Anglo and Mexican American farmers took their place during the war years. The Montana Land Company inserted restrictive covenants in the deeds of all the properties it sold that limited ownership of the land to buyers who were white and non-Jewish. Elsewhere in Los Angeles County, federal housing agencies "red lined" neighborhoods that were racially mixed, preventing homeowners from getting federally-backed mortgages. When war work ended, employment for African Americans faded.
Racial discrimination affected the Lakewood-area workforce as well. In the war year of , Douglas Aircraft had 2, black workers. Northern American Aviation had 2,, and Lockheed Vega had 1, But after , the proportion of black workers at North American dropped from seven percent to three percent and from eight percent to one percent at Douglas.
With the war over, Bonner began making plans to expand home construction in Lakewood for the thousands of veterans who were expected to head to California. In , Hopper and Bonner drew up a development plan for the Montana Ranch that was remarkably similar to the Lakewood of today. Those dreams were cut short in late when Bonner, still in his fifties, died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage. Today, most traces of Clark Bonner's role in Lakewood have disappeared. The Montana Ranch offices and barns on Arbor Road were razed in the s.
A few of the ranch's eucalyptus trees remain near the offices of the Lakewood Water Resources Department. He was told that no one now knew where it was. Through his efforts, a new plaque honoring Bonner was dedicated in Sarah first wrote about her childhood in a brief memoir published by the Historical Society of Southern California in In her recollection, the family business of sheep ranching was the most significant fact of her young life.
The fun of life was at the sheep ranches, the Alamitos or the Cerritos, at each of which lived an uncle and aunt and some double cousins, and at which I made long and frequent visits. We ate sheep, smelled sheep, saw sheep, heard sheep, talked sheep; we lived, moved and had our being in, for and by sheep.
There were sometimes as many as thirty thousand on this ranch Los Cerritos alone. We had got into the business in the early days of our being in California, long before I was dreamed of. Sheep dipping at Rancho Los Alamitos in the s. Northerner on July 7, After a brief attempt at gold mining, the Bixby and Flint cousins turned to sheep raising, bringing a herd of more than 2, sheep from the Midwest to Southern California overland. They prospered and Bixby family members eventually purchased both the Cerritos and Alamitos ranchos.
Sarah Bixby remembered the hard lives of the herders and the work of the twice-yearly shearing. Most of the sheep … lived out on the ranges in bands of about two thousand under the care of a sheepherder and several dogs. These men lived lonely lives, usually seeing no one between the weekly visits of the man with supplies from the ranch.
Twice a year, spring and fall, the sheep came up to be sheared, dipped and counted. Father usually attended to the count himself, as he could keep tally without confusion. He would stand by a narrow passage between two corrals, and as the sheep went crowding through he would count and keep tally by cutting notches on a willow stick. As soon as the shearing was well under way the dipping began. This was managed by the members of the family and the regular men on the ranch.
In the corral east of the barn was the brick fireplace with the big tank on top where the "dip" was brewed, scalding tobacco soup, seasoned with sulfur, and I do not know what else.
This mess was served hot in a long, narrow, sunken tub, with a vertical end near the cauldron, and a sloping, cleated floor at the other. Into this steaming bath each sheep was thrown, it must swim fifteen or twenty feet to safety, and during the passage its head must be pushed beneath the surface.
How glad it must have been when its feet struck bottom at the far end, and it could scramble out to safety. How it shook itself, and what a taste it must have had in its mouth. I am afraid Madam Sheep cherished hard feelings against her universe. She did not know that her over-ruling providence was saving her from the miseries of a bad skin disease. Now the sheep are all gone, and the shearers and dippers are gone, too. The pastoral life gave way to the agricultural and that in turn to the town and city.
There is Long Beach. Once it was cattle range, then sheep pasture, then, when I first knew it, a barley field with one shed standing about where Pine and First streets cross. And the beach was our own private, wonderful beach; and we children felt that our world was reeling when the beach was sold and called Willmore City.
Nobody now knows what a wide, smooth, long beach it was. It was covered with shells and piles of kelp and a broad band of tiny clams; there were gulls and many little shore birds, and never a footprint except the few we made, only to be washed away by the next tide.
Two or three times a summer we would go over from the ranch for a day, and beautiful days we had, racing on the sand or going into the breakers with father or uncle …. All these things happened once upon a time in the long ago, and now we children are all grown up, and grandfather, father and mother and uncles … live only in the changeless land of memory.
The shipbuilding industry hurriedly expanded and eventually employed more than , workers, many of them at the Long Beach Naval Shipyard. Suburban Lakewood entered the war, too. The most important defense employer in Lakewood was the Douglas Aircraft Company, whose 1.
