Sixty Years in Southern California, 1853-1913. Harris Newmark
had three thousand dollars surplus, there was still no school building which the City could call its own. New trustees—Manuel Requena, Francis Mellus and W. T. B. Sanford—were elected; and then happened what, perhaps, has not occurred here since, or ever in any other California town: Foster, still Mayor, was also chosen School Superintendent. The new energy put into the movement now led the Board to build, late in 1854 or early in 1855, a two-story brick schoolhouse, known as School No. 1, on the northwest corner of Spring and Second streets, on the lot later occupied, first by the old City Hall and secondly by the Bryson Block. This structure cost six thousand dollars. Strange as it now seems, the location was then rather "out in the country;" and I dare say the selection was made, in part, to get the youngsters away from the residential district around the Plaza. There school was opened on March 19th, 1855; William A. Wallace, a botanist who had been sent here to study the flora, having charge of the boys' department and Miss Louisa Hayes directing the division for girls. Among her pupils were Sarah Newmark and her sisters; Mary Wheeler, who married William Pridham; and Lucinda Macy, afterward Mrs. Foy, who recalls participating in the first public school examination, in June, 1856. Dr. John S. Griffin, on June 7th, 1856, was elected Superintendent. Having thus established a public school, the City Council voted to discontinue all subsidies to private schools.
One of the early school-teachers was the pioneer, James F. Burns. Coming with an emigrant train in 1853, Burns arrived in Los Angeles, after some adventures with the Indians near what was later the scene of the Mountain Meadow Massacre, in November of the same year. Having been trained in Kalamazoo, Michigan, as a teacher, Burns settled, in 1854, in San Gabriel; and there with Cæsar C. Twitchell, he conducted a cross-roads school in a tent. Later, while still living at San Gabriel, Burns was elected County School Superintendent. Before reaching here—that is, at Provo, Utah, on September 25th—the young schoolmaster had married Miss Lucretia Burdick, aunt of Fred Eaton's first wife. Burns, though of small stature, became one of the fighting sheriffs of the County.
Among others who conducted schools in Los Angeles or vicinity, in the early days, were Mrs. Adam Bland, wife of the missionary; H. D. Barrows and the Hoyts. Mrs. Bland taught ten or twelve poor girls, in 1853, for which the Common Council allowed her about thirty-five dollars. Barrows was one of several teachers employed by William Wolfskill at various times, and at Wolfskill's school not merely were his own children instructed but those of the neighboring families of Carpenter, Rowland and Pleasants as well. Mrs. Gertrude Lawrence Hoyt was an Episcopal clergyman's wife from New York who, being made a widow, followed her son, Albert H. Hoyt, to Los Angeles in 1853. Young Hoyt, a graduate of Rutgers College and a teacher excited by the gold fever, joined a hundred and twenty men who chartered the bark Clarissa Perkins to come around the Horn, in 1849; but failing as a miner, he began farming near Sacramento. When Mrs. Hoyt came to Los Angeles, she conducted a private school in a rented building north of the Plaza, beginning in 1854 and continuing until 1856; while her son moved south and took up seventy or eighty acres of land in the San Gabriel Valley, near El Monte. In 1855, young Hoyt came into town to assist his mother in the school; and the following year Mrs. Hoyt's daughter, Mary, journeyed West and also became a teacher here. Later, Miss Hoyt kept a school on Alameda Street near the site of the Los Angeles & San Pedro Railroad depot. Mrs. Hoyt died in Los Angeles in 1863. Other early teachers were William McKee, Mrs. Thomas Foster and Miss Anna McArthur.
