- An Original Building of the Irvine Ranch -

"Pickups and splashes from floor and pool"

This is a page of random items about old Irvine. Bios of interesting people, newspaper reports of crimes and just plain weirdness. Good stuff you want to know that doesn't fit on the other pages.

People give us some of the best stories of history. Sure, a building can tell a story,  A newspaper can tell a story. Photographs tell us some of the most detailed stories. But nothing is as rich a source of stories as people. Either by handing them down through time or just living their lives and having their stories passed down by others. And Irvine has plenty of people stories.

Because Irvine was a stop on the Santa Fe and was also bisected by the highway from Los Angeles to San Diego where the road to the Laguna split off, there were always all sorts of people passing through. Most didn't leave any record of their travels. Some were involved in horrible accidents at the crossing of the highway and the railroad until the highway realignment of 1929. Some were hobos just passing through, asking for meals at the back door.  Some were briefly famous, such as The Tomato Springs Bandit who came to Irvine in 1912. You can read all about his short stay and violent end lots of places so he will not be included here. By the way, the innocent girl who was the victim of the attack that put the events in motion lived to a ripe old age elsewhere in southern California. Ok, it should be mentioned that after the shootout and commotion, there was an effort to change the name "Tomato Springs" to "Lemon Cove".  The new name didn't catch on. John Joplin used the name "Tomato Springs Gazette" for his local publication in the 40s. Not much ever happened there of note and the area is known as Tomato Springs today on the area maps.  The Lambert Ranch and subsequent housing tract is now in that locale. But back to the people...

There were many suicides of prominent people on the Irvine. The most famous of these was the death of Myford Irvine in 1959, head of the Irvine Ranch at the time. There are many who don't believe this was a suicide as there were both handgun and shotgun wounds on the body. Since that whole story has been  well documented by others, it has not been included here. The large warehouse by the AT&SF tracks tied into at least two events.  At least two of the men in warehouse committed suicide when they were employed there.  The first was Werner Dross who ended his life on December 28, 1921. Mr. Dross was the warehouse supervisor for Harry Spencer who owned the lease for the warehouse and lived in the house across the street and across the tracks from the warehouse. Mr. Dross lived in a tent in the garden of the Spencer home. One day Mrs. Spencer was working in the garden outside the home and heard a loud noise which she attributed to a automobile backfire. Some hours later, the body of Mr. Dross was found in his tent, where he had ended his life with a bullet fired through his mouth. Mr. Dross left a note with instructions for the distribution of his possessions but without providing any reason for his action. The Spencers and others were asked about possible motivations but the consensus was that Mr. Dross was feeling ill the two days prior but had not provided any hints of his plan.

The second event occurred in May of 1941. On the evening of Thursday the 15th, Otto Knoche who was the Warehouse secretary-manager, drove up to an auto court on east Second Street in Long Beach. He rented a room but never went inside. Instead, he drove the car into the attached garage and put one end a hose in the exhaust pipe and the other end through a window of the car. His body was found hours laer when someone investigated why the car was running in a closed garage for so long. No suicide note was found but it was well known that Mr. Knoche was having "financial difficulties". His estate included $2000 in personal property and a 7 acre orange grove in Butte county but rumors swirled of financial misdeeds related to his position at the warehouse. Mr. Knoche was a well known member of the community. He was a member of many civic and fraternal organizations and was a 32nd degree Mason and a past president of the Laguna Beach Rotary club as well as a special deputy sheriff for Orange County.

Crystal Cove has not been covered elsewhere on this site. It is a stretch of beach between Newport and Laguna that was formerly part of the Ranch. Since it was not valuable for livestock or crops, Irvine allowed his employees and their families to use it for short and long term  camping and other recreation.  It was not open to the public but brief use by other locals was not strictly prohibited.  A woman from Pasadena was visiting Laguna with her husband on a weekend in January 1929. She was some distance north from her cottage, walking on the Crystal Cove beach picking wildflowers, when she claimed that when she passed a huge rock, a "caveman" attacked her.  She said she ran to the water's edge where he grabbed her. She kicked in the nose, the caveman repeatedly said that he would kill her. The struggle continued, with her clothes all ripped from her body, until she broke away and ran screaming back to her cottage. Her husband heard her screams and went to her but there was no sign of the caveman. The caveman was described as six feet tall, 150 pounds, "almost nude" with a red moustache. A search of the area found nothing. By the next day, the police had arrested a baker in Laguna who admitted to have been on the beach south of Laguna at the time of the attack near Crystal Cove. The victim failed to identify the baker in the police lineup and he was released. No one else was ever charged. The caveman is still on the loose!

