This Picture's Thousand Words: Los Angeles from Fort Hill, ca. 1870

A circa 1870 photo by William M. Godfrey taken from Fort Moore Hill above New High Street looking southeast.  Click on it to see the image in a larger view in a separate window.  Courtesy of the Workman and Temple Family Homestead Museum, City of Industry.

This is a remarkable photograph, circa 1870 by William M. Godfrey, one of Los Angeles' first photographers, of part of the city looking southeast from Fort Moore Hill above New High Street, for a variety of reasons relarting to early criminal justice, or the lack thereof, in the town..

Number one is the gent standng on New High Street in the center foreground.  Dressed in a dark suit, white shirt, and light-colored hat, our subject is also carrying a shotgun in his hands.  This would seem to indicate that he was one of the handful of constables who patrolled the town.

The next item of interest takes us to the top center of the photo, where the conspicuous clock tower shows that the time was a little before 12:45 p.m. on whatever day Godfrey took the photo, or whatever day the clock stopped working prior to that!  The building which the tower surmounted was built as the city's market house in 1859 by merchant Jonathan Temple.

As earlier posts here have noted, the structure was leased to the city and county for public offices and the courthouse.  It served in this capacity until the late 1880s, when separate structures were built for the city hall and courthouse.  The "Old Courthouse" as it was sometimes known was torn down shortly afterward and replaced by the Blanchard Building.  In the last half of the 1920s, this area, known as the Temple Block, because of several buildings constructed by Jonathan Temple and his half-brother between 1857 and 1871, was redeveloped for the new city hall, completed in 1928.

Finally, there is the site behind the armed gentleman and the building next to him.  Fronting Temple Street is a white adobe wall and a two-part wooden gate with a crossbeam atop it.  This is the Tomlinson and Griffith lumberyard, located at the corner of New High and Temple streets, a bit of the latter is at the far right, where the ox-team is in view.

John J. Tomlinson was an early proprietor of a stagecoach line form the rudimentary port at San Pedro and a fierce rival of Phineas Banning, who, along with Banning, became a lumberman in 1860. Shortly afterward, his brother-in-law, John M. Griffith, came to Los Angeles and the two men became partners in both the stagecoaching and lumbering businesses until Tomlinson died in 1868.

Griffith then took on a new part, Santa Cruz lumber magnate Sedgwick J. Lynch, who was looking to expand his empire as Los Angeles began its first sustained growth period just around the time that Tomlinson died.  Griffith, Lynch and Company prospered as the city needed more lumber to accommodate the construction demands of the growing town.

Unfortunately, there was another unforeseen demand placed upon the lumberyard--the use of its gate and crossbeam as a convenient gallows for lynch (somewhat ironic given the name of one its partners) mobs to conduct their extralegal business.

According to prominent merchant Harris Newmark, a late 1863 lynching of Charles Wilkins (to be covered here in more depth later) took place

on Tomlinson & Griffith's corral gateway where nearly a dozen culprits had already forfeited their lives.

Given that Tomlinson, according to Newmark, had only embarked in the lumbering business three years prior, it is unclear how "nearly a dozen culprits" had been hung there, unless there had been a prior owner of the property.

Seven years later, at the end of 1870, Michel Lachenais, who had committed several homicides and been acquitted twice in Los Angeles courts, murdered his neighbor Jacob Bell over a property dispute (again, this case will be profiled here at a future time), and, as noted by Newmark

three hundred or more men . . . took Lachenais out [of the jail], dragged him along to the corral of Tomlinson & Griffith . . . and there summarily hanged him.

The Lachenais lynching has the distinction (if it can be so called) of being the only one that was photographed--also by Godfrey.  This photo has been published in many books and articles over the years and is easily one of the best-known images of a benighted "City of Angels."

Finally, there was the one event that constituted the biggest blot on Los Angeles in its early history and perhaps of all of its existence: the Chinese Massacre of October 24, 1871.  After an internal dispute among the small, but growing, Chinese community led to gunfire and the death of an American who interjected himself into the battle, a mob of perhaps 500 or so men stormed the Calle de los Negros east of the Plaza,where Los Angeles Street heads towards Alameda Street and lynched nineteen Chinese males, including a teenaged boy.  Once more, this event will be given a fuller treatment here, but among the locations where the horrors were perpetrated was, as Newmark again noted,

up Temple to New High street, where the familiar framework of the corral gates suggested its use as a gallows.

It appears that there was just one victim hung at the corral and there would have been more, except that Sheriff James Burns and citizens Robert Widney (accused by Horace Bell, another, more fanciful, chronicler of the time, of leading the Lachenais lynching--though this is not at all proven), Cameron Thom, the district attorney, and H.C. Austin assisted in saving at least one other man.

Fortunately, there were no more lynchings in the city after this and it was said that Griffith was so angered by what had happened that he ordered the gate and beam removed to prevent its further use by lawless mobs.

It is tempting to think that Godfrey set up this photo as some kind of reference to Los Angeles and its lawlessness.  Having an armed constable (if that's who the gent was), the Tomlinson & Griffith corral, and the county courthouse in view seems coincidental.  We'll never know, unless Godfrey left a diary that hasn't yet seen the light of day!