Letters from the Sphinx: The William Allens in England, Egypt, and the San Gabriel Valley

By Paul C. Rollins

Spanning one hundred years and three continents, Letters from the Sphinx tells the story of the William Allens, an Old World family swept up in a New World sea of change. Incorporating sources from the United Kingdom and Egypt; previously unpublished diaries, photographs, and letters held in private collections; and journals housed at the Huntington Library, the biography describes one man's desperate pursuit of self that takes him from England to Egypt and back again before he sets sail, sick and alone, for Southern California. His story-and that of his wife and children-unfolds in unexpected ways against the backdrop of the San Gabriel Valley at a time when the foothills were a riot of golden poppies and the earth was untilled and bursting with opportunity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Covenant Books, Inc.
• Release date: Apr 13, 2021
• ISBN: 9781644687215

Book preview

cover.jpg

Letters

from the

Sphinx

The William Allens in England, Egypt, and the San Gabriel Valley

Paul C. Rollins

ISBN 978-1-64468-719-2 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64468-720-8 (Hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-64468-721-5 (Digital)

Copyright © 2020 Paul C. Rollins

All rights reserved

First Edition

Portraits on cover and back of the book:

Photographic portraits of Emily Jane Bell and William Allen believed to have been taken in Alexandria at the time of their engagement, c. 1857.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Covenant Books, Inc.

11661 Hwy 707

Murrells Inlet, SC 29576

www.covenantbooks.com

Table of Contents

Introduction

Acknowledgments

The San Gabriel Valley, 1878

The English Visitor

Mountain Home Ranch

California Prelude

A Lancashire Lad, 1821–1847

Alexandria, 1847–1864

Emily Jane Bell, 1840–1864

Bath and Biarritz, 1864–1878

A Place to Call Home

Summer, 1879

The Sphinx, 1879–1880

The Harvest, 1880–1886

Highland Life, 1880–1886

Post Mortem

Lamanda Park, 1886–1889

Hard Times, 1890–1898

The End of an Era, 1899–1911

Altadena, 1911–1923

Epilogue

Appendices

Select Bibliography

Image Sources

To Pat and Eldrid

Introduction

A move from Atlanta to Southern California resulted in my buying a 1929 Spanish Colonial Revival bungalow overlooking Pasadena’s Eaton Canyon, a deep, narrow gash in the western wall of the San Gabriel Mountains. The house, built entirely of blue granite, and its locale, set against the rugged mountainside, stimulated my curiosity about the area’s past and ultimately led me to research the history of the house and ownership of the lot.

My half-acre, I learned, was once part of an enormous tract belonging to the Mission San Gabriel Arcangel built in 1771, the fourth of the twenty-one Roman Catholic missions the Spanish established along the California coast. When Mexico succeeded Spanish rule, the Mexican government attempted to rid itself of Spanish influence throughout the region by taking land away from the church and granting huge tracts to Mexican loyalists. In 1826, my lot was contained within a massive 14,000-acre land grant called Rancho San Pasqual in the San Gabriel Valley northeast of the Pueblo of Los Angeles. Rancho San Pasqual, like many other land grants, changed hands numerous times before being acquired in 1867 by American businessmen Benjamin (Don Benito) Wilson and John S. Griffin, the pair who divided the rancho and sold progressively smaller tracts at a profit. On December 28, 1873, they sold almost 4,000 acres of the rancho to the Indiana Colonists, who went on to found Pasadena in 1875.

In 1879, my lot, three miles north of Pasadena, became part of a 500-acre tract known as the Sphinx ranch owned by the William Allens, a refined British mercantile family who lived in England and Egypt before immigrating to the San Gabriel Valley. Because of their early chronology, arriving five years after the Indiana Colonists, the Allens are mentioned in most local histories. Nevertheless, little is known about one of the valley’s most prestigious pioneer families.

