Claremont McKenna College - Ayer Yearbook (Claremont, CA)

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lived pastoral lives on this sprawling property, supporting themselves from cattle and subsistence agriculture. In the 18705 Americans began to arrive, spearheaded by Wil- liam Martin, who settled on some 156 acres centered 011 Eleventh Street and Indian Hill Boulevard, and Stephen Gale, who ran some 2,000 Angora goats from a home- stead near Pomello Avenue. It was the boom of the 18805 that Americanized the Pomona Valley and created the town of Claremont: a boom made possible by the overland arrival of the Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe Railroad, which reached San Bernardino in 1883 and Los Angeles in 1885, thereby giving Southern California its own direct railroad connection to the East. From the beginning, Claremont had strong New England origins and con- tinuing orientation. Its first developer, the Pacific Land and Improvement Company, was based in Boston; and it was in Boston that the name Claremont was chosen, the town site organized, the Claremont Hotel financed, and settlers were recruited. By January 1888, however, as the boom of the eighties began to go bust, auction sales of town sites dwindled into negligibility, and the sprawling gingerbread gothic Hotel Claremont on Fourth Street stood Virtually empty, having failed to attract visi- tors from the East. The failure of the hotel was especially worrisome; in the develop- ment of Southern California during this era, a resort hotel tthe Del Coronado in San Diego, the Virginia in Long Beach, the Mission Inn in Riverside, the Maryland in Pas- adena, the Wentworth in Santa Barbara, and, later, the Beverly Hills and the Brent- woodi anchored a proposed development, gave it identity, and recruited prospective settlers as first-time tourists who might decide to stay. Abusy hotel was a city in minia- ture, utopian in its amenities and service, foreshadowing the city that might be, once lot sites were auctioned and construction begun. An empty hotel, conversely, more than any Other factor, bespoke the fear that a surveyed town site might forever remain a phantom city. What to do? How best to reenergize the stalled town? Astutely, the Pacific Land and Improvement Company substituted a college for the hotel. Already, in September 1888, the board of trustees of Pomona College, a Congregationalist institution, had been attempting to build a structure in the Piedmont district on Scanlon Mesa. The president of the board of trustees was Henry Palmer, a principal in the Pacific Land and Improvement Company and a prime promoter of both the Piedmont and the Claremont developments. In Los Angeles, in 1880, equally interested developers had donated property to the Methodist church for the establishment of the University of Southern California in an effort to boost land values south of the downtown. Palmer . had a similar scheme in mind, but he and his Pomona College trustees were having no luck whatsoever raising funds now that the boom had begun to wane. By the fall of 1888, then, the trustees of Pomona College were looking for a building, and the Pacific Land and Improvement Company was looking for someone to take the Claremont 6 Claremont McKemrm College

