Claremont McKenna College - Ayer Yearbook (Claremont, CA)

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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

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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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groves carpeting the Pomona Valley had brought into being one of the most beautiful, indeed Virgilian, agricultural landscapes in North America. The Pomona Valley, including Claremont, was at the very heart of this citrus culture. In 1892-93 eleven Claremont growers organized the Claremont Fruitgrowers Association, to which was added at a later date the El Camino Citrus Association, the College Heights Orange and Lemon Association, and the Indian Hill Citrus Association. By1915these cooper- atives were shipping more than $2.1 million of citrus a year in boxes adorned with the colorful labelseCollegiate, Valley View, Morning Gloryedepicting Claremont, Po- mona College, and vicinity. Naturally, this being Claremont, growers took a scholarly approach to citrus. In 1894 a circle of Claremont growers organized the Pomological Club, under the presidency of A. J. Cook, professor of horticulture at Pomona Col- lege. Charles Sumner was also a member. By the 19205, then, Claremont, California, a college town in the New England man- ner, had come into its own. It was a refined and seIf-respecting community of some 3,000 residents, its daily life reported by a full-size, four-page weekly, the Courier, founded in 1911; its population lived in charming Victorian, Edwardian, Craftsman, and Spanish Revival homes. Already, two generations of tree planting had taken ef- fect, and Claremont, a semi-arid desert in earlierphotographs, had verymuch become an arboreal garden suggestive of the best possibilities of horticulture and landscape architecture in Southern California. Also suggestive of the larger Southern California, this time in human terms, were two Mexican-American communities, one on the southeast and the other on the southwest edge of the town. Separated from Anglo Claremont by ethnicity and reli- gion, barrio Claremont showed the same tendencies toward propriety and communal life. The men and women of barrio Claremont, first of all, had jobSein citrus and construction tespecially stone crafti, as gardeners and other staff at Pomona and the secondary schools-and they equally prized family life and religion, centered on the Roman Catholic Church of the Sacred Heart tbuilt, in part, from donations from the congregation at the Claremont Churchi. The families of the barrio Enriquez, Hermosilla, Gutierrez, Serna, Rubio, Torres, Contreras, and Sevillaewere likewise proud of their ancestry, traced in their case back to Mexico and Spain. Like their A11- glo counterparts, they valued education, albeit their children were kept in segregated schools, up to the fourth grade, until the mid-194os. Barrio Claremont showed an equally characteristic taste for social organization and the arts. While Anglo Claremont supported the Claremont Community Players, which mounted productions in the indoor-outdoor Padua Hills Theater complex, bar- rio Claremont also produced programs there of traditional Mexican songs and dances linked by storytelling and spontaneous recitation. The parallel nature of these pre- sentations tperformed in tandem with English-language drama for a largely English 8 C laremont M cKemm College