They were not impoverished homesteaders but sprang from an international merchant class that benefitted from a combination of skillful business dealings, fortuitous timing, and well-placed family connections. Neither aristocratic nor pretentious, they did, however, maintain patrician attitudes toward culture, money, and privilege—attributes that earned them the respect of Southern California’s gentry. Throughout the 1880s, the Allens rubbed elbows with names that tumble out of the history books. However, their inner circle was largely a function of geographical proximity. Their Old Settler friends—the James Craigs, James F. Cranks, Albert Brigdens, and Abbot Kinneys—lived within two miles of the Sphinx, their five contiguous ranches occupying an area extending from the base of the San Gabriel Mountains south to what is now Villa Street and from Allen Avenue in the west to Eaton Canyon and beyond, to the Kinneloa Mesa in the east.¹

Known to pull up chairs around the Allen table were the widow and second wife of Benjamin Don Benito Wilson; Don Benito’s daughters and sons-in-law, Mr. and Mrs. de Barth Shorb and Mr. and Mrs. George S. Patton, the latter the future parents of the World War II general; vintner and horse breeder Leonard J. Rose and his wife Amanda, after whom Lamanda Park was named; Alfred Chapman, co-developer of the cities of Glendale and Orange; civil engineer Gervaise Purcell, recently of Japan; future California Governor George Stoneman; and Pasadena bon vivant Bayard T. Smith—all rancheros of means and substance. Often, the bustling Sphinx ranch threatened to burst at the seams should another carriage arrive along the dusty road up the mountainside.² Little wonder 140 years on, the Allens are still remembered as the center of highland social life in the 1880s.

The Allens also played a pivotal role in the valley’s early development. In addition to introducing commerce to the region, they brought life to an otherwise inhospitable landscape. They piped water from nearby Eaton Canyon, planted hundreds of acres of citrus groves and grape vines, and enriched the land thereby setting the stage for the area’s accelerated growth after the turn of the century.

William Allen (1821–1886) was born into a middle class Lancashire family at a time when the streets and alleyways of Liverpool and Manchester, England were replete with Dickensian images of beggars and workhouses. His father, who managed one of several Allen family cotton mills, was the traditional Victorian paterfamilias. His word was law. Consequently, fifteen-year-old William had little to say about his father’s decision to indenture him straight out of grammar school as an apprentice to a Liverpool textile brokerage house—an indenture that lasted seven years. Even after his father died, William was unable to pursue his own interests. His uncles, Richard and John Allen, took charge of his future and shipped him off to Egypt to establish a commercial beachhead in Alexandria. Until then, William had never ventured far from Lancashire. The family also saw to it that William’s two brothers were similarly employed in textile brokerage in the home market. But theirs was a life unfulfilled. Neither ever married, and both died in Liverpool asylums in their thirties, one of syphilis.

Although Egyptian commerce made William a wealthy man, his heart was not in the business, and he abandoned Egypt and the cotton trade at the age of forty-two. He was also in declining health, which caused him to stew over his own mortality—a worry heightened by the early deaths of his father and three of his four siblings. In 1864, he retreated to the spa city of Bath, England, a locale he hoped would restore his vitality. But the move was in vain. His health worsened.

It took Charles Nordhoff’s California: For Health, Pleasure, and Residence (1873) to alter his outlook and destiny. William pored over the pages of the international bestseller, imagining himself Nordhoff’s gentleman farmer strolling among the citrus orchards and grapevines of the San Gabriel Valley. He became obsessed with Nordhoff’s euphoric descriptions and, at the age of fifty-six, sailed to America, sick and alone, at a time when most of his contemporaries had settled into easy chairs before roaring fireplaces. Five months later, he returned to England, convinced that his future lay across the broad expanse of an ocean and a continent. The following year, William and his family immigrated to America. But his dream did not last long. Within seven years, he was dead, stranding his wife and children five thousand miles from home.

William Allen is not remembered in manuscripts, and no anecdotes about him survive among his descendants. Nevertheless, his personality emerges in letters, diaries, and the decisions he made. They reveal the stereotypical Victorian Englishman, probably much like his own father, soft-spoken, polite, courteous, and responsible; his behaviors those of an accountant—careful, studied, meticulous, exacting, organized and, one would assume, void of spontaneity. His was a calculated life, leaving little to chance. Every action was planned, scheduled, costed out, and weighed against its attendant risk.

Yet William Allen was more than a rigid, moralistic specimen of Victorian manhood. Denied a life of his own by his father and uncles, and in steadily declining health, he longed for a different kind of existence. When the old and ancient worlds failed to satisfy his yearnings, he became fixated on the new and set his sights on Southern California because of its curative climate and the opportunity to pursue his own interests.

His wife was not keen on the idea. Emily Jane Bell (1840–1911) was nineteen when she married thirty-seven-year-old William Allen in Egypt in 1859. The offspring of an indifferent father and a classically trained mother, she grew up in the English expat community of Ramleh, an upper-crust watering hole just east of Alexandria. After her mother gave birth to eight children in rapid succession, she died an early death—some say from apoplexy, others, from poison.³ Thereafter, Emily’s father married a youthful cousin whom he barely knew and by whom he sired three more children. He buried her within five years, rendering sixteen-year-old Emily the de facto lady of the house.

