Your August Newsletter from the Seaver Center Has Arrived!

THE RESEARCHERS

Dr. Emily Bills is an urban historian and faculty at Woodbury University. She became interested in Los Angeles’ telephone history when she discovered that the city had more telephone subscriptions per capita by 1895 than anywhere else in the world. This indicated how much Angelenos valued telephone services as an economic and social tool in a rapidly developing, but spread-out region. The Seaver Center’s L.A. County Incorporation Records helped her piece together Los Angeles’ complicated corporate telephone history, including who invested in the first telephone company and how far telephone wires connected subscribers during the earliest years. Telephone company founders hand wrote the first articles of incorporation in 1881 and the utility operated in the city without a franchise, stringing telephone wires over rooftops for six blocks in Downtown L.A. Two young messenger boys ran the exchange, listening in on conversations so they knew when to break the connection. Long before Downtown Los Angeles had paved streets, electric trolley service, or automobiles, telephone poles and wires marked the area as the heart of a modernizing city.

Los Angeles also has a rich competitive telephone history. Until 1916 the city had two main telephone companies, a local AT&T subsidiary called Sunset Telephone and an independent concern called Los Angeles Home. These companies refused to interconnect their lines so Angelenos had to subscribe to two different companies and rent two different telephone devices to access the full telephone network—an expense that annoyed almost everyone. Los Angeles’ fiercely entrepreneurial spirit also manifested itself in the many independent telephone companies that sprang up across the Southland. The L.A. County Incorporation Records indicate that, starting in 1902, at least two dozen companies filed articles of incorporation, from Pomona, to Santa Monica, to Sunland. The independent United States Long Distance company, founded in 1902, interconnected these separate and successful companies, helping to bind the services—and Angelenos—together.

Her research will culminate in her forthcoming book Linking Up Los Angeles: How the Telephone Built a City to be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press.

Helene Demeestere wrote: Incorporation papers were crucial in my research, since most of local documents regarding the ethnic group I was studying were lost during the 1906 San Francisco fire. The French consulate was then located in the Bay area, and my PhD dissertation topic was French immigration to the West. I had to turn to local archives. As a social historian, I needed to delve into the lives of these Frenchmen and women who settled in Los Angeles during the Progressive Era.

From the files I pulled out names that matched with those that the Federal census or Great Registers recorded as “French born”. Each document I opened, was telling the amount of capital stock, the purpose of the business, the name of its directors etc., a determinant insight of the French presence and the dynamics of the group in Southern California. From a meat-packing company, a weekly newspaper, a confectionery or a mining company, it showed the diversity of activities of the people I was studying, and the structure of these companies but moreover, an indication of who were the leaders of the community.

The year 1902 was a surprise for there were a great number of incorporations with boards of directors exclusively made of French immigrants. Over the course of six months (May to October), eight organisations were incorporated, all with an identical statement: “for the purpose of social intercourse, amusement, recreation and entertainment of its members and for procuring merchandise and commodities, food and refreshment supplies and distributing the same to its members,” and from these eight clubs, two had added the wording “to furnish literature, reading matter.“ That led me to think that the French community had created their own private organisations to override the new obstacles put on their social lives. Indeed, a December 1901 city ordinance forbade all card playing in saloons, and cards were a major distraction among the French working class. It was also a time when the temperance movement was gaining momentum, and the local government applied more stringent regulations on the sale and distribution of alcohol. That year, not only did the French incorporate many clubs such as The Country Social Club or the Casquettes Blanches, but Germans and Italians as well had created their own ethnic clubs, as was found with further attention given to the box of files.

The content of the incorporation papers have an undeniable value for historians as myself. Furthermore, being able to read the signatures of my fellow countrymen on each file, individuals who, like myself, had chosen to settle in Southern California, added a tiny zest of emotion to my work.

H.D.

Steven and Patrice Demory are Civil War Living Historians, and they have in the past 15 years portrayed Professor Thaddeus Lowe and his wife Leontine. They appear at reenactments and give educational presentations for various organizations and schools. They have traveled across the country researching the Lowe's at a myriad of different and varied locations, including the Library of Congress and the National Archives in Washington, D.C.

Lowe is best known to history as the founder and head of the Civil War U.S. Balloon Corps, the predecessor of today's Air Force, and also as the builder of the Mount Lowe Railway, an electric funicular and mountain railway in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. He was an exceptionally prolific inventor, visionary and businessman. He holds more than 200 patents and was involved in dozens of businesses (such as banks, heating, gas and ice manufacturing) in Los Angeles County and across the country to Norristown, Pennsylvania. He was a nationally known personality of his day, one which the public knows so little about today.

This is what led them to the Seaver Center’s voluminous collection of Los Angeles County incorporation records. There were two primary items they were seeking to document. First, Lowe had a vision of building a scientific institute, here on the West Coast, to rival the Franklin Institute of Philadelphia or M.I.T. of Cambridge. His goal was, "To establish and maintain meteorological stations, astronomical observatories, art galleries, buildings and methods for the preservation of documents and records, geological, ethnological, anthropological, natural history, botanical and other museums ..." He continued to outline the establishment of a vast educational institution to teach and grant degrees in these, and many other subjects.

In her "Eureka!" moment Patrice found the incorporation documents of the Lowe Institute. They marveled at the scope of the project and also enjoyed seeing the signatures of Thaddeus, his wife Leontine, and a number of their family members. Due to hard economic times due to the "Panic of 1893" the Lowe Institute was never completed. Which led to their second item of interest: documenting the actual realization of Lowe's vision. In a series of documents, we found that he co-founded (along with other prominent Pasadena citizens) a school in Pasadena called Throop University. This was a vocational school where students leaned a trade, the schools motto being, "Learn to do by doing." In a string of documents, they established that Throop University morphed into the California Institute of Technology. Indeed, Lowe's vision had been realized, as he was a co-founder of Cal Tech, one of the premier scientific institutes in the world today. As a bonus to this search, the Demory’s also documented his ownership and involvement in many other business ventures. He was truly a "Mover and Shaker" in Los Angeles County.

The special collections of the Seaver Center was integral in enabling these researchers to add yet another layer to the amazing history of Professor Thaddeus Sobieski Constantine Lowe.

Patrick Norton, screenwriter and researcher, is writing about the political and cultural life of Nazi sympathizers in Los Angeles during the years leading up to World War II. Because so many of the people participating in these activities did not want their involvement known, it is often necessary to locate primary documents that show relationships which would otherwise go unnoticed by the public.

When Patrick began this project, the idea of Nazis in Los Angeles seemed absurd on its face, and he thought if the rumors held any truth at all, he would discover an isolated incident or aberration in California's history. But as he unraveled the details, he found the pieces of a story – involving not just a small group of Nazi sympathizers, but actual Nazis, wealthy industrialists, obscure occultists, intelligence operatives, Russian monarchists, Sikh assassins, psychics, traitors, con men, and ufologists – that spanned both continents and decades, even as the story returned to L.A. again and again. By providing sources and documentation that back up what were largely urban legends and oral history, the Seaver Center has been invaluable to Patrick’s research into a corner of history that often defies belief.

Notes from the Archive