Seal Beach: A Brief History

research.

INTRODUCTION

Many people know far more about Seal Beach than me. Unfortunately, with a few exceptions, those people haven’t written books. And because I wanted to know more about the town—early Anaheim Landing, Phil Stanton, the red cars, Joy Zone, rumrunners, gambling ships, summers on the bay, the early days of surfing and the people who used to live here—I started doing some research here, more research there until I realized that even considering what I don’t know, I still have a lot of good information worthy of a book. So here it is.

Unlike earlier city historians, I had the advantage of the Internet, which has provided access to a treasure-trove of information heretofore buried in college libraries around the country. I’ve incorporated much of that information in here.

Seal Beach was originally a city of hype—a real estate development where honesty and factual history took a back seat to hoopla and press releases that have been passed down as fact over the years—and over beers.

Like the issue of whether John Ord was Seal Beach’s first resident. He wasn’t.

Nor was the town’s original name of Bay City changed because of confusion with San Francisco, and the Seal Beach amusement area (the Joy Zone) was not one of Southern California’s most popular tourist areas until the Depression did it in. The Joy Zone, overwhelmed by competition from other beach cities, was a financial disappointment right from its start in 1916 and was basically out of business by 1925.

But not to worry—most of the legends are based in truth, and newly discovered facts are more impressive than the previous hype.

There is probably too much information in this book. But since the town has never had a thorough history written about it, I figured I had better cram all the info in now. Who knows how long before the next one is written?

I stop my story of Seal Beach in 1967 for what I think are extremely good reasons:

First, I didn’t want to write a five-hundred-page book.

Second, by avoiding the craziness of the 1970s and ’80s, I can keep friends.

Finally, 1967 was arguably the year that Seal Beach stopped being an isolated small town. Some say that happened when Leisure World opened in 1962. Or when the school districts merged in the early 1980s. But to me it was 1967—after the annexation of the Rossmoor Business Center, when the separation between Seal Beach and its neighbors to the north became seamless.

I’m sure I’ve left out deserving events and memorable characters. The more I learned, the more I realized how little I still knew about the town. But hopefully, I’ve also brought much forward that has been overlooked and given a good account of why Seal Beach is what it is.

So I hope you Old Town old-timers are willing to cut this inlander some slack. But if you aren’t, then go down to Main Street, and while having a beer, start your own book or article. I look forward to reading it.

CHAPTER 1

THE BASICS

Except for Landing Hill, all seventy feet of it, Seal Beach is flat. From an elevation of thirty-eight feet in easternmost College Park East, it drops over two miles to twelve feet by the high tide line of the wetlands and local beaches. Before the straightening of the San Gabriel River and construction of the levees, this area frequently flooded when heavy rains carried water from the San Gabriel and San Bernardino mountains.

Pacific storms often stalled over these mountains, sometimes releasing incredibly heavy precipitation—a 1943 storm dumped twenty-six inches on Hoegee’s Camp in a twenty-four-hour period. Annual rainfall near the coast averaged twelve inches, but in the mountains, it exceeded forty inches per year (more than Portland and Seattle). As the mountain soils saturated, debris of boulders, gravel, sand and silt fell into canyon streams and was carried along on its journey toward the ocean.

Most of the water sank into the sand and gravel soil of the San Gabriel Valley, the Inland Empire and Los Angeles basin. In some places, the gravel was six miles deep. Gravity induced most of the run-off water to sink into the large aquifers—underground reservoirs that slowly made their way through the slanted layers of sediment that descend to the ocean.

On reaching the main Los Angeles basin, the waters would sometimes spread out or form and reform channels on a whim. The San Gabriel River sometimes sent its water west to merge with the Los Angeles River, sometimes east to join up with Coyote Creek, sometimes south directly into Alamitos Bay. Farther east, the Santa Ana emptied at times into Bolsa Chica or Anaheim Bay until the floods of 1862 diverted it permanently to empty near Newport Bay. During great rainfalls, the floodwaters spread out and joined up in one vast sheet of water fifteen miles wide, allowing individuals to travel by canoe from Long Beach to Newport. The floods led the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to consider these rivers, especially the Santa Ana, as the greatest flood threats in the nation.

Underground, the waters encountered a natural dam of clay and rock, a fault line running from Newport Beach to Inglewood. Above ground, this dam is visible as a string of highlands—the Bolsa Chica Bluffs, The Hill in Seal Beach, Bixby Hill, Signal Hill, etc. up to Cheviot Hills. This natural dam caused the gravelly soil and silt to build up behind it, only to be leveled by the inevitable floods.