Like most young women of the period, Emily desired nothing more than a quiet conventional life as a supportive wife and loving mother. She saw in William a serious, well-mannered Englishman, someone capable of providing the security that was her due as a young lady of breeding. Throughout their marriage, the social order of the day required she acquiesce to him in all matters. To do otherwise was unthinkable. Convention required she support him, bear what would be ten children, and manage the household—duties she fulfilled faithfully for nearly thirty years. But after William’s death, she revealed herself a formidable woman. In true English stiff-upper-lip fashion, she picked up the pieces of her broken family to forge the path forward.

William left a legacy none of his survivors wanted. The Sphinx was his dream, not theirs. Neither his wife nor children bargained for a life of harvesting grapes and citrus fruit on a remote mountainside half a world away from their native England. Too far in to turn back, Emily had no choice but to make her late husband’s dream a reality. Initially, she relied on the English system of primogeniture, turning to her firstborn son to help shoulder the burden. However, a series of costly mistakes sent him packing, and he left California, unwilling to return for twenty years. Meanwhile, his younger brothers did their best to hold things together, but in spite of their efforts, the Sphinx proved to be a losing proposition. Had it not been for William’s investments in real estate and government coupons, the Allens could not have survived on the mesa.

Twenty years after their father’s death, the Allen sons were able to break the stranglehold imposed on them by William’s will. Whereas William had loved the Sphinx for the sake of the soil and the life it engendered, the children saw money in the land, none of which could be realized until after their mother’s death. But in 1906, she renounced her rights to the estate and agreed to a plan that would enrich her family before she died. Ironically, it was not until weeks after her burial in 1911 that the children finally found a buyer and were able to start liquidating the ranch—a decision that affected more than the family. It rang the death knell on Old California in much of the San Gabriel Valley, rendering the sleepy communities of Altadena, Lamanda Park, and San Gabriel virtually unrecognizable within a quarter-century. In two large transactions, the Allen heirs not only dismantled their father’s legacy but did much to bring the region’s Rancho Era to a close.⁴

***

Letters from the Sphinx is divided into four parts. Part 1, The San Gabriel Valley, introduces William Allen and details his arduous six-week journey from London to Los Angeles in 1878. The pioneers who will become his closest friends and neighbors are also introduced. William explores a 200-acre parcel on a slope just below the steep ascent of the San Gabriel Mountains. The acreage will become his new home; however, he returns to London without buying it. Part 2, California Prelude, is, as the name implies, an account of William’s life to date—his boyhood in Lancashire, his time in Egypt, his marriage to Emily Jane Bell, and subsequent retirement to Bath, Somerset.

After five months in America, William returns to London in 1879. Part 3, A Place to Call Home, relives his last summer in England, his negotiations to buy the highland ranch, and his family’s immigration to Southern California. To quell his wife’s discontent over the primitive conditions she finds in the American West, he builds an impressive Italianate mansion on the mountain slope three miles above Pasadena, and produces the first of many harvests. Citrus and grape production data are largely confined to Chapter 9 or charted in Appendix C, allowing the narrative to focus on the personal life of the family. Part 4, Postmortem, describes the years after William’s passing in 1886—the Panic of 1893, the loss of friends, the death of Emily, the end of a way of life, and the sell-off of the ranch, eradicating any trace that the Allens were once the heartbeat of one of the valley’s most elite pioneer enclaves.

Spanning one hundred years and three continents, Letters from the Sphinx tells the Allen story. Incorporating sources from the United Kingdom and Egypt; previously unpublished diaries, photographs, and letters held in family collections; and the Sphinx Ranch Journals housed at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, the saga of this Old World family unfolds against the backdrop of a new American Eden, reflecting a time when the San Gabriel foothills were a riot of golden poppies; and the earth was untilled and bursting with opportunity.

Acknowledgments

Before acknowledging their descendants, I would like to thank William and Emily Jane Allen for committing their lives to paper, thereby leaving a trail for the rest of us to follow. For one, they were dedicated diarists. As a result, their personalities emerge as they memorialized both the trivial and momentous events of their lives from 1878 to 1910. Aside from these brief daily records, they wrote long informative letters, over two hundred of which have sifted down through the generations. Devoted parents, they took turns writing to their sons at boarding school in England. In these missives, they described the California landscape, the construction of the ranch house, and the trials and tribulations of carving out a life in the San Gabriel Valley. In the same vein, after 1889, their son Harold submitted annual reports detailing the Allens’ orchard and grape production to his brother Arthur in Arizona. Thus, the dislocation of the family—whether to Lancaster, England or Payson, Arizona—proved indispensable to this biographer in capturing the essence of the Allens’ nineteenth-century life on the mesa.