A very similar series of events occurred some years earlier, in February of 1913. About 11:00 one Saturday night, a woman claimed that she had left her house carrying a knife when she walked to her hen house to make sure it had been secured for the night. She said two men wearing masks drove up in a buggy and immediately attacked her by  wrapping a clothes line around her neck three times and then dragged across the ground. She said she got away by using the knife to cut the clothesline and run back to the house. The two men chased her for a bit and then through a rock after her. The rock went through one of the house windows and startled the woman's daughter, who, like the woman's husband had been in the home at the time but had heard nothing. The police arrived and found only the cut clothesline and the rock. The plot thickened during the continuing police investigation when the woman disclosed that she was the victim of an on-going extortion plot. She said that her house had been burglarized and some clothing taken and later an old coat belonging to her husband was found in a tree near Delhi. (Delhi is a neighborhood in south Santa Ana, the woman lived in the northwest part of the ranch in what is now Tustin.) She claimed she had been receiving anonymous letter threatening her with death is she failed to  leave large sums of cash, usually $100, at various places on her property. The letters were signed with a hand drawn in black ink and labeled "Black Hand" . Many people, including the sheriff, were not convinced with the stories the woman was telling. Eventually the sheriff believed that she created both the letters and the attack stories despite the alleged victim insistence of their accuracy. The sheriff asked her to complete an affidavit of her version of the crime. Her completed document had several words misspelled in the exact same way as they had been misspelled in the "Black Hand" letters.  She finally confessed to writing the letters but claimed that she only did so because the sheriff had threatened her with jail.   The sheriff turned the case over to the Postal Inspector for possible prosecution. By November  the husband had moved to Arizona to farm and the woman and her children had moved to Los Angeles. The family eventually returned to Orange County, settling in Gloryetta. (Gloryetta or Glorietta was in the same area as Delhi.)

Gypsies still roamed the countryside in 1920.  Just before Halloween of that year, several arrived outside the hotel with an offer to tell the fortunes of all wished. One man in the crowd, Louis McDonald, took them up on it and asked the gypsies to tell hi m if would become rich. The gypsies responded that he should give them the money in his pocket to hold and then asked the assembled crowd to turn around, look at the horizon, and say what they saw in the distance.  While the crowd complied with the instructions, the gypsies hopped in their car and drove off. McDonald himself summed up  the events best - "They told me they would tell me my fate and I guess my fate was that I was to lose $6.50'"

​

In 1892, tenant farmers complained that squirrels had eaten 25% of the grain crop. In response, George Irvine, manager of the Ranch and James' brother, hired John L Oilar, the King of the Squirrel Poisoners, to eradicate the squirrels on 20,000 acres of Ranch land for the royal sum of $2800. Oiler was 79 years old at the time and had behind a 17 year record of success along the California coast all the way up to Santa Cruz. Oiler used 16,000 pounds of wheat laced with 40 pounds of strychnine to eliminate, by his estimation, over 1,000,000 of the furry grain eaters. Despite his successful completion, Oiler abdicated his title the following year and applied for a Government pension of $8 per month and 160 acres of land which he was entitled to as a veteran of the Black Hawk War. Prior to his reign as the squirrel killer king, Oiler had been a State Senator in his native Indiana and had been arrested for counterfeiting in a gang that also included his son.

As we move down the list of living oddities, next comes into view those warm blooded animals...

In 1901, over 100 pigs were killed by the roving bands of coyotes. The carnage of animals was sobering. Mostly they fell victim to trains and automobiles. Beginning not too long after the railroad tracks were laid through the Ranch, the train hit a band of sheep in August of 1895. Due to the carnage, the actual count could not be determined. A train killed two mules tied to the back of a wagon in December of 1920.  One odd.  accident occurred when a train collided with a buggy in October of 1910. After the collision, the train stopped about a quarter of a mile past the point of impact. The crew walked the tracks and found some small pieces of the horse along the tracks with bloody pieces of the buggy. A couple of shoes and a coat were also found but no parts of a person. It turned out that the buggy was an unoccupied runaway that finally stopped on the tracks.

Bugs bugs bugs! Everyone has them. Not many like them. But not many can say they burned down their house in the effort to get rid of them. In June of 1929, in a home at the corner or Irvine Boulevard and Red Hill (OK -not technically part of the Irvine but close enough for a good story), the owner was attempting to eradicate ants by spraying them with gasoline. The fumes later exploded and the   subsequent fire destroyed the $3500 house and a like amount in value of the contents. There was no one in the house when the fumes exploded and there were no injuries.  What adds to this story is that the man in question worked as a gas station manager for Union Oil at the time! He had gotten married just 18 months before the fire. He and his wife went on to have a son in early 1931. He later changed to professions to an ice delivery man, a nice juxtaposition from the fire. Sadly, his story ends early with a fatal heart attack while riding a horse in 1940.