Eventually, the rivers wore down and created four gaps through this natural barrier—by Newport Bay, Anaheim and Bolsa Bays (the Sunset Gap), Alamitos Bay and the Wilmington Gap. On the coast, the incoming waves and the downstream flow of alluvial silt and sand built up sand barriers that created a sheltered tidal marsh much bigger than now.¹ Portions of Alamitos and Anaheim Bays—marshy sloughs—reached up beyond the present San Diego Freeway into Rossmoor, forming lakes, ponds, marshes and peatlands, often bordered by forests of willows, cottonwoods and thick shrubs.

The wetlands left the area that would become Old Town Seal Beach accessible by only one land route—the Anaheim Landing Road—more recently called Bay Boulevard and now Seal Beach Boulevard. Even on the slightly higher land, the high water table made much of present Leisure World and College Park East areas into large alkali meadows.

The wetlands were natural cleaning agents where fish and smaller mammals thrived, which in turn attracted bigger animals—coyote, foxes, deer and, at the top of the chain, the California grizzly bear.²

The area’s climate and abundant food supply no doubt attracted the area’s earliest human settlers. Some say these first arrivals arrived 2,500 years ago and were of Hokan³ linguistic stock. Others say the first inhabitants arrived about 40,000 years ago and were part of the Santa Barbara Oak Grove hunter-gatherer culture. Whoever these original inhabitants were, it is generally accepted that between 500 BC and AD 1200, natives of Shoshone linguistic stock made their way from the Great Basin of Utah and Nevada to the Southern California coast. This intrusion is called the Shoshonean Wedge. The early Spanish called those around here Gabrielino because of the proximity to the Mission San Gabriel. What the Native Americans called themselves is shrouded in controversy and tribal politics. Some say they were called the Puvu, the Puvitsi and the Tongva. Another side claims Tongva is a made-up word and that the tribe used the word Kizh.

The Tongva/Kizh built as many as one hundred villages in the greater Los Angeles and Northern Orange County area, leaving us with many familiar names—Pacoima, Cahuenga, Tujunga, Topanga, Azusa and Cucamonga. Tibahangna lay near the Los Angeles River on the property of Rancho Los Cerritos. The largest settlement was probably Puvungva, on Bixby Hill, by California State University–Long Beach, where the underground dam forced water up into a reliable, natural spring.

The closest village site was just north of Landing Hill by the new Heron Point homes. The hill blocked the cooler ocean breezes, and the waters of both bays were very close. Arms of Alamitos Bay reached almost to the current police station.⁴ But middens (refuse heaps of shells) and other remains indicating villages have also been found on Hog Island in the Anaheim Bay Wetlands, the Bolsa Chica bluffs and along the San Gabriel River near El Dorado Park and up Coyote Creek.

Tongva society included extensive trade, technologically advanced knives and bowls, and baskets woven so tight they could hold water and also make very sea-worthy canoes.

There was a sizable Tongva population in Southern California—estimates range from five thousand to fifteen thousand—when Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, a Portuguese navigator sailing under the Spanish flag, sailed into San Pedro Bay in 1542. Cabrillo noted the smoke from many villages, calling it the Bay of Smokes.

California was left alone by the Spanish for over two hundred years, until other European powers, especially Russian fur traders, showed interest. To thwart Russian colonization north of San Francisco Bay, the Spaniards sent four expeditions to California. In 1769, Father Junipero Serra established Mission San Diego, the first of many missions intended to bring Catholicism to the California natives and secure the land for Spain. In mid-July 1769, a second land expedition under Don Gaspar de Portola set out from San Diego north in search of Monterey Bay.

Portola’s company included friars, muleteers, servants and Indian neophytes, as well as his second in command, Captain Pedro Fages; Corporal Manuel Nieto; and privates Jose María Verdugo and Juan Jose Domínguez. Their path roughly followed what is now Interstate 5. After two weeks, they camped near present Angels Stadium, then continued north, passing through the Coyote Hills, which provided an excellent view of the land toward Palos Verdes and Signal Hill and the lush lowlands between Anaheim and Alamitos Bays.

Fages eventually became governor. Nieto was assigned to the garrison at San Diego but remembered the good land to the north. In 1784, he petitioned his former commander for the right to graze his cattle on some of it, and Fages granted him, as well as Verdugo and Dominguez, the first provisional ranchos in California. (Technically, they were grazing permits. The King of Spain still owned the land.) The Nieto grant was by far the largest—300,000 acres—but to resolve issues with the priests at San Gabriel, it was whittled down to a measly 167,000 acres between the ocean and El Camino Real and the Santa Ana River and the old San Gabriel River (which emptied where the Los Angeles River now empties). It was still the largest grant ever made by the Spanish or Mexican governments in California.