I would not have been able to tap into this wealth of information were it not for certain Allen descendants to whom I owe an enormous debt. Working with each of them has led me to the conclusion that being inveterate pack rats dedicated to preserving the past is a gene William and Emily must have embedded in the family DNA long ago.

Immense gratitude goes to Mrs. Patricia Schuyler Allen Sparacino, the great granddaughter of William and Emily Allen, for being the guiding spirit of this biography. Not only did Mrs. Sparacino open her files, she introduced me to a number of relatives with their own collections of Allen family memorabilia. Her support was truly invaluable, and I cannot thank her enough for her advice, encouragement, and constancy throughout this project.

Mrs. Eldrid Roche Allen, the wife of William and Emily’s great grandson, produced an enormous array of Allen family letters, journals, diaries, and account books inherited by her husband, William Dietzel Allen. Where account books and business journals supplied background detail, personal correspondence and diary entries brought life to the Allen story. I will be forever grateful to Mrs. Allen for organizing her trove of documents and giving me free, unencumbered access to her husband’s collection.⁵

Great-granddaughter Mrs. Moira Allen Auld provided many photographs that filled in where the imagination left off. She never hesitated to answer emails and search for important maps and images, many of which fill the pages of this biography. I am especially grateful for all the photographs she shared, especially the ones of the Bell house in Alexandria, Egypt, circa 1855.

These three ladies, along with great-granddaughter Mrs. Marcia Moorhead Cashion, provided the financial support necessary to get the biography of their great grandparents into print. They put their confidence in me to tell their family story and helped fund my work. I would be grossly negligent if I did not express my heartfelt gratitude to each one of them.

A fifth great-granddaughter, Mrs. Mary Suzanne Hall Szentesi, tapped in the earliest pieces of the Allen puzzle by furnishing William Allen’s apprenticeship and borough documents from 1830s and 1840s Liverpool. My thanks to her for taking time to uncover these documents while in the middle of packing and moving to another city.

The Huntington Library in San Marino, California allowed me access to its Sphinx Ranch Journals, forty-six volumes in all, for which I owe their staff, particularly Morex Arai, a debt of gratitude. However, it is worth noting that the Allen family possesses more Allen documents than does the library, which houses only about one-third of the family’s historical records. It is my sincere hope that family members will donate their collections to the Huntington, where everything Allen can be found in one place by those researching the pioneer society of the San Gabriel Valley.

In addition to these sources, I would like to thank California-based independent researcher Larry Pumphrey; Dan Mclaughlin at the Pasadena Public Library; Betty Uyeda at the Seaver Center for Western History Research; Kathy Hoskins, Eric Mulfinger, and Jane Brackman at the Altadena Historical Society; Anuja Navare at the Pasadena Museum of History; and the staffs at the Los Angeles and Altadena Public Libraries. I am also very grateful for the generous assistance of Mrs. Elizabeth Edwards, the great-granddaughter of Albert and Helen Whitaker Brigden and great-grandniece of Mary Agnes Brigden (Mrs. James Fillmore) Crank.

I would also like to express my appreciation to my niece, Mrs. Catherine Shaw, who showed me things I thought no computer could do. She combined technological proficiency with patience to assist me in preparing the photographs included in this book. In the same vein, my appreciation goes to Stephanie Voltolin, Director of Design, Media, and Computer Graphics, etc. at Georgia Piedmont Technical College in Clarkston, who connected me to students Lester Hickson in CAD design and Philip Edun in Photo Shop. Both used their skills to enhance several illustrations in this book. Ron Kline is also credited for his contributions to cover design.

Because much of the Allen story occurred in England, a number of across the pond sources must be acknowledged. Unfailingly responsive to my requests for information, they include in no particular order: Colin Johnson, principal archivist, Bath and Northeast Somerset Council; Anne Buchanan, local studies librarian, Bath Public Library; Dan Brown, photo archivist at Bath-in-Time; Paul Holman, current owner of The Cloisters in Bath; Tony Foster, society member, Bury Family Historical Society; Beryl Plent, archivist, the Gateacre Society; Marian Hartley, researcher, Lancashire Records Office; Roger Hull, researcher, Liverpool Record Office; Isobel Woods and Bill Huyton of the Ormskirk & Family History Society; Pam Richardson, secretary, the Parish Chest; Georgina Edwards, archivist, Brasnose College, Oxford; the administrators of the Prestwich and Whitefield Heritage Society; Dr. A.M. Dodson, senior research fellow, Department of Archaeology & Anthropology, University of Bristol; Andy Kennedy, British newspaper researcher; Nick Saunders, chairman of the Milton Heritage Society; Geoffrey Bullard, senior customer services advisor, Tonbridge Castle; and Vicky Green, local studies librarian, Southampton (UK) Central Library.

