres. In April 1892 Mrs. Rowe purchased one of these acre lots, Lot 49, containing 8 6/10 acres, for $860 or $100 an acre. Acre Lot 49 was located between what are now Diamond and Chalcedony streets and west of Lamont. Mrs. Rowe also apparently had her ‘cottage by the sea’ moved onto her new property; the $400 improvement assessed on her lots in block 226 in 1893 was no longer there in 1894 but there was a $400 improvement assessed on Acre Lot 49.

The ’sunny slopes’ north of the college campus turned out to be ideal for lemon cultivation and the lemon ranches established there flourished. The Union reported in 1895 that Mrs. Rowe was daily improving her place (and also that the society of her daughters was much sought after on account of their charming qualities). A Horticultural Notes column in 1897 included the note that Mrs. Mary E. Rowe had a ranch that from the raw condition had been developed to one now valued at $9,000; ‘The ladies of Pacific Beach are justly proud of their ranches’. In 1900 the report from the Union was that Percy Rowe was in charge of the ranch and had recently done much to improve its condition; ‘It is no little task for a lad to tackle a ranch which needs so much renervation, but pluck and industry generally win’ (Percy would have been about 20 at the time).

The Rowe girls had come to Pacific Beach for an education and after the college closed they continued their studies in the public schools. The only high school in San Diego at the time was the Russ School downtown (now San Diego High), and students from Pacific Beach could take the train from the station at the corner of Lamont Street and Grand Avenue, a few blocks from the Rowe ranch. Evangeline Rowe appeared in the second row in a photo of the Russ School graduating class of 1894. After graduation Mabel and Evangeline Rowe went to Los Angeles to further their educations. Evangeline attended the College of Medicine at the University of Southern California where she met and married Dr. Charles Caven. Evangeline Rowe Caven graduated with a medical degree in 1898 and the couple briefly returned to Pacific Beach before moving back to Los Angeles, then on to Bisbee in the Arizona Territory.

In 1898 the Jowett family had purchased the lemon ranch on Acre Lot 34, which lay across Chalcedony Street on the north side of the Rowes’ ranch. The Jowetts also had children of about the same ages as the Rowes and the neighborhood kids often got together. On one occasion the Union reported that a wagon-load of sea moss with its surface bristling with young people from Pacific Beach had arrived and had dinner on the rocks at La Jolla, after which a musical program was rendered at the pavilion, followed by dancing. The party returned home at a late hour; those present included the Misses Nellore Rowe and Ruth Jowett and Messrs Percy Rowe and Oliver Jowett. Although Mabel Rowe was missing from this particular party (she was studying in Los Angeles), she did return home on occasion and apparently became acquainted with Oliver Jowett. They were married in Los Angeles in 1900, although they later divorced and ‘O. J.’ remarried in 1909.

Nellore Rowe graduated from the Russ School in 1898, was certified as a kindergarten teacher in 1899, and was teaching school in National City in 1900. She later moved to Bisbee, where her sister Evangeline was practicing medicine, and in 1908 married William Gohring, superintendent of mines for the Calumet and Arizona Mining Company. The Gohrings moved to Phoenix in 1918, where he was an executive of the Arizona Copper Company.

The Cavens came back to San Diego in 1910, living in a house on Quince Street at the western end of the Quince Street footbridge (which had been finished in 1907). When the Panama-California Exposition opened in Balboa Park in 1915 Dr. Charles Caven was appointed the official physician and while there he made the news as perhaps the first opioid overdose victim in San Diego history. According to the Evening Tribune he was found in a semi-conscious condition in a garden near the California Building and taken to the Exposition hospital where he died of what the attending physicians determined to be an overdose of morphine (friends said he had no reason to be taking morphine and they believed he took it by mistake). Evangeline remained in San Diego and in 1919 joined a group of doctors, nurses and child welfare workers who traveled to Serbia to assist orphans from World War I. She eventually returned to San Diego where she purchased property overlooking a canyon at the corner of Brant and Upas streets and lived in the home now known as the Evangeline Caven bungalow. She later moved to Los Angeles where she lived with her sister Mabel.

Back in Pacific Beach, Mary E. Rowe had sold Acre Lot 49 with her home and lemon ranch in July 1903 to John and Julia Hauser. By 1903 the lemon era had run its course and real estate developers hoping to sell residential lots were converting acre lots back into the residential blocks originally laid out in the Pacific Beach subdivision map of 1887.  F. T. Scripps, for example, had created the Ocean Front subdivision between Mission Boulevard (then Allison Street), Diamond, Chalcedony and Cass streets from Acre Lots 43 and 44 in 1903. The Hausers also followed this model, drawing up a map for Hauser’s Subdivision of Acre Lot 49 that divided the 8.6 acre lot into two blocks of 40 lots each, separated by Missouri Street (like in the original 1887 map). The city council accepted the Hauser’s subdivision map and the dedication of its streets and alleys for public use at the end of September 1904.

A couple of weeks after Hauser’s subdivision had been accepted by the city an ad appeared in the Evening Tribune for a Big Bargain, house and ten lots $2500 or whole block of 40 lots for $5000; apply to owner, John Hauser.  Apparently this ad produced an offer and he sold all of block 1, which included the Rowe ranch house, to John S. Hoagland. In 1906 Hoagland sold lots 31-34, where the ranch house was located, as well as lots 7-10, across the alley from the house and fronting on Chalcedony Street, to D. C. Shively. The Hausers continued to own block 2 and in 1906 they built a home for themselves on the northeast corner, in lots 17-20.

In 1910 the Hausers sold their home to Sterling Honeycutt, a prominent Pacific Beach real estate operator, and moved away from the subdivision. At the same time they sold lots 21-24, at the southeast corner of block 2, fronting on Diamond Street, to Kate Woodman (Mrs. Woodman already owned the block across Diamond Street, the eastern half of Acre Lot 64). However, the rest of the property in block 2 remained in the Hauser name for many years after that. Julia Hauser died in 1937 and in 1939 John Hauser married Martha Smiley. When he died in 1947, Martha Hauser assumed ownership and was still selling lots into the 1950s.

Sterling Honeycutt had also purchased the property with the Rowes’ former ranch house from D. C. Shively in 1910 and in 1911 he sold it to Emma Wood. Between 1917 and 1937 the house served as the parsonage for the Pacific Beach Presbyterian Church, occupied by Rev. J. William Millar until 1927 and then by Rev. William McCoy. In 1912 Honeycutt also sold the Hauser’s former home in block 2, which changed hands several more times before being acquired in 1922 by H. A. Hodge. D. C. Shively continued to own the lots on Chalcedony Street and he built a home there in 1910. This property, with the only other house in the subdivision to this time, was sold to E. R. Rounds in 1924 and Shively moved into another home he had built in the adjoining Acre Lot 48, a home that is still standing at 1782 Missouri.