Douglas workers delivered their first C transport plane to the Army just sixteen days after the December 7 attack on Pearl Harbor. To protect workers and vital machinery, the steel frame structure was lined with metal siding, and the entire plant was camouflaged to make it appear from the air to be a tract of suburban houses.
In November , Douglas employed just 7, workers. An estimated 47, were building planes by May Approximately 57 percent of them were women.
By the end of the war, 87 percent were women — the highest proportion in the country for an aircraft production facility. The plant built more than 4, Douglas C transport planes, 3, heavy bombers under license from Boeing, and more than 2, Douglas light bombers.
They flew new Douglas planes to military bases across the nation. After the war ended, most war plants were sold to their operators, usually for a fraction of their construction cost. The end of the war also brought an end to wartime employment. But military procurement picked up later in the decade, and by the start of the Korean War in , Douglas Aircraft in Long Beach was busy assembling Globemaster transport planes and the Skyhawk bomber.
In , after enormous effort, Douglas produced its first jet airliner — the famed DC Boeing was becoming dominant with its , , , and models. The DC-8 remained extremely popular, however, as did the DC-9, which went into service in Facing more financial reverses, Douglas agreed to merge with St.
Louis-based McDonnell Aircraft Corporation. At one point in the s, one in ten Lakewood households depended on a paycheck or pension from MDC. In the s and early s, the company introduced other models and configurations, some which sold well and others that did not return the cost of their development.
The aerospace industry managed a broad recovery during the mids due to the Reagan-era defense buildup. But defense spending soon leveled off, and the end of the Cold War in led to rapid downsizing.
The C, despite some start-up troubles, became the workhorse of military transport after The ups and downs of the aerospace industry are remembered in Lakewood as cycles of strikes, layoffs, and rehiring, a pattern that generations of Douglas, MDC, and Boeing workers endured. In , Boeing laid off close to 26, of its Long Beach workers. But aircraft production in Long Beach was nearing an end.
Contracts with foreign military purchasers kept the C production line going, but eventually even those sales ended. Boeing Realty made plans in the early s to turn acres of the original Douglas plant into office buildings and light industrial shops.
Left behind were two vast hangers where DCs had been assembled; one of them was leased in to automaker Mercedes Benz. On its south-facing side of the hanger, still lighted at night, is a huge neon sign that continues to urge airline passengers to "Fly DC Jets. The Los Angeles and San Gabriel rivers were once known as "tramp rivers" because of their habit of wandering over the Coastal Plain south of Los Angeles.
In the s, the San Gabriel River actually flowed several miles west of the Lakewood area. After more flooding in the s, the river found a new bed east of Lakewood approximately in its current location. Even in the early s, Bellflower and Artesia residents reported that the bed of San Gabriel River might shift as much as a mile between one winter storm and the next.
The Los Angeles River was even more footloose. After , the river flowed more or less south and emptied into San Pedro Bay. This channel, however, was only provisional. Just a few inches of sudden rain could send the river down one of its old beds. At one point in the late 19th century, the San Gabriel River captured the Los Angeles River north of the Lakewood area, and the merged rivers flowed together to the sea at Long Beach.
More flooding in led to the start of channelization of the wayward river, beginning with a system of dikes and levees at the foot of downtown Los Angeles. By , the Los Angeles River was bound for much of its course south of the city by levees and railroad embankments. In , both the Los Angeles and San Gabriel rivers flooded again, after a four-day storm dropped nineteen inches of rain.
Water stood five feet deep in low-lying parts of the Montana Ranch. The flooding also threatened the new Los Angeles Harbor and the trade that would come with the opening of the Panama Canal in Harbor interests urged voters to create a County Flood Control District to manage the river.
The Los Angeles Times opposed the plan. Few Los Angeles residents lived in flood-prone areas, the paper argued, but a countywide district would assess every household for flood protection regardless of the threat. Lacking a comprehensive plan, Los Angeles raised more levees to direct the course of the river.
It flooded catastrophically in killing as many as countywide. Less severe flooding troubled the river 14 times after Modest rainfall could flood Lakewood in the s. In response, the Army Corps of Engineers confined the Los Angeles and San Gabriel rivers in concrete walls, and built miles of flood control channels, 2, miles of underground storm drains, four reservoirs, six major dams, and more than 22 smaller flood control structures.
And without them, the land would not have been eligible for development. The designation would require homeowners to get costly federal flood insurance.