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underfunded school, teaching an academically uneven student body in spartan Cir- cumstances, might achieve an advance in the dialogue between theory and practice that would be the envy of more established, even venerable institutions, could be criti- cized as naive, even delusional. Yet this was Claremont, Southern California, in 1946; and otherwise cautious businessmen, ignoring all objections and reservations, had launched an enterprise whose primary selling point lalthough sales were as of yet sluggishl was the promise of a new kind of academic institution in a new part of the United States. Ever since the 18805, in fact, and certainly from the 19205 onward, men and women of higher education and others of uncertain academic lineageeYankees, New Englanders, Congregationalists, real estate salesmen, retired missionaries, cit- rus growers, college peopleehad been projecting onto the tabula rasa of Claremont the dreams and metaphors of heightened expectation. Like all of Southern California in comparison to Northern California, Claremont eindeed, the entire Pomona Valley-had not experienced signihcant development until the boom of the 18805. In pre-European times, a band of Serrano Indians, 3 Sho- shonean people belonging to the Uto-Aztecan linguistic family, pitched their circular domed structures, some two hundred strong, on a mesa watered by a nearby creek and artesian springs to the east. Later, in the Spanish and Mexican era, when the region became part of the vast and sprawling properties of Mission San Gabriel, its geograph- ical features acquired their enduring names. The creek was named San Antonio in honor of St. Anthony. The great mountain range to the northeast, dominated by the 10,064-foot Mount San Antonio, was named the Sierra Madre, the Mother Range, which the Americans would later designate the San Gabriel Mountains, just as they named the site of the Serrano village Indian Hill and nicknamed the stately Mount San Antonio Old Baldy. Geologically, the future city of Claremont would arise in the center of a serni-desert alluvial fan carved by the rush of ancient waters down from the SanGabriel Moun- tains. lThis ancient flow survived as the San Antonio Creek and upon occasion, as in 1938, it could regain its ancient fury and wash into oblivion the roads and streets of the cityj This alluvial fan extended from San Antonio Canyon into the Pomona Valley. To the south was another, smaller mountain range, later designated the hills of Chino and Puente. It was a dry semi-desert region riddled with stones and boulders washed ClOWn in ancient times, sparse in its coverage of sagebrush and intermittent oak, abun- dant in deer, jack rabbits, burrowing rodents, and other desert animals. After the establishment of the Pueblo of Los Angeles in 1781, the region became forever fixed to that settlement as an avenue of approach, a corridor of passage, whether across cattle, sheep, or wagon trails, or Via interurban electrics or freeways. In 1837 the Mexican government deeded the.region to the Rancho San Jose owned by Don Ricardo Vejar and anacio Palomares. Two generations of Mexican landowners Fommtlnt-ing and F ounding the Enterprise, 1926-1946 5

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Hotel off its hands in such a way as to preserve land value, and Henry Palmer was at the center of both the company and the college. The result: an agreement signed on 21 October 1888 transferring the Hotel Claremont t0 Pomona College, together with the block of land on which the hotel stood and 260 additional lots. Under the agreement, the College was authorized to sell these lots, returning half the proceeds to the four principals of the Pacific Land and Improvement Company. A New England Congregationalist college had now become the prime developer of Claremont, Cali- fornia, Fixing the identity of the proposed City for the century to come. With Pomona College as its founding institution, its DNA code, Claremont was destined to develop as and remain a college town. In January 1890 college-level and preparatory classes commenced in the erstwhile Hotel Claremont, now renamed Claremont Hall. Until the arrival that year of the Rev- erend Cyrus Grandison Baldwin, the first president, one of the founders of Pomona College, the Reverend Charles Sumner tGeorge C. S. Bensonis grandfather; hence the initials C. S. insistently inserted between his first and family namesi, served as chief Financial ofhcer, faculty dean, secretary to the board of trustees, and de facto president of the fledgling institution. In later years Reverend Sumner, white haired and white bearded, dignified in his vested suit and old-fashioned upright collar, sur- vived as the beloved patriarch of the Old Guard, as the founding faculty of Pomona eventually became known: the men and one woman tPhebe Estelle Spalding, the First female faculty member at Pomona Collegei who had brought New England values and the New England way of life to the city of Claremont. Over the next thirty years, Claremont Village, as the City was informally called, developed as an enclave of New England in Southern California. It centered on Pomona College, from which so many derived their income; the Webb School, the Norton School for Boys, and Girls Colle- giate, three private preparatory institutions; the Claremont Church, where the ma- jority of the city worshipped; the first-rate public grammar and high school, where children prepared for college; and the Village itself, its stores lining streets named Harvard and Yale, with no saloons allowed. College, prep schools, church: Claremont was an enclave of Anglo-Arnerican Protestant value paradigmatic of the demograph- ics of Southern California in the pre-World War II era, only more New England than Midwestern, like Pasadena and Whittier, in origins and orientation. Unified by college, school, religion, lifestyle, and ethnic identity, Claremont was a cohesive township. In the summertime, there were communal picnics and camp-outs in Bear Canyon. The Pomona College glee club gave public performances; and the College opened many of its circles and organizationsethe Rembrandt Club, for ex- ampleeto townspeople. There was a Claremont String Quartet, another town-ande gown enterprise. Even citrus, the primary local industry outside of education, sus- tained this tone of refinement and gentility. By the early 19005 the orange and lemon Formulating and Founding the Enterprise, 1926-1946 7