Capt. Thomas Davis had founded the San Diego Army and Navy Academy in 1910 on the former college campus, located a block south of Hauser’s subdivision between Garnet Avenue and Emerald Street. The academy grew and in 1923 he extended the campus a block north by acquiring the eastern portion of Acre Lot 64, between Emerald and Diamond, from Kate Woodman. Also in 1923, a new elementary school was built for Pacific Beach at the corner of Emerald and Ingraham streets and Capt. Davis had the former wooden schoolhouse moved from Garnet Avenue to a site on the expanded campus near the corner of Emerald and Lamont streets, where it became the academy’s junior school. Davis hired Lt. E. H. Mohan to be principal of the junior school and in 1927 Lt. Mohan purchased lots 33-36 in block 2 of Hauser’s subdivision from the Hausers and built a Spanish revival home there on Diamond Street, across from his junior school. These houses, the Mohan home, the former Hauser home, the Rowe ranch house and the home built by D. C. Shively on Chalcedony street remained the only structures in Hauser’s subdivision throughout the 1930s.

In 1940 there were still only the four homes in Hauser’s subdivision, but Pacific Beach was on the verge of a population explosion brought about by Consolidated Aircraft’s move to San Diego in 1935 and the military buildup during World War II. In 1941 the federal government expropriated most of Pacific Beach east of Olney Street to build a housing project for defense workers made up of temporary ‘demountable’ homes (this land has never been returned to private ownership and is now the Admiral Hartman Community for military families). In other areas of Pacific Beach, like Hauser’s subdivision, only three blocks away from that housing project, private developers also began building homes for defense workers and military personnel. 14 new homes were built in Hauser’s subdivision in 1941, 5 on Chalcedony, 5 on the north side of Missouri and 4 on Lamont. In 1947 five more homes were built on Missouri Street, four of them on the south side. However, there were still no homes on Diamond Street other than the Mohan home.

My family arrived in Pacific Beach in 1947 and were living at the De Luxe trailer park on Cass Street. In 1950 my parents and the family in the trailer next door went looking for more permanent homes and found what they were looking for in Hauser’s subdivision of Acre Lot 49. They bought adjoining lots at the southwest corner of block 2, on Diamond Street, where they had homes built and continued to live as neighbors. Our home was on lots 39 and 40, theirs was on lots 37 and 38. The deeds were granted by Martha H. Hauser, and Mrs. Hauser also included an easement over lot 6 for a water pipe to the main in Missouri Street until the city got around to installing one in Diamond Street. My grandmother later bought the neighbor’s house. Both houses are still standing, although both have been renovated over the years.

By 1955 Hauser’s subdivision was built out, mostly with 2-and-3 bedroom homes on double lots but also a few duplexes on single lots. The Rowes’ former ranch house still stood at 1828 Missouri and I remember it was the polling station for the neighborhood in the early 1950s. It finally met its end in 1957 and the Hausers’ former home was also razed in 1965, both replaced by multi-unit apartments. The Mohan’s Spanish-style house on Diamond Street lasted until the late 1970s before it was torn down and replaced by a town home. Today, most of the first generation of detached homes built during the 1940s and 1950s have also been supplanted by apartment complexes or town homes. The only sign of the past remaining in Hauser’s subdivision is a large palm tree standing alone in front of the apartment buildings at 1828 and 1840 ½ Missouri Street, a tree that once stood in the front yard of the Rowes’ ranch house when it stood alone in Acre Lot 49.

Google Maps satellite view of Hauser’s subdivision today

Springtime in PB

Vacant lots and other undeveloped spots around Pacific Beach have turned a brilliant shade of green after a series of winter storms blew ashore in January. In 2019 these undeveloped spots are few and far between and the greenery is only apparent in isolated islands between streets, sidewalks and houses.  It makes you wonder what it would have looked like before all the development occurred.

Actually, news reports from those early days did comment on the natural beauty of Pacific Beach after winter and spring rains. In January 1888 the only development in Pacific Beach was a hastily-constructed railway line built along what became Balboa Avenue. The line had been completed as far as Lamont Street in time to deliver more than 2500 people from San Diego to a hillside a couple of blocks north for the laying of the corner-stone of the San Diego College of Letters, the first substantial building in the month-old community. No one could have wished for a better January day, according to the San Diego Union; clouds were threatening rain in the morning but before the second train-load of excursionists reached Pacific Beach the sun had broken through the clouds and the green grass contributed to a sublime scene at the college campus. The San Diego Daily Bee added that the new campus was a lovely spot on a verdant slope. One of the speakers at the corner-stone ceremony also described the spring-like verdure, with the whole scene bathed in perennial sunshine. The college opened in September of 1888 but was not a success and closed in early 1891. The buildings remained, however, and were reopened in 1905 as the Hotel Balboa. A color (or colorized) post card from that time still shows a sublime scene of spring-like verdure bathed in sunshine (in 2019 the site is a parking lot at Pacific Plaza II).

When the college closed most of the academic community moved away but some remained and found the verdant slope surrounding the campus to be ideal for lemon cultivation. Several hundred acres were planted and in March 1895 a report in the Union stated that the lemon trees never looked finer nor made better growth. In other parts of Pacific Beach the fertile soil and winter rains combined to produce crops of grain and hay; the report in May 1895 was that hundreds of acres of grain were being harvested and the yield was good. The hillsides above the fields and orchards also benefited from the rain; the Union reported in February 1897 that ‘the hills and valleys hereabouts are clad in the most attractive emerald’.

Not every year was so ideal. In November 1897 men and teams and plows were said to be at work from daylight until dark getting ready to put in the seed for next year’s hay crop but in March 1898 the news was that although these grain-fields still looked green the need of rain was becoming very urgent. By August less than an inch of additional rain had fallen and the Union reported that the water situation was becoming serious. The ranches nearest the hillside were the greatest sufferers; the lemon ranches were irrigated but there was not enough water to supply the ranches at higher elevations. The Union’s Pacific Beach correspondent added that it was hoped that the experience of August 1873 would be repeated, when 1.95 inches of rain fell. However no rain did fall that August and only another quarter of an inch fell over the next three months.

1899 seemed destined to perpetuate the drought conditions in Pacific Beach. In March the news was that the seriousness of the water situation overshadowed every other topic. The service had been very insufficient for several days and the higher levels were feeling the situation very keenly. However in early May a delightful shower freshened the grass and trees wonderfully and a connection with a well in Rose Canyon had improved the water service. Showers in October were very welcome; the air was clear and beautiful and everyone seemed happy, not because a sufficient amount had fallen but because of the promise of more. By November 1899 the fields and hillsides were taking on the bountiful green so dear to all lovers of nature and O. J. Stough had nearly finished seeding 1200 acres to hay around the Beach.