Flood control improvements spared most residents the cost of flood insurance. Lakewood city officials reacted with a mix of lobbying efforts, community education, and technical studies. The city paid for a survey showing that 5, of the 13, properties in the proposed flood hazard zone in Lakewood were exempt from insurance requirements because they were actually above the level of potential flooding.
The city also held workshops to help residents learn the new flood insurance obligations. And city officials met with federal agency representatives and members of Congress to urge quick action to restore flood protection. To end the threat, the city joined with other communities in the hazard zone to push Congress to fund flood protection restoration along the Los Angeles River. They succeeded.
When the project was completed in December , flood protection was restored and flood insurance requirements eased. Edward Bouton, like so many newcomers to Los Angeles in the late 19th century, was a Civil War veteran. He had served as an artillery commander in General William T. Like other entrepreneurs, Bouton planned to profit during t he real estate boom of by building a speculative townsite on the Cerritos Rancho property he had recently purchased.
He laid out a plan for homes and farms roughly east of what is now Cherry Avenue and north of Carson Street. Bouton drilled for water on his land to supply his own needs and neighboring farms.
Water — in the form of flowing artesian wells — was already being tapped on land nearby, giving Bouton confidence that he would strike water on his own property. Bouton brought in his first well in August A spectacular new well in was a "genuine gusher. Over the next five years, they frantically laid out miles of streets and erected 17, homes in assembly-line fashion. Time Magazine called this new community the largest housing development in the world. One salesman sold homes in one hour.
Aerial view of Lakewood Park development, In , the developers also built the massive Lakewood Center Mall. Native Americans who lived in the Los Angeles area spoke a language distinct from their neighbors to the North and South of them.
They have come to be known as Gabrielino, because many of those who survived European diseases and the disruption of their normal trade patterns and culture went to the Mission San Gabriel in Los Angeles, some voluntarily, others only when confronted by force.
When the Europeans arrived, they discovered many Indian villages between the Pacific Ocean and the San Gabriel mountains. The Gabrielino lived in domed, circular structures with thatched exteriors.
Both men and women wore their hair long and used a vegetable charcoal dye and thorns of flint slivers to tattoo their bodies. They required very few clothes, though women usually donned deerskin or bark aprons, and all might wear animal skin capes in cold or wet weather. Those who lived near the coast ate fish and other seafood, in addition to acorns, seeds, roots, and small game animals.
Nevertheless, during the late s and early s, after dominating the Los Angeles area for hundreds of years, those Gabrielino who did not flee were gradually moved to Spanish missions. Many became laborers for local landowners. Most eventually adopted a more European lifestyle. In the Lakewood area, Gabrielinos established small villages while continuing to migrate to take advantage of seasonal resources. They lived by hunting and fishing rather than by agriculture, though once European settlers arrived in the late s they were soon put to work on Rancho San Pedro and the San Gabriel Mission and helped bolster the economic success of the mission.
In what is now Lakewood, the Indians lived on the plains, which were mostly semi-arid but during heavy rainy seasons got so much rain that the rivers overflowed their banks, creating marshy areas. By the nineteenth century their numbers decreased rapidly due to diseases such as smallpox for which they had no immunity. Los Angeles Original Peoples. Gabrielino Tongva Springs Foundation.
Lakewood was first populated by Gabrielino Indians who were hunters and gatherers but did not become involved in agricultural pursuits. That changed after Spanish explorer Gaspar de Portola arrived in , followed shortly after by missionaries and ranchers who put the Gabrielinos to work on ranch and mission projects. In the s, Manuel R. Nieto received a land grant to graze cattle. The property went through a succession of owners in the s and around was renamed the Bixby Investment Company, though the land retained its ranching purpose through the 19th century.
In the Montana Land Company bought a large parcel of the property, which it leased out for farming and grazing purposes. Lakewood has been mostly a bedroom community to nearby industries that include Douglas Aircraft, North American Aviation, Long Beach Naval Shipyards, and Aerojet General, as well as other regional manufacturing plants.
It has attracted some companies who do research and development, including the Purex Corporation, which is located in Lakewood Center. City of Lakewood -The Lakewood Plan. With your LA County Library card, you can download or stream eBooks, eAudiobooks, magazines, music, and movies on your computer, tablet, or phone. It's free and you'll never have to worry about overdue fines! Have you walked into a library and wished you could check out more books than you could possibly carry?
Check out a Kindle Paperwhite at participating libraries with a collection of titles that you are sure to enjoy. Each Kindle has been loaded with expert-selected books. These Centers provide enhanced resources, computer technology, and homework helpers to support the educational needs of students in these communities. Online Homework Help is also available on the Internet computers in all County libraries and from home computers during designated hours.
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