Nieto settled near present Downey. When he died in 1804, the land passed to his widow but was overseen by their oldest son, Juan Jose.

In the early 1830s, Mexico declared itself free of Spain. Others petitioned new governor Figueroa for the land by Alamitos Bay, saying it was not being used. Juan Jose Nieto asked Figueroa for a re-confirmation of his father’s grant and requested that it be divided among Manuel’s heirs. After a diseño (a survey of the land) in June 1833, Figueroa granted the separation of the vast grant into five separate ranchos: Las Bolsa, Los Cerritos, Los Coyotes, Santa Gertrudes and Los Alamitos. Perhaps not so coincidentally, a year later, Juan Jose sold the governor the Alamitos rancho at a very cheap price.

Figueroa formed a company to work the land, but his untimely death in 1835 ended that enterprise. However, the quality of the land had not been forgotten by the man who made the diseño, Abel Stearns. Stearns was born in Massachusetts in 1798. After becoming an orphan, he went to sea at age twelve. He learned the South American and China trade and then made his way to Mexico, forming good relationships with important British merchants and becoming a Mexican citizen.

By 1829, Stearns was in Los Angeles and became a leading merchant, bartering groceries, liquors and dry goods for the hides and tallow from the surrounding ranchos. He also purchased furs from the growing number of American trappers coming to California.

Stearns’s influence grew even more after his 1839 marriage to Arcadia, the daughter of the influential Don Juan Bandini. Their home in Los Angeles became a center for pueblo society for the next thirty years. In 1840, just a year after his marriage, Stearns purchased the Rancho Los Alamitos, paying around $6,000 for its 900 cattle, nearly 1,000 sheep & 240 horses, as well as 6 sq. leagues of land, a small house & a few other triflings worth some $200.

The California gold rush, and the arriving miners’ appetites for beef, ushered in a spectacular boom for cattle. Once worth four dollars for their hides and tallow, cattle now sold for seventy-five dollars just for their beef. Stearns’s knowledge of Southern California business affairs enabled him to add one financially troubled ranch after another to his holdings. By 1862, Stearns had built up the largest cattle empire in southern California, controlling over 200,000 acres of the choicest land in the area now comprising Los Angeles, San Bernardino and Riverside Counties and most of the land in Orange County west of the Santa Ana River.⁵

But he also invested in several unprofitable mining ventures and the celebrated Arcadia Building in Los Angeles, which stood at the southwest corner of Arcadia and Los Angeles Streets. The two-story brick building contained eight stores, and represented an investment of about $85,000.

To finish the building, Stearns borrowed $20,000, with an interest rate at 1.5 percent per month, from a San Francisco financier, Michael Reis (usually now spelled Reese). Stearns used the Alamitos as security.⁶

Stearns’s predicament was not helped by Mother Nature. December 1861 saw the arrival of almost forty straight days of rain, turning the Los Angeles Basin into an inland sea. Ironically, when the rain finally stopped, the irrigated lands produced lush grasses, which made the cattle plump, causing a glut on the beef market and another drop in prices. By the spring of 1862 Stearns’s obligations far exceeded his income, and a number of his notes, including one for $15,000 and another for $10,000, were long overdue.

The floods were followed by an even more disastrous two-year drought. The bones from the carcasses of dead cattle covered the Stearns lands, including the Alamitos, and those of other ranchers for years.⁷

In 1866, the Alamitos defaulted into the hands of Michael Reese. Before he lost other properties, Stearns was rescued by longtime friend and business associate Alfred Robinson, who organized a group of San Francisco investors to subdivide and sell almost 180,000 acres of Stearns’s remaining lands in Southern California. Besides being paid $50,000 and having a one-eighth interest in the new corporation, Stearns was also paid a dollar and a half per acre once the land was sold.

The trust, under the name of the Los Angeles and San Bernardino Land Company, distributed thousands of maps and flyers of the Stearns Ranchos throughout the United States and Europe. Agents flooded the east with literature describing the incomparable climate and agricultural advantages of Southern California. Every time a steamship left San Francisco for Los Angeles, trust agents were on board to describe the Stearns land. Twenty- and fifty-acre plots sold for five to thirteen dollars an acre.