Winter rains greeted the arrival of the twentieth century; the report from Pacific Beach in January 1900 was that the grain fields were beautiful and farmers said the prospects were never better. By March the grain was looking well since the rain and Pacific Beach ranches were a very pretty sight, the rich dark green of the orange trees mingled with the shades of the fruit from lightest green to deep yellow, contrasted with the pink and white of the peach blossoms. In April the ranches were busy picking lemons and the mowing machines were busy cutting O. J. Stough’s hay.

Although the young grain was looking well and pasture was good early in March 1901 another rain was ‘about due’. Apparently it did arrive on or around March 21, the date of the spring equinox. The report from Pacific Beach was that the ‘equinoctial’ rain was much needed and brought the grain along in fine shape (the correspondent added that arrangements should be made to have an equinox twice a month the whole year). The weather continued to be uncooperative, however. Most of the hay on the beach had been cut by mid-April 1901 but the Evening Tribune reported in late April that after holding off when it could have done the most good, a storm came ‘just in time to catch the new hay in the cocks so the farmers will have to fork it all over’ (ideally farmers ‘make hay while the sun shines’). The hay balers were back at work by the end of May and a quantity of hay was baled and shipped out.

The beneficial effects of winter rains became a common theme in the news from Pacific Beach in the new century. In January 1902 the Tribune reported that all the rain had soaked into the ground, which showed how very dry the earth must have been, but the hills had begun to show green and the lemon trees were looking well and were bearing heavily, with the promise of good price in the near future. A year later, in April 1903, the Union reported that recent rains had made fishing in False Bay (Mission Bay) very good, which kept the anglers busy when not employed in the orchards. The hay was all cut and most of it cured and the orchards were laden with bloom, not only with orange and lemon blossoms but with peach, pear and plum. Although 1903 and 1904 were relatively dry years, 1905 had the second highest annual rainfall ever recorded to that time in San Diego, over 16 inches. In June the Union reported that never had old Soledad been more lovely, with his mantle of variegated green and yellow, the tones of which vary with every hour of the day. The low-lying mesas between La Jolla and San Diego took on a more brilliant coat of red as many varieties of ice plant neared maturity and mingled with the long blooming sunshine flower.

O. J. Stough sold his holdings of over half the territory of Pacific Beach to Folsom Bros. Co. in November 1903. While Stough had plowed and seeded hundreds of acres of his land in the fall to harvest grain and cut hay in the spring, Folsom Bros. Co. was a real estate company that hoped to convert this undeveloped acreage into residential lots. By 1907 they were grading streets and pouring concrete sidewalks, and a subsidiary, Pacific Building Company, was incorporated to build homes for new lot owners. Lemon ranching had also gone into decline as eastern markets were increasingly supplied with lemons from across the Atlantic, particularly from Sicily, and some former lemon ranchers re-subdivided their land into residential lots. As more streets and sidewalks were paved and more houses built, fewer sublime scenes of variegated green were to be seen after winter rains (although the Union reported in 1908 that the people of Pacific Beach had been given a treat from Mother Nature in the fields of wild flowers that cover the hills back of the residence section).

The springtime displays continued to be noted for a few more years in the San Diego Union’s annual New Year’s day report of suburban communities. The Union wrote in 1918 that after the rainy season, which occurred in the winter months, the hills and every available spot in Pacific Beach were ablaze with wild flowers and all vegetation sprang into marvelous growth. No one could do justice to the advantages of living in this particular spot of Southern California. In 1922 the report was that the town occupied a site that might have been chosen by the gods. The setting was that of a beautiful picture in which no form of natural beauty had been omitted. To the north and east were green hills. ‘In such environs abide health and beauty. Hebe herself must have made this her dwelling place.’ (Hebe was the goddess of youth, and cupbearer for the gods and goddesses, serving their nectar and ambrosia).

Population growth and a new surge of residential development and street improvement following the war years of the 1940s eliminated most of the remaining open ground in central Pacific Beach, but for a while there were still green hills to the north and east in the springtime. When Kate Sessions Elementary School was opened at that corner of the community in 1956 this former student can remember a field of yellow mustard extending up the slope to a saddleback on the ridge. The development of Pacifica and Wesley Palms in 1960 replaced the green hills to the east, and the natural look of the hills to the north also disappeared as development continued up the slope of Mount Soledad. But even today, verdure can appear in undeveloped spots following winter rains; the San Diego Union-Tribune commented that the grass along local freeways had turned ‘greener than an Irish meadow’ after heavy rains in February 2019.

Original PB Ranch House

In February 1892 the San Diego Union reported that Pacific Beach was to have quite an increase in the way of permanent residents:

It was learned yesterday that nine easterners had each purchased a ten-acre lot, all joining and situated just above the College of Letters. Eight teams are now at work breaking and preparing the soil for improvements that are to be made. The purchasers are in the city, and they intend planting the entire ninety acres in fruit, with the exception of sufficient space on which to build residences this spring.

The adjoining ten-acre lots were the ‘acre lots’ which had just appeared on a new map of the Pacific Beach subdivision, filed in January 1892. Although the original PB subdivision map from October 1887 had divided the entire community into uniform residential blocks, property in the outlying areas had not sold well and the new map consolidated most blocks north of what is now Diamond Street into the acre lots, intended for agricultural uses. As the Union had observed, these acre lots proved to be extremely popular and more than a dozen of them were purchased in the first months of 1892, most just to the north of the college campus, later the San Diego Army and Navy Academy and Brown Military Academy, and now the Pacific Plaza shopping center (the college itself had closed the year before, in 1891).

Detail from 1892 PB subdivision map showing acre lots north of the college campus (modern street names added)
Portion of 1892 PB subdivision map showing acre lots north of the college campus (modern street names added)

Two of the easterners, brothers-in-law and business partners from Henning, Tennessee, actually bought three adjoining acre lots which met at the corner of what are now Chalcedony and Lamont streets. R. C. Wilson and G. M. D. Bowers were Confederate veterans and proprietors of Wilson & Bowers, general merchandise, in Henning, and Wilson had married Bowers’ sister Susie in 1879.  In February 1892 Wilson and Bowers jointly purchased Acre Lots 34 and 50 and in March 1892 they added Acre Lot 33 of Pacific Beach. Lots 50 and 33 were on the east side of Lamont; lot 50 between Diamond and Chalcedony streets and lot 33 between Chalcedony and Beryl. Acre Lot 34 was between Chalcedony and Beryl but west of Lamont, extending to what is now Kendall Street. The price was $100 an acre; $1850 for lots 34 and 50 and $990 for lot 33. A year later Wilson and Bowers also bought Acre Lot 51, east of lot 50 and extending to what is now Noyes Street, for $830.