Tarantulas! The ranch was apparently overrun with them early on.   There is a report from 1883 that 56 were spotted in a distance of only two miles.

Aside from the living things which gives so many stories...

On May 22, 1942, James Irvine, owner of the Irvine Ranch, was charged with multiple fish and game law violations including using a hook and line to catch black bass, crappie and sunfish out of season and catching 10 more than the limit of six black bass. He was cited at the lake behind Peters Canyon dam, just south of Irvine Park on land he owned. Sounds like Government overreach? Wait! The legal question here was not really fishing out of season but who owned the fish! The state charged that there was a free passage between Santiago Creek and the lake so that the ownership of the fish could not be determined. Irvine hired two sharp Los Angeles attorneys who walked the waterway between the dam and the creek and found two 15 foot tall waterfalls. Claiming that the fish could not navigate the two 15 foot climbs, the attorneys were able to get the charges against Mr. Irvine dropped by mid-August.

There was a brief strike at the Warehouse in September of 1937.  Here's what happened. Some of the Irvine Warehouse employees were members of the Teamsters and Warehouse Workers Local 692.  Talks had been going for some time  between the union rep and Otto Knoche, secretary-manager of the warehouse. On September 3, a strike was called. The workers said that they were working 18 hours a day at 40 cents per hour. The demand was 9 hour days with wages ranging from 65 cents an hour for mill men and sack sewers to 85 cents an hour for checkers and filers  As soon as the strike began, each side blamed the other for not negotiating  By the 7th, violence was threatened by strikers against non-strikers and those threatened refused to come to work. The sheriff was called in. The strike ended on September 15th and everyone was back at work on Friday the 17th. No details of the settlement were released. The union apparently morphed with the times. Harold Watermark, who represented the union, was the president of the General Truck Drivers and Helpers Local 692 of Orange County when other strikes were called against other firms in 1941.

Things that aren't there anymore. Irvine was a thriving agricultural and ranching town when the development of the land began about 1960. As the previous businesses and activities were closed or abandoned with this development, they were left standing in place. Much like two sides of a coin, some saw all these remnants as historical treasures, tributes to times past and the people that were there and others saw these buildings as unsightly and incompatible with the ambience of a modern city. Many, many of the larger buildings and sites were removed without fanfare or notice.  Occasionally a few bits remain. The facade of a packing house survives on the wall of a bank. Some of the footings for the salt works can be seen at the top of the Newport Back Bay. 

Names also come and go. El Toro became Lake Forest. Frog Rock became Turtle Rock.  There was a time, from about 1909 through 1929, when the area was known as "Beantown". The name appears on some maps and handbills which also identify a Beantown Road. Beantown Road was also called Valencia Road at the time and that's the name that survived for decades.  In the 1920s and 1930s, the local amateur baseball team was known as the Beanpickers which probably helped to perpetuate the name. Munger Road became Central Avenue became Sand Canyon Avenue.  El Camino Real became the San Diego highway became Highway 101 became Burt Road and half of that ironically became Progress.

Some history is legendary. Sometimes a story grows over time and might get twisted a bit in the retelling. With a bit of time and determination, most history stories can be peeled back to the source. And sometimes there is not a verifiable basis for the legend. For the Irvine area, the best example is the purported confrontation between the Irvine Ranch and the Southern Pacific railroad that occurred on July 7, 1888. The Irvine Company even produced some promotion materials with a watercolor rendition of the confrontation. The background of the story that is verifiable is that Collis Huntington, who owned the Southern Pacific and wanted to place track from Tustin south through the Ranch was disliked by James Irvine for reasons that are unclear but stemmed from their meeting on the steamship that brought them together to southern California. While the Southern Pacific did build tracks from Tustin to the edge of the Ranch and  did attempt to force the tracks across the Ranch in the courts the legend goes to describe an armed confrontation.  The story is that Saturday, July 7, 1888 (some versions of this story say it occurred on a Sunday morning), the Southern Pacific directed crews to lay the tracks across the Ranch without permission of the Ranch and without court order. James Irvine's brother led and armed crew of ranch hands to successfully stop the attempt. The legend always includes a specific mention that this happened on a weekend when the courts were closed.  Many hours of research by many interested parties have turned up any contemporary corroboration of the armed conflict. There were no accounts published in newspapers or found in railroad archives. No mention of the conflict appears in the historical before the 1960s.

Finally, there are the memories of dreams. Businesses plannd, the openings announced and then the dreams fade quietly away....

The motor court - to be added

The Dairy - to be added