Sixty Years in Southern California, 1853-1913 Containing the Reminiscences of Harris Newmark

I was born in Loebau, West Prussia, on the 5th of July, 1834, the son of Philipp and Esther, _née_ Meyer, Neumark; and I have reason to believe that I was not a very welcome gue...

In April, 1853, when I had reached the age of nineteen, and was expected to take a still more important part in our business--an arrangement perfectly agreeable to me--my father...

On September 20th, during some excitement due to the fear lest passengers from New Orleans afflicted with yellow-fever were being smuggled into the city despite the vigilance of...

Once fairly well settled here, I began to clerk for my brother, who in 1852 had bought out a merchant named Howard. For this service I received my lodging, the cost of my board,...

In the primitive fifties there were but comparatively few reputable lawyers in this neighborhood; nor was there, perhaps, sufficient call for their services to insure much of a...

Trivial events in a man's life sometimes become indelibly impressed on his memory; and one such experience of my own is perhaps worth mentioning as another illustration of the r...

About the time when I arrived, Assessor António F. Coronel reported an increase in the City and County assessment of over eight hundred and five thousand dollars, but the number...

At the time of my arrival, the Plaza, long the nucleus of the original settlement, was the center of life in the little community, and around it clustered the homes of many of t...

Many of the houses, as I have related, were clustered around and north of the Plaza Church, while the hills surrounding the pueblo to the West were almost bare. These same hills...

In June, 1854, my brother sold out, and I determined to establish myself in business and thus become my own master. My lack of knowledge of English was somewhat of a handicap; b...

As I have already related, I made fifteen hundred dollars in a few months, and in January, 1855, my brother advised me to form a partnership with men of maturer years. In this I...

From all accounts, Fourth of July was celebrated in Los Angeles with more or less enthusiasm from the time of the City's reorganization, although afterward, as we shall see, the...

Of the wonderful domains granted to the Spanish dons some were still in the possession of their descendants; some had passed into the hands of the Argonauts; but nothing in the...

During 1856, I dissolved with my partners, Rich and Laventhal, and went into business with my uncle, Joseph Newmark, J. P. Newmark and Maurice Kremer, under the title of Newmark...

In the beginning of 1857, we had a more serious earthquake than any in recent years. At half-past eight o'clock on the morning of January 9th, a tremor shook the earth from Nort...

In January, 1858, I engaged, in the sheep business. After some investigation, I selected and purchased for an insignificant sum, just west of the present Hollenbeck Home on Boyl...

In 1858, my brother, to whom the greater opportunities of San Francisco had long appealed, decided upon a step that was to affect considerably my own modest affairs. This was to...

In 1860, Maurice Kremer was elected County Treasurer, succeeding H. N. Alexander who had entered the service of Wells Fargo & Company; and he attended to this new function at hi...

Early in 1860, Phineas Banning and J. J. Tomlinson, the energetic rivals in lighterage and freighting at San Pedro, embarked as lumber merchants, thereby anticipating the enormo...

The year 1861 dawned dark and foreboding. On the twentieth of the preceding December, South Carolina had seceded, and along the Pacific, as elsewhere, men were anxiously wonderi...

When the Civil War began, California and the neighboring territory showed such pronounced Southern sympathies that the National Government kept both under close surveillance, fo...

On the first of January, 1862, after an experience of about five years, I retired from the selling of clothing, which was never congenial to me; and as I had been buying hides a...

Of all years of adversity before, during or since the Civil War, the seemingly interminable year of 1864 was for Southern California the worst. The varying moves in the great st...

From 1862 I continued for three years, as I have told, in the commission business; and notwithstanding the bad seasons, I was thus pursuing a sufficiently easy and pleasant exis...

The reader may already have noted that more than one important move in my life has been decided upon with but little previous deliberation. During August, 1866, while on the way...

It was early in 1869 that I was walking down Spring Street one day and saw a crowd at the City Hall. On a large box stood Mayor Joel H. Turner, and just as I arrived a man leani...

The Los Angeles & San Pedro Railroad continued in 1869 to be the local theme of most importance, although its construction did not go on as rapidly as had been promised. The sit...

As I have somewhere related, I began buying hides as far back as 1855, but it was not until 1870 that this branch of our business assumed such importance as to require more conv...

H. Newmark & Company enjoyed associations with nearly all of the most important wool men and _rancheros_ in Southern California, our office for many years being headquarters for...

As already stated, the price of wool in 1871 was exceedingly high and continued advancing until in 1872 when, as a result, great prosperity in Southern California was predicted....

Although a high school had been proposed for Los Angeles as early as 1860, it was not until 1873, during Dr. W. T. Lucky's superintendency and under his teaching, that high-scho...

Until near the end of the seventies, there was very little done toward the laying of sewers, although the reader will remember that a private conveyor connected the Bella Union...

Once Santa Monica's boom had been launched, the town developed as had few other suburbs of Los Angeles. Within nine or ten months a thousand inhabitants pointed with satisfactio...

Before the completion of the San Fernando tunnel, a journey East from Los Angeles by way of Sacramento was beset with inconveniences. The traveler was lucky if he obtained passa...

The late seventies were marked by an encouraging awakening of national energy and a growing desire on the part of the Angeleño, notwithstanding the excessive local dullness, to...

The year 1881 opened with what, for Los Angeles, was a curious natural phenomenon--snow falling in February and covering the streets and plains with a white mantle. So rare was...

Ten or twelve months after the starting of the first cable railway here, Los Angeles, in 1885, resumed the march of progress, this time with an electric street car line. Poles--...

Not as impulsively perhaps as on previous occasions, I left Los Angeles for Europe on April 30th, 1887, accompanied by my wife and our two children, Marco and Rose. Mrs. Eugene...

By agreement among property owners, the widening of Fort Street from Second to Ninth began in February, 1888. This was not accomplished without serious opposition, many persons...

Accompanied by my family, I traveled to Alaska, in 1892, going as far as Muir Glacier and visiting, among other places, Metlakahtla (where we met Father William Duncan, the famo...

A cloud, considerably larger than a man's hand, flecked the skies at the dawn of 1898 and troubled many who had been following the course of events in Cuba. So, too, like the th...

On January 1st, 1906, after more than half a century of commercial activity--with some things well done, and some poorly enough--during which it has never been my ambition to be...

At one o'clock in the morning of October 1st, 1910, occurred the most heinous crime in the history of Los Angeles. This was the dynamiting, by the evil element of union labor, o...