By the end of March 1892 the San Diego Union reported that 4,000 feet of water pipe was being laid over this 30-acre tract and that the property was to be put in lemons during the next few weeks. The new owners had also reserved sufficient space on which to build their residences. The Bowers built their home on Acre Lot 34 in 1892, the first ranch house to be built on a Pacific Beach lemon ranch, and moved in with their five children. The Wilsons, with two children, built in 1893 across Lamont on Acre Lot 33.

The development of lemon ranches on the acre lots combined with facilities for curing, packing and shipping lemons brought a decade of relative prosperity to Pacific Beach. The ranchers and their families became prominent in Pacific Beach society and their activities were noted in San Diego newspapers. In one example from 1893, the Union reported that Miss Eddie Sue Bowers and Miss Annie Bell Wilson wore dainty costumes of cream color to a joint birthday party for Miss Evangeline Rowe and Miss Mary Barnes, who in their soft pink gowns were ‘like two rosebuds in their fresh girlish beauty’ (the Rowe lemon ranch was just south of the Bowers, in Acre Lot 49; the Barnes ranch was Acre Lot 64, just south of the Rowes).

Pacific Beach lemon ranches could generate profits over time selling lemons for a few cents a pound, or all at once by selling the ranch itself for thousands of dollars. Wilson and Bowers chose the second option, beginning with the eastern portion of Acre Lot 51, which they sold in June 1894 for $500. Lot 33, including the Wilsons’ home, was sold in September 1895 for $5500. In October 1895 both lot 50 and the western portion of lot 51 were sold, for $3000 and $1000, and lot 34, with the Bowers’ home, was sold in November for $5500. Both families then returned to Henning, Tennessee, having realized a gain of nearly $12,000 on their Pacific Beach real estate investments.

On Acre Lot 33, the family of Ozora Stearns and, after 1899, Carrie Linck lived in the Wilson ranch house while shipping carloads of lemons from the ranch. After 1901 the property passed through a series of five absentee owners until it was sold in 1904 to the Layman family, who remained on the ranch for the next thirty years. The Stearns had named the ranch Vencedor, but the Laymans renamed it Seniomsed (Des Moines, their former home, spelled backward). In 1947 Acre Lot 33 was included in the Lamont Terrace development (the homes with the brick chimneys and shingle siding) and the former ranch house was torn down, leaving only a Moreton Bay Fig tree to mark its place. Across Lamont Street in the former Acre Lot 34, however, the Bowers’ home remains as a monument to PB’s lemon ranching past.

The Bowers had sold Acre Lot 34 to William Davis, a mining engineer, who moved in with his wife and sister in December 1895. Two children were also born to the Davises while living on their Pacific Beach ranch. Mr. Davis spent much of his time at the Arizona mines and his sister, Louise, may have actually run the ranch. She may also have been the one who gave the ranch its name; in June 1896 the Union reported that Miss Davis had shipped 84 boxes of choice lemons from Ondawa Ranch.

In May 1898 the Davises sold Acre Lot 34 to James and Sarah Jowett and by July Mr. Jowett was said to be making extensive additions to the barn and putting flumes all over the ranch. However, the Jowetts also moved on after a few years, selling Acre Lot 34 in December 1901 to Ires E. Cobb, who sold it a few months later, in May 1902, to Walter and Louisa Boycott for $5000.

Mr. Boycott was a retired publisher from La Crosse, Wisconsin, and according to the Evening Tribune he came to San Diego with his family to enjoy the salubrious climate and profit from the good times just in sight. By July 1902 the Tribune reported that the family was enjoying their new home and Mr. Boycott was fertilizing heavily and picking a fine quality of fruit from the heavy Lisbon lemon trees. A year later, in June 1903, the good times apparently came in sight for the Boycotts and they sold the ranch for $6000 to Abraham and Adelaide Manny, who changed the name of the ranch from Ondawa to Las Flores. When Miss Virginia Manny entertained a pair of her friends from Los Angeles in 1906, the Union noted that the young women were delighted with Pacific Beach, as well they might be, since the view from the floral bowers of Las Flores, over banana trees, palms and lemon orchards, to the bay and Mexican mountains, was unmatched.

Lemon ranching in Pacific Beach had begun with the development of the acre lots in 1892, particularly the Wilson and Bowers properties, and lemons had supported the community for over a decade, but by 1906 many people foresaw that PB’s future prosperity would come from residential development, not agriculture. In December 1906 an advertisement appeared in the San Diego Union for an elegant Pacific Beach residence, with city water, all modern conveniences, highly improved grounds, on ½ acre or more, only a short distance north of the depot, in ‘block 34’. The ad also offered lots in block 34, with fine fruit trees and water on each lot, prices low, terms easy, illustrated description free, A. J. Manny, owner (the ‘depot’ was the Lamont Street stop on the railroad between San Diego and La Jolla, which ran along Grand Avenue).

Although Manny apparently had intended to sell the ranch house and the other lots separately, in fact the entire acre lot was sold in January 1907 to Robert Ravenscroft. By 1907 a number of the Pacific Beach acre lots had already been re-subdivided back into city blocks, including the lots immediately west and south of lot 34, and in December 1907 Ravenscroft followed suit, recording a subdivision map that turned Acre Lot 34 back into the two blocks shown on the original 1887 map of Pacific Beach, along with their original block numbers. Like the other blocks on the original map, Block 90, south of Beryl Street, and Block 105, north of Chalcedony Street, were divided into 40 25- by 125-foot lots with a 20-foot-wide alley through the center of each block, connecting Kendall and Lamont streets. The 80-foot-wide street between the blocks, Florida Avenue on the original map, was re-dedicated to the city and became an extension of Law Street.

Blocks 90 and 105

Subdivision of Acre Lot 34 into 80 individual lots meant that the ownership and any improvements on each lot was recorded in the city lot books. The lot book data shows that from 1908 to 1911 the Ravenscrofts continued to own every lot in the subdivision and that the only improvement, the original ranch house, was valued at $425 and located on lots 17-20 of Block 105, a location at the southwest corner of Law and Lamont streets. In 1913, the lot book entry for lots 17-20 in Block 105 no longer showed improvements but instead contained the note ‘Imps on blk 90’, and the lot book entry for Block 90 showed a new improvement valued at $425 for lots 25-27. This suggests that the ranch house had been moved across Law Street and down the block to its present location at 1860 Law.

The lot books also showed that in 1911 three lots on the south side of Block 105, lots 29-31, were sold to Ferdinand Defrenn. In November 1911 a building permit was issued to F. Defrenn for a 6-room cottage on Chalcedony Street valued at $1700 (although that home, at 1838 Chalcedony, was destroyed by fire in 1927). In the next few years the Ravenscrofts sold most of the remaining lots on the south side of Block 105 while continuing to own all of Block 90 and the lots on the north side of Block 105. The Defrenn’s home on Chalcedony was rebuilt but no other homes were built in the subdivision over the next 30 years.