Last but by no means least, I am indebted to Stephen Nulty, Gill Ratcliffe, and Geoff Berry of St. Helens Connect and the Prescot Genealogy Forum for the tireless research and endless fact-checking done on my behalf. The story of William Allen’s early years in Lancashire and his business association with John and Richard Allen could not have been written without the combined help of these three dedicated local historians.

I consider myself extremely fortunate to have located and benefitted from these helpmates. Nevertheless, I must agree with a book reviewer in the New York Times, who wrote, Biography is a notoriously arduous affair. Typically, the biographer spends years in the archives, sifting through documents, folder by folder, box by endless box. One worries about the missing diary or the poignant letter gone astray—or the proverbial suitcase in the attic, stuffed with handwritten love letters, only to be discovered too late.⁶ His words ring true as they relate to one particular facet of my research.

I am left to speculate about the years William spent in Egypt. Judging from the meticulous notes he took on his initial voyage from Lancashire to Alexandria, William was a keen observer of the unfamiliar. It is, therefore, hard to imagine he did not record the sights, sounds, and smells of nineteenth-century Egypt with equal attention to detail. However, no papers or diaries have been found to document Egypt’s assault on his senses. Without documentation, it is impossible to ascertain the impact Egypt had on his manners, customs, and outlook. What is known is that William traveled outside Alexandria and visited Cairo on numerous occasions for business as well as pleasure. He certainly ventured up the Nile, but how far is unknown. One is left to wonder what impressions the young Englishman might have had of Karnak, Luxor, or the Valley of the Kings. When he reached Aswan, what emotions were stirred by those colossal pharaonic figures half-buried in sand and carved with the initials of boorish tourists? The fact that this information has not been found or has not survived is unfortunate given that the subject of nineteenth-century travel to Egypt is now an important field of study. One can only hope that a relevant sheaf of William’s papers will surface from a box in the attic or basement of some distant kin.

For now, the reader can be assured that every effort has been made to document the Allen story as completely as is possible to know it today and to reconcile any conflicting information with the archival and family sources available. Nevertheless, it bears stating that I welcome additional information from any authoritative source that challenges, corrects, or embellishes upon this seminal work.

Paul Rollins

Decatur, Georgia

Part 1

The San Gabriel Valley, 1878

Courtesy of William Dietzel Allen

William Allen, Biarritz, France, 1878

Chapter 1

The English Visitor

Nothing was particularly noteworthy about the man’s appearance. He was of average height for the time, about 5'8", lacking sufficient stature to offset his ample girth.⁷ His face was red and swollen; his gait slow, and shoulders rounded. He gave the impression of a man in his late sixties, although he was more than a decade younger. His clothing was rumpled but that of a gentleman, and his speech betrayed a far-distant home.

Tucked under his arm was the Los Angeles Herald. Its front page displayed train and steamer schedules and hawked land, lodging, saloons, lumber dealers, and dry goods stores where purchase was strictly cash only. Bewildered and exhausted, he threaded his way through raucous crowds, dust, dirt, and piles of horse manure to arrive at the St. Charles Hotel, where he signed the guest register: William Allen. Address: London, England. But in truth, he had no home.⁸

It had been six weeks since he embraced his wife and children and boarded a northbound train from London’s Euston Station. He reached the port city of Liverpool the next day, on October 3, two days before his scheduled departure aboard Cunard’s iron-hulled SS Parthia, which afforded him time to spend with friends and family.⁹ On Saturday afternoon, October 5, from Prince’s pier, the southernmost dock in Liverpool, he was tendered out to the Parthia, smoke billowing from her distinctive funnel, red with three horizontal black-stripes, set amid three masts rigged for sailing. He settled into his saloon, or first class, cabin amidships. A few hours later, the liner steamed into the Mersey River and out into the Irish Sea. William Allen was bound for America.

Calm seas prevailed until the steamship reached Queenstown, Ireland, after which