As undeveloped as the pueblo was, Los Angeles boasted, in her very infancy, a number of physicians, although there were few, if any, Spanish or Mexican practitioners. In 1850, Drs. William B. Osburn, W. W. Jones, A. W. Hope, A. P. Hodges and a Dr. Overstreet were here; while in 1851, Drs. Thomas Foster, John Brinckerhoff and James P. McFarland followed, to be reënforced, in 1852, by Dr. James B. Winston and, soon after, by Drs. R. T. Hayes, T. J. White and A. B. Hayward. Dr. John Strother Griffin (General Albert Sidney Johnston's brother-in-law and the accepted suitor of Miss Louisa Hayes) came to Los Angeles in 1848, or rather to San Gabriel—where, according to Hugo Reid, no physician had settled, though the population took drugs by the barrel; being the ranking surgeon under Kearney and Stockton when, on January 8th, they drove back the Mexican forces. He was also one of the hosts to young W. T. Sherman. Not until 1854, however, after Griffin had returned to Washington and had resigned his commission, did he actually settle in Los Angeles. Thereafter, his participation in local affairs was such that, very properly, one of our avenues is named after him. Dr. Richard S. Den antedated all of these gentlemen, having resided and practiced medicine in Los Angeles in 1843, 1844 and again in the early fifties, though he did not dwell in this city permanently until January, 1866. Den I knew fairly well, and Griffin was my esteemed physician and friend. Foster and Griffin were practitioners whom I best recall as being here during my first years, one or two others, as Dr. Osburn and Dr. Winston, having already begun to devote their time to other enterprises.
Dr. Richard S. Den, an Irishman of culture and refinement, having been for awhile with his brother, Nicholas Den, in Santa Bárbara, returned to Los Angeles in 1851. I say, "returned," because Den had looked in on the little pueblo before I had even heard its name. While in the former place, in the winter of 1843–44, Den received a call from Los Angeles to perform one or two surgical operations, and here he practiced until drawn to the mines by the gold excitement. He served, in 1846–47, as Chief Physician and Surgeon of the Mexican forces during the Mexican War, and treated, among others, the famous American Consul Larkin, whose surety he became when Larkin was removed to better quarters in the home of Louis Vignes. Den had only indifferent luck as a miner, but was soon in such demand to relieve the sufferers from malaria that it is said he received as much as a thousand dollars in a day for his practice. In 1854, he returned to Santa Bárbara County, remaining there for several years and suffering great loss, on account of the drought and its effects on his cattle. Nicholas Den, who was also known in Los Angeles, and was esteemed for both his integrity and his hospitality, died at Santa Bárbara in 1862.
Old Dr. Den will be remembered, not only with esteem, but with affection. He was seldom seen except on horseback, in which fashion he visited his patients, and was, all in all, somewhat a man of mystery. He rode a magnificent coal-black charger, and was himself always dressed in black. He wore, too, a black felt hat; and beneath the hat there clustered a mass of wavy hair as white as snow. In addition to all this, his standing collar was so high that he was compelled to hold his head erect; and as if to offset the immaculate linen, he tied around the collar a large black-silk scarf. Thus attired and seated on his richly-caparisoned horse, Dr. Den appeared always dignified, and even imposing. One may therefore easily picture him a friendly rival with Don Juan Bandini at the early Spanish balls, as he was on intimate terms with Don and Doña Abel Stearns, acknowledged social leaders. Dr. Den was fond of horse-racing and had his own favorite racehorses sent here from Santa Bárbara, where they were bred.
Dr. Osburn, the Postmaster of 1853, had two years before installed a small variety of drugs on a few shelves, referred to by the complimentary term of drug store. Dr. Winston also kept a stock of drugs. About the same time, and before Dr. A. W. Hope opened the third drug store in September, 1854, John Gately Downey, an Irishman by birth, who had been apprenticed to the drug trade in Maryland and Ohio, formed a partnership with James P. McFarland, a native of Tennessee, buying some of Winston's stock. Their store was a long, one-story adobe on the northwest corner of Los Angeles and Commercial streets, and was known as McFarland & Downey's. The former had been a gold-miner; and this experience intensified the impression of an already rugged physique as a frontier type. Entering politics, as Osburn and practically every other professional man then did—doubtless as much as anything else for the assurance of some definite income—McFarland secured a seat in the Assembly in 1852, and in the Senate in 1853–54. About 1858, he returned to Tennessee and in December, 1860, revisited California; after which he settled permanently in the East. Downey, in 1859, having been elected Lieutenant-Governor, was later made Governor, through the election of Latham to the United States Senate; but his suddenly-revealed sympathies with the Secessionists, together with his advocacy of a bill for the apprenticing of Indians, contributed toward killing him politically and he retired to private life. Dr. H. R. Myles, destined to meet with a tragic death in a steamboat disaster which I shall narrate, was another druggist, with a partner, Dr. J. C. Welch, a South Carolinian dentist who came here in the early fifties and died in August, 1869. Their drug store on Main Street, nearly opposite the Bella Union, filled the prescriptions of the city's seven or eight doctors.