Miss Susie Ravenscroft, a 19-year old telephone operator, was married at home in 1911. The Evening Tribune reported that the ceremony took place in the front parlor under a canopy of ferns and smilax ‘thick starred with Shasta daisies’. The back parlor decorations were of pink roses and ferns. Punch was served in the large sun-parlor. Several kodaks were produced and there were many pretty groupings on the front lawn of the spacious Ravenscroft grounds.

Robert Ravenscroft died in 1916 and in 1923 the Ravenscroft family’s holdings in blocks 90 and 105 were sold to Cameron Hutton, secretary-treasurer of a downtown sheet metal fabrication and auto body shop. In 1925 Hutton also reacquired six of the lots in the south half of Block 105 that had been sold by the Ravenscrofts.

In 1922 the city council ‘closed up’ Law Street between Kendall and Lamont streets and the alleys in blocks 90 and 105 for the ‘public interest and convenience of the city’. Although the street and alleys had been mapped and dedicated fifteen years earlier there had been no actual grading or other improvement, and no new construction requiring access, so these closings would have had little practical effect. The 1923 – 1927 lot books contained a notation that Law St. and all alleys were closed in 1922, but this notation was scratched out in the 1928 lot book, presumably indicating that the street and alleys had been reopened. When Lamont Street was paved in 1928 between Garnet Avenue and the city property that became Kate Sessions Park, the project included the curbs and sidewalks along blocks 90 and 105 which remain today.

R. W. Brown Paving

The former ranch house was vacant in 1928 but from 1929 to 1933 it was home to Roscoe Porter, a real estate operator. His son David Porter recounted in a 1995 interview for the San Diego Historical Society’s oral history program that the family moved to a ‘great big old Victorian house’ two or three blocks north of the Academy on the corner of Lamont and Law Streets where they had eight acres of fields and orchards with strawberry patches, tangerines, orange and grapefruit trees, lemons, pears and apricots.

In November 1933 ads appeared in the San Diego Union for Vista Villa Rest Home ‘for particular people; sea air, wide verandas, large rooms, food to your needs’. If you needed rest, quiet, right thinking and proper diet, you should live at Vista Villa, 1860 Law St.; ‘Broad verandas, large grounds. Exclusive’. The rural nature of the property was also still evident in a 1938 advertisement for a big work horse, kind and gentle, for sale, cheap, 1860 Law St., Pacific Beach.

1937 aerial view of Pacific Beach. Brown Military Academy, the former college campus, is in the foreground with the land once covered by lemon ranches beyond. The acre lots originally owned by Wilson and Bowers are outlined.
1937 aerial view of Pacific Beach. Brown Military Academy, the former college campus, is in the foreground with the land once covered by lemon ranches beyond. The acre lots originally owned by Wilson and Bowers are highlighted (San Diego History Center 83:14603-1).

However, major changes occurred in San Diego beginning in 1935 when Reuben Fleet moved the Consolidated Aircraft Corporation from Buffalo to San Diego. Consolidated and other local aircraft manufacturing companies experienced explosive growth as demand grew for military aircraft in the years before and during World War II. Tens of thousands of aircraft workers who came to San Diego required homes and many found them in Pacific Beach, only a few miles away from the downtown factories.  In 1942 there was still only the one home on Law and one on Chalcedony but by 1947 houses lined the streets in what had been Acre Lot 34 and today it is hard to imagine that the area could ever have been a ranch, except for the original ranch house that still stands above it all.

Early PB Water Supply

When the Pacific Beach Company was formed in 1887 one of the tasks the founders assigned themselves in developing the new community was to ‘construct water works, reservoirs, [and] lay down mains and water pipe’. In the days leading up to the opening sale of lots at Pacific Beach in December 1887, their advertisements emphasized that arrangements had been made to give Pacific Beach a ‘splendid water system’, and that ‘men were already at work laying the pipe from the city water works’. When they cut prices in half a few months later to revive lot sales (San Diego’s ‘great boom’ collapsed in the spring of 1888), they also assured potential purchasers of an ‘abundant supply of city water’ and other substantial improvements.

The city water that was piped to Pacific Beach in 1888 was provided by the San Diego Water Company from wells beneath the San Diego River in Mission Valley. Construction was also underway on a 35-mile wooden flume which would reach up the river to Boulder Creek and deliver a flow of mountain water to the city water system. The completion of the flume was marked by a gala celebration and parade in San Diego on Washington’s Birthday, February 22, 1889.

This additional water became particularly important for Pacific Beach when the community turned to agriculture, especially lemon cultivation, after the failure of its original centerpiece, the San Diego College of Letters, in 1891. In March 1892 the San Diego Union’s Local Intelligence column noted that a Mr. Bowers, who had come west last fall from Tennessee, had purchased a thirty-acre tract at Pacific Beach and was having 4,000 feet of water pipe laid over his land. The property was to be put in lemons during the next few weeks. In April, C. H. Raiter, a Minnesota banker who had spent the previous winter in Pacific Beach, sent instructions to have a ten-acre tract in PB piped, fenced and broken. In July, George Hensley, secretary of the Pacific Beach Company, claimed that much of the new water available to San Diego was going to waste and proposed giving anyone planting an orchard of at least five acres free water for the next year. He reported that the 170 acres lately planted in Pacific Beach were making a fine growth.

The lemon ranches in Pacific Beach were concentrated between what are now Ingraham and Noyes streets and extended from Pacific Beach Drive uphill to north of Beryl Street (the Bowers ranch bordered Beryl, the Raiter ranch PB Drive). The lower ranches began at an elevation of about 50 feet while the upper ranches were at nearly 200 feet above sea level. The Pacific Beach Company built a reservoir at an elevation of about 300 feet and in August 1893 asked for permission to connect with the city water system. The reservoir, located in the foothills near Los Altos Road, is still used to store water for Pacific Beach.

Although the flume was often represented as a new source of water for San Diego, in fact both the wells in Mission Valley and the flume from Boulder Creek were ultimately dependent on rainfall in the San Diego River watershed. In 1894 the San Diego region experienced a drought which dried up the river and its tributary creeks and drained the relatively shallow Cuyamaca reservoir, which held the flume company’s reserves. With flume deliveries cut back the water company was unable to maintain consistent supplies of water to more remote areas, including Pacific Beach. In October 1894 the Union’s Pacific Beach Notes column reported that the reservoir was dry and those living in the higher lands were out of water a good part of the time. In this instance the rains did return; a storm in the middle of January 1895 caused flooding all over the county. In Pacific Beach, Rose Creek was reported to be a roaring river, the country around the race track east of the creek was a vast lake and the tracks of the Pacific Beach railroad were nowhere to be seen.