By 1870, the syndicate had sold more than twenty thousand acres, and Stearns, fully recovered from the financial debacle of the 1860s, was on the eve of again amassing one of the greatest California fortunes when he was stricken with a sudden illness while on a business trip to San Francisco. He died there on August 23, 1871.

The next actors in our story were three cousins from Maine—Benjamin and Thomas Flint and Lewellyn Bixby. In 1849 and 1850, they came to California in search of gold and settled in the mining town of Volcano, where it was said that one miner took out $8,000 worth of gold in a few days.

Eventually, seven of Lewellyn Bixby’s brothers, his two sisters and his father-in-law would migrate to California. The Maine men quickly learned that selling goods to the growing population of miners provided better financial opportunities than mining itself. The cousins made enough ($5,000) to return home in late 1852. After a short time of visiting, Benjamin, Thomas and Lewellyn took a train to its terminus in Terre Haute, Indiana. There they formed Flint, Bixby & Company and proceeded to buy two thousand head of sheep. In mid-May 1853, starting out in Council Bluffs, Iowa, they drove the sheep on a seven-month trek to California. Because of the slow pace of the sheep, the men would usually walk.

Throughout the 1850s Flint, Bixby & Company became California’s most successful sheep ranching company, even more so during the Civil War, when the Union blockade of Southern cotton created a demand for wool. As wool prices soared, so did the Flint-Bixby fortunes.

The drought of 1862–64, which almost ruined Stearns, provided opportunities for the Flint-Bixby sheepmen who began buying lots of the available land in Southern California. In 1864, they partnered with Benjamin Flint’s friend James Irvine of San Francisco to buy two ranchos and part of a third that together would be called the San Joaquin Ranch and later the Irvine Ranch. In 1866, on their own, Flint, Bixby & Co. bought the twenty-six-thousand-acre Los Cerritos Ranch for $20,000 in gold and asked Lewellyn’s capable younger brother Jotham to manage it, also giving him a future option to buy half the ranch.

In 1869, Jotham exercised his purchase option and a new company was formed to manage the Cerritos—J. Bixby Company, half owned by Jotham and half by Flint, Bixby & Co. The new company had thirty thousand head of sheep, with 200,000 pounds of wool being sent annually to San Francisco, often via Anaheim Landing.

The partners invested in other projects—the Coast Stagecoach line, a Northern California sugar factory⁸ and the Ranchos Palos Verdes. By 1872, the men of Flint, Bixby & Co. were the largest non-railroad landholders in all of California. Their interests in eight ranchos totaled 334,000 acres—over 500 square miles.

But a mid-1870s drop in wool prices, another drought in Southern California and bad investments by Benjamin Flint almost ruined the company. Thomas Flint and Lewellyn Bixby bought out Ben, and to get out of debt, the company sold off many properties, including its share of the San Joaquin Ranch. Irvine paid the men $150,000—a nice return on their original $12,500 investment twelve years earlier.

In October 1871, another Bixby arrived in Southern California. John W. Bixby was not only a first cousin to Lewellyn and Jotham via their fathers but also a first cousin to the Flints through his mother, Deborah Flint.

He found work at the Cerritos Rancho, and then in October 1873, John W. Bixby married Susan Patterson Hathaway, the youngest sister of Lewellyn’s second wife, Mary, and Jotham’s wife, Margaret.⁹

The newlyweds moved to Wilmington, where their first child, Fred Hathaway Bixby, was born in 1875. Within a couple years, John and Susan were subleasing one thousand acres of Rancho Los Alamitos land when they heard that Alamitos owner Michael Reese had died and his will required that all his property be sold. John W. Bixby organized a partnership between himself, the J. Bixby Company (still half owned by Jotham and half by Lewellyn Bixby and Thomas Flint) and banker I.W. Hellman.

Hellman was president of the Farmers & Merchants Bank, Los Angeles’ largest bank,¹⁰ and already becoming the most important banker on the Pacific Coast. The Los Angeles Express reported on December 29, 1886, that Isaias paid the most taxes of any man in Los Angeles—more than $14,000.

Some reports have John W. first approaching the Farmers & Merchant Bank to lend him $125,000 to acquire the 26,392.5 acres of the Alamitos. Hellman reportedly said the bank couldn’t assume the risk but that he personally would lend half the requested money if John W. could convince his cousins Jotham and Lewellyn to do the same. J.W. did.¹¹

The new partnership formed the John W. Bixby Co., a name that did little to end confusion of the Bixby holdings. Since Thomas Flint and Lewellyn Bixby held half interest in the