The flume was built of redwood and open to the sky and the essence of the wet wood apparently infused the pure mountain water on its 35-mile ride to the city. In June 1896 Pacific Beach Notes noted that some citizens were buying Coronado water because of the ‘rare old peculiar odor of flume water’. Worse than the odor, some believed that the water was unhealthy. The Union reported in September 1896 that a worker on Mrs. Rowe’s ranch in Pacific Beach had typhoid fever caused, it is said, by drinking too much flume water. The water was cheap, however. In July 1897, Maj. W. D. Hall told the Union that he did not pay so much for water for his entire 10 acres as for enough, in Phoenix, Arizona, to water an acre and a half. He used it so plentifully that his trees were kept free from scale.

Drought returned in 1898; a June Pacific Beach Notes column reported that the ranchers near the hillside had been absolutely without water the past two days. Although the Union’s correspondent hoped this was only a temporary scarcity, the report in August was that the water situation was becoming serious. The ranches nearest the hillside were the greatest sufferers. Again, the correspondent held out hope that ‘that the experience of August, 1873, will be repeated, when, according to the Union, 1.95 inches of rain fell’. History did not repeat itself in this case; in November the news was that water on the higher levels was at a premium. ‘Weeks go by without any water at all, that being used for domestic purposes being hauled in tanks’.

The 1898 drought was not relieved by a January storm either, and in March 1899 the Union’s Local Intelligence column reported that F. W. Barnes of Pacific Beach was tired of waiting for the San Diego Water company to furnish water, and was putting in a well; ‘If he gets water, William D. Hall will at once put in a well, and others at the Beach will probably do the same. The seriousness of the water situation overshadows every other topic. For several days past the service has been very insufficient, the higher levels feeling the situation very keenly’. There is no indication that Barnes ever got water, though, or that others at the Beach did the same.

Although a delightful shower freshened the grass and trees wonderfully in May 1899, wells were sunk in Rose Canyon and a pumping plant put in with the hope of insuring a good supply of water during the coming summer. Connection was made with the Rose Canyon well in June and the water service was said to have improved. The president and an engineer from the San Diego Water Company visited Pacific Beach in July with a view to making an ‘equal distribution of water’. They concluded that if the reservoir could be filled and an extra check valve installed for the higher ranches, it would solve all the difficulties.

The water shortages also caused lemon ranchers to take other conservation measures. Pacific Beach Notes noted in December 1899 that many ranchers were cutting out their cypress hedges, as it had been proved they do more harm than good, and enough water cannot be given them to satisfy their thirst. ‘They will take all you give them and rob the lemon trees as well. It is a pity as a cypress is a thing of beauty’.

The water company’s improvements apparently did have a beneficial effect and an Evening Tribune Pacific Beach Notes column in March 1900 reported that everybody in Pacific Beach was grateful to the water company for carrying them through the drought. In September 1900 the Tribune reported that the water service had been very good on the beach that summer; ‘when we remember that this is our third dry year that is a good deal to say that water has been of the very best quality and has been furnished in abundance’.

In 1901 the holdings of the San Diego Water Company within the city limits were purchased by the city and water distribution became the responsibility of the city water department. This reorganization did not include any new sources of water, however, and the water supply to relatively remote sections like Pacific Beach remained unreliable. The Evening Tribune reported in June 1902 that the water service on the Beach had been very poor that summer. Sterling Honeycutt had become the latest resident to try his luck with a well and in October the news was that his well had struck salt water and then, at 215 feet, indications of oil. This had led to much excitement but in the end neither oil nor fresh water in sufficient quantities were found.

Water shortages in Pacific Beach were compounded by a deteriorating water distribution infrastructure. The superintendent of the city water system reported in January 1903 that the mains in many places had ‘outlived their usefulness’, especially if laid in salt, alkali or adobe soil. He particularly called attention to the Pacific Beach pipeline and announced that he had ordered 5000 feet of cast iron pipe to replace portions of kalamein pipe that were giving trouble and causing the loss of millions of gallons of water (kalamein was an alloy coating for iron pipes). A letter to the editor of the Evening Tribune in March by a Pacific Beach resident described the condition of a water main that supplied some of the upper ranches at Pacific Beach. The main was about 500 yards long and during the past seven years had often experienced two or three breaks in one week. About 25 yards of the main was simply covered with a string of rubber bands and clamps. The writer claimed that during the past two years out of a total of 230 acres of bearing orchard at Pacific Beach, 60 acres had been cut down or abandoned, largely on account of the difficulty and expense of procuring an adequate supply of water.

The new cast iron section of the Pacific Beach pipeline was completed and connected in May of 1903 and concern about the water supply subsided. ‘Abundant water is now assured’ reported the Tribune correspondent, but the water that came through the new pipes ‘is very much in the nature of ink on account of the tar in the pipes’. It was not unwholesome to drink on that account, but was ‘unsatisfactory just now to wash with’.

The Pacific Beach Company had been dissolved in 1898 and its remaining holdings, the property it had been unable to sell, distributed to its shareholders. However, the five-acre site of the Pacific Beach reservoir had not been included in this distribution and the trustees of the defunct company finally sold the site, and the reservoir, to the city for $2000 in 1906.

Most of the other unsold property was acquired by Folsom Bros. Co. and this company initiated an ambitious effort to market Pacific Beach to prospective purchasers by developing or improving the community before offering lots for sale. The improvements would include grading streets, putting in curbs and sidewalks, and laying water mains. In January 1907 the Union reported much improvement going on in Pacific Beach; miles and miles of water pipe laid and streets graded by Folsom Bros. Co. By June Folsom Bros. Co. ads highlighted its improvements; sidewalks are being laid on block after block, avenues of fine palms are being planted. New water mains are being laid to tap each section as it is developed.

By August 1909 nearly a mile of cement sidewalk and curbing has been laid in Pacific Beach. Over two miles of street grading has been completed. The water supply has been increased. A concrete storage reservoir had been completed (presumably meaning that the Pacific Beach reservoir had been lined with concrete).

In 1912 horticulturist Kate Sessions and her brother Frank bought the western portion of Pueblo Lot 1785, 74 acres, as additional growing fields for their expanding nursery operations. Frank Sessions also leased the eastern 86 acres of the pueblo lot from the city. Pueblo Lot 1785 is in the foothills above Pacific Beach and adjoins the Pacific Beach reservoir site; the eastern portion is now Kate Sessions Park. Since much of this land was above the level of the existing reservoir, Frank Sessions dug another reservoir at the highest point on his land, above today’s Soledad Way, where he could store water to irrigate the growing fields below. In January 1913 he received a permit from the city to build a pumping plant on the city reservoir site to pump water further uphill to his reservoir. The Sessions’ reservoir was also eventually deeded to the city, in 1918 (the site is now a private home and tennis court).

The water situation in Pacific Beach stabilized, but for some the memory of drought and shortages remained. In September of 1913 the San Diego Union described a palatial home being built in Pacific Beach for C. C. Norris. The home, still standing on Collingwood Drive, is only a short distance from the Pacific Beach reservoir and not far below its elevation, and Norris apparently was well aware of the history of water shortages at the higher elevations of Pacific Beach. Among the details provided of the home’s interior (birch doors . . . old colonial type stairs with spiral newel post composed of a spindel balustrade . . . large tile mantle of unique design) the basement included a cistern with pump to furnish the house with rain water.

Over the ensuing century the San Diego region has expanded its water supply to keep pace with population growth, at first from a system of dams on local rivers, then by importing water from the Colorado River and Northern California, and most recently by desalinating sea water, so even though the past few years have seen a return of drought conditions like in the 1890s, the residences built on what were once the upper lemon ranches in Pacific Beach are not out of water a good part of the time, at least not yet.

Historic Pacific Beach Trees

Screen grab of Google Street View, Ingraham Street south of Fortuna Drive, before January 30, 2016.
Screen grab, Google Street View, looking north on Ingraham Street south of Fortuna Drive, sometime before January 30, 2016.

A massive pine tree growing along the west side of Ingraham Street south of Fortuna Drive in Pacific Beach recently blew over in a fierce windstorm, killing a passing motorist. The story in the San Diego Union-Tribune mourned the victim, a popular musician on her way to a performance, but also noted that many residents expressed a fondness for the tree, which one likened to an old friend; ‘I’ve known that tree for a long time. It was an icon, it really was’. Some residents estimated the tree was about 100 years old. Although this particular tree probably wasn’t that old, there are trees in Pacific Beach that are that old or older and many others which may be considered icons or old friends.

The most iconic tree in Pacific Beach would be the Kate Sessions Tipuana tree which stands on the site of her former nursery at the corner of Garnet Avenue and Pico Street. It has been a local icon for at least 75 years; an item in the San Diego Union’s Public Forum in June 1941 written by Max Matousek, a former foreman at her nursery, encouraged all tree-lovers to visit it the next week-end when it would be in flower, a mass of golden yellow and a living monument to Kate Sessions. He described the tree, probably about 15 years old at the time, as 35 feet tall and spreading its branches 65 feet in one direction and 55 feet in the other, one of the finest and largest specimens in Southern California.

Kate Sessions Tipuana Tree
Kate Sessions Tipuana Tree

Kate Sessions had come to San Diego in 1884 to replace the principal of the Russ School, predecessor of San Diego High School, who had abruptly resigned. However, she soon resigned herself, entered the nursery business and became active in civic organizations dedicated to improving and beautifying San Diego by planting trees (civic leader Julius Wangenheim later recalled that she apparently decided it was easier to get something out of the good earth than into the heads of young San Diegans). She was allowed to use a portion of the City Park, now Balboa Park, in exchange for planting and caring for 100 trees and donating an additional 300 trees in boxes to the city each year. She moved her nursery from the park to Mission Hills in 1905 and in 1912 acquired property in the foothills above Pacific Beach for her nursery operations. In 1924 she purchased property on both sides of Rose Creek north of what was then Grand and is now Garnet Avenue, and moved her sales office from Mission Hills to that location. Apparently she planted the Tipuana tree shortly after this move; in 1946 it was said to have been planted over 20 years before. She became a Pacific Beach resident in 1927 and died at the age of 83 in 1940.

In 1941 the Federal Public Housing Authority expropriated most of eastern Pacific Beach to build the Bayview Terrace housing project for defense workers and their families. An announcement of the project noted that the nursery formerly owned by the late Kate Sessions, prominent San Diego horticulturist, was included in the site, and the blooming acacia trees, long a landmark in San Diego, would be preserved in a proper setting. The preservation effort apparently extended to the Tipuana tree as well, which survived this project and others which threatened its future.

In July 1960, for example, the Union reported that a tree planted 40 years ago by a woman who brought greenness to San Diego was scheduled for alteration as the march of progress cut under its friendly boughs. The street under its friendly boughs, now Garnet but by then called Balboa Avenue, was being widened and traffic lanes would pass from 7 to 10 feet from the base of the tree, which might have made it necessary to trim branches to allow vertical clearance and remove some minor roots. However, city officials backed down after the Pacific Beach Garden Club and the Pacific Beach Women’s Club organized a campaign to protect the tree and modified the plan to add a 15-foot buffer between the street and the tree. ‘I know of no one in city government who wants to harm a twig on this fine old tree’, said the city park and recreation director. ‘We’re going to do nothing to damage it’. A senior design engineer in the city engineer’s office agreed, saying ‘our instructions are to avoid damaging the tree in any way’.

Emboldened by their success, the campaign to protect Kate Sessions’ Tipuana tree then petitioned the state park board to make the tree a state historical monument, and in May 1961 their proposal was accepted. A story in the Union reported that the tree, said to have been planted in 1905 (years before Kate Sessions first acquired property in PB and nearly 20 years before she owned the property where it stands), would become a state historical monument. A plaque recognizing Kate Olivia Sessions’ Nursery Site and commemorating the life and influence of a woman who envisioned San Diego beautiful was dedicated on July 7, 1961. The plaque was actually mounted on a stone monument under the tree and didn’t refer to the tree at all, but news reports emphasized that the Tipuana tree, said to be 50 years old, was the actual landmark.

The San Diego Union’s report on the campaign to save the Kate Sessions Tipuana tree also mentioned that construction crews were trying to preserve another, even larger tree believed planted by Miss Sessions on the construction site for the Capehart housing project (successor to the Bayview Terrace project and now the Admiral Hartman Community). This tree, thought to be a Ficus, was located on a promontory overlooking Mission Bay about 1 quarter mile south of Kate Sessions school. This description matches a huge Moreton Bay Fig tree (Ficus macrophylla) still growing today behind houses near the intersection of Chalcedony and Donaldson Drive, south of Kate Sessions school and overlooking Mission Bay. It is unlikely, however, that this tree was planted by Kate Sessions; it actually appears to be one of the last remaining signs of the area’s lemon ranching past.

Moreton Bay Fig tree, Chalcedony Street and Donaldson Drive.
Moreton Bay Fig tree, Chalcedony Street and Donaldson Drive.

For over a decade beginning in 1892 life in Pacific Beach revolved around growing, packing and shipping lemons. Most of the lemons were grown on ‘acre lots’, parcels of approximately ten acres corresponding to pairs of today’s residential blocks. Most acre lots were located on what were then the fringes of the community, south of Reed Avenue and north of Diamond Street, and there are still traces of the former lemon ranches to be seen in these areas. The large two-story frame home at 1860 Law Street was originally the ranch house for the Wilson and Bowers lemon ranch on Acre Lot 34, now the two blocks surrounded by Lamont, Chalcedony, Kendall and Beryl streets (although the house, built in 1892, was moved from other side of Law about 1912). Two other ranch houses, at 1932 Diamond, built for the Coffeens in 1895, and at 4775 Lamont, built for the Roxburghs in 1904, remain on Acre Lot 50, the two blocks east of Lamont between Diamond and Chalcedony.

On other former acre lots the ranch houses have disappeared but the sites are still marked by the trees which once stood next to them. The two blocks east of Olney Street between Chalcedony and Beryl where the large Moreton Bay Fig tree stands was once Acre Lot 30, where Frank Marshall established a lemon ranch in 1894. A panoramic photo of Pacific Beach from the east taken in 1906 shows lemon groves and a ranch house surrounded by large trees on this site.

Lemons ranches on Acre Lots 53 and 30 from Bunker Hill, 1906.
Pacific Beach lemon ranches from Bunker Hill, 1906, showing ranch house and trees on Acre Lot 30 (San Diego History Center #283).

The lemon groves eventually died out and after the area was reconfigured for the Bayview Terrace housing project in 1941 the ranch house had also disappeared, but the tree was spared and can be seen in an aerial photo of the area from 1946. The builders of the Capehart housing project also succeeded in their efforts to preserve this iconic tree, saving the last visible reminder of the Marshall’s lemon ranch.

1946 aerial view of Bayview Terrace housing project showing Moreton Bay Fig (San Diego History Center #10356-2)
1946 aerial view of Bayview Terrace housing project showing Moreton Bay Fig (San Diego History Center #10356-2)

Trees are also the only survivors of other former lemon ranches in Pacific Beach. On the former Acre Lot 33, east of Lamont between Chalcedony and Beryl streets, a ranch house built for Wilson and Bowers in 1893 was torn down in the 1940s and the entire area was cleared for one of the first planned developments in Pacific Beach, Lamont Terrace (the homes with the brick chimneys and shingle siding). The only thing left standing was another Moreton Bay Fig tree which once stood beside the ranch house and is now in front of the house at 1922 Law.

Moreton Bay Fig tree, 1922 Law Street.
Moreton Bay Fig tree, 1922 Law Street.

On Acre Lot 49, west of Lamont between Diamond and Chalcedony, the house on Mary Rowe’s lemon ranch was demolished in the 1950s but a large palm tree which once marked her ranch house still stands in front of the apartment buildings at 1828-1840 1/2 Missouri.

Palm from Mary Rowe lemon ranch, now in front of 1828-1840 1/2 Missouri
Palm from Mary Rowe lemon ranch, now in front of 1828-1840 1/2 Missouri

In other parts of Pacific Beach, it is not individual trees but rows of trees, many of them over a century old, which have become iconic. In 1907 Folsom Bros. Co., which owned most of Pacific Beach and was trying to attract buyers by grading streets and laying sidewalks and water mains, also advertised that avenues of fine palms were being planted. These rows of palms still line parts of Lamont and Hornblend streets. The rows of palms along Bayard Street south of Grand Avenue and Pacific Beach Drive west of Bayard were also planted in the early years of the twentieth century. These trees lined the approach to Braemar Manor, the bayside mansion of the F. T. Scripps family and now the site of the Catamaran Hotel.

Palm trees along Pacific Beach Drive and Bayard Street
Palm trees along Pacific Beach Drive and Bayard Street

The group of Canary Island palms on the west side of Bayard between Reed and Thomas Avenues once stood in front of the Rockwood Apartments, later the Rockwood Home for the Aged, built in 1904 (2022 note; these palm trees have been cut down).

Site of Rockwood Apartments, behind the Phoenix canariensis palms on Bayard
Site of Rockwood Apartments, behind the Phoenix canariensis palms on Bayard.

Another century-old Canary Island palm tree is growing in the patio of the Pacific Beach Presbyterian Church at Garnet Avenue and Jewell Street. The church’s web site actually presents its history through the character of this tree; ‘My name is Phoenix Canariensis . . . I live and grow in the patio of the Pacific Beach Presbyterian Church. I really don’t know where I came from but that’s not important because new life began for me in 1915 when the Ladies Aid Society transplanted me to beautify the barren sandy soil around their church’. After recounting a century of history, the tree describes its present environment; ‘I now live on the busiest street in all of San Diego. I am completely surrounded by businesses and apartments. Parking is a problem. People from the streets sometimes sleep in this patio, giving testimony to the gravity of the times’. It even considers its future; ‘Some say that the life of a Canary Date Palm is about 80 years. I know that I shall soon complete my cycle of life. The men seem to know it too. They are giving me extra attention . . . I even see a new family of palm trees in the refurbished patio’.

Phoenix canariensis in the patio of Pacific Beach Presbyterian Church
Phoenix canariensis in the patio of Pacific Beach Presbyterian Church

Other trees in Pacific Beach may not qualify as iconic but could still be considered old friends. When I was growing up on Diamond Street across from Brown Military Academy in the 1950s we had a decent view to the southwest, including the bay, Point Loma and the ocean. Before that view was obscured by the glaring Newberry’s sign in 1961 and completely blotted out by the Plaza Apartments in 1970, one of the most prominent landmarks visible from our front window was a tall Norfolk Island Pine tree, perfectly symmetrical, growing a few blocks south.

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Norfolk Island Pine tree in front of Baldwin Academy, Hornblend Street.

We traced it to Hornblend Street, just west of Kendall Street, where it is still growing in front of the historic house which is now the Baldwin Academy. It must be about 90 years old; it was already tall in an aerial photo of Brown Military Academy taken in 1938. I seem to recall that it had a lighted star on top during the holiday season, although I can’t imagine how anyone could have placed it there.

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1938 aerial photo of Pacific Beach showing Norfolk Island Pine (foreground), also palm trees at the ranch house on Missouri (left) and Moreton Bay Fig on Law (right), beyond Brown Military Academy (center). (San Diego History Center #83:14603-1)

After last week’s fatal accident in Pacific Beach city crews went to Ocean Beach to cut down a pair of Torrey Pines that the city had deemed unstable and a threat to public safety. According to the Union-Tribune, a local resident stopped to see what was going on and became infuriated when he was told that two historic trees planted in the 1930s were going to have to come down. He placed himself in front of one of the trees, defending it from the city workers, presumably brandishing chainsaws, until they were able to convince him that the trees had been condemned. He then walked away, unable to watch the destruction. Other residents also joined in the complaints, saying that the trees were some of the most historic in that coastal community. The Torrey Pines were eventually cut down, but this incident again showed the fondness that a community can express for their historic trees.