by Jon Wilkman
Along with movie stars, tourist attractions, athletic facilities, entertainment venues, and shopping opportunities, 1920s Los Angeles had cultural and intellectual aspirations. In a canyon between Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley, the Hollywood Bowl opened in 1921, an outdoor setting for Easter services and celebrations of culture and the city’s balmy weather. The rustic amphitheater was famous for “concerts under the stars,” performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, founded in 1919. Downtown, behind the Biltmore Hotel, the Moorish-looking Central Library was completed in 1926. In time it would be the third-largest public collection in the United States, after Boston and New York. Unlike rivals on the East Coast, reading rooms were decorated with murals depicting bold Spanish explorers, devout Franciscan fathers, grateful Indians, dashing caballeros, bright-eyed señoritas, and, more conventionally, the enterprising Anglo-American pioneers who of course really started it all.6
Rural and small-town America often viewed Hollywood and big-city Los Angeles with a mix of fascination and moral indignation. If Owens Valley activists portrayed their homeland as a Garden of Eden, the Santa Clara River Valley, fifty miles north of Los Angeles, was closer to the biblical imagery. In Northern California, the Sierra snowpack produced much more water, but the Santa Clara River and its tributaries supported a more productive agricultural environment, including acres of orange, lemon, and walnut groves. The Limoneira Company, founded in the Valley in 1893, played an important role in Southern California’s lucrative citrus industry. By the 1920s, the extent of cultivated Limoneira land had quadrupled.7
Nearby mining activities contributed to the ranching and subsistence agriculture economy of the Owens Valley. The Santa Clara River Valley, bounded by the Topatopa Mountains to the north and the Santa Susana Mountains to the south, had something better: oil had been discovered in the area in the 1860s.
In 1890, the Union Oil Company was founded in the town of Santa Paula.8 Drilling rigs and pumping machines sprouted from the valley floor as the Santa Clara River approached the Pacific Ocean. By 1928, the population of Inyo County was in decline, thanks in part to the depressive impact of William Mulholland’s Aqueduct. In Ventura County there were nearly eight times more people, and their numbers were increasing.
In 1910, before Hollywood captured the title of America’s movie capital, Santa Paula made a brief bid for the honor when Gaston Méliès, brother of French motion picture pioneer Georges, built a film studio north of town.9 In the end, the Star Film Company didn’t survive, but like the Alabama Hills near Lone Pine in the Owens Valley, the area around Santa Paula provided locations for film crews from Los Angeles, and local residents were sometimes recruited to play bit parts.
Few Americans had heard of towns such as Santa Paula, Piru, Fillmore, Bardsdale, and Saticoy, but Camulos, an old Spanish rancho, was famous. In 1910, D.W. Griffith filmed Ramona, starring Mary Pickford, at Camulos. The picturesque homestead was marketed as the real location for the best-selling 1883 novel Ramona, a tragic cross-cultural love story set in 1850s Southern California. Intended as an angry protest against government injustices toward Indians, Helen Hunt Jackson’s book, four Hollywood films, and a popular annual outdoor pageant were instead embraced as an appealing historical romance and major lure for newcomers.
By 1928, the days of the missions and ranchos were long past, but during the decade of the 1920s there was a dramatic increase in the number of Mexican immigrants living in the Santa Clara River Valley, particularly in Santa Paula. The Ventura County Latino population grew from less than 1 percent in 1920 to nearly 25 percent ten years later. Many were new arrivals, escaping revolution in their home country. They were employed as fruit pickers or packers in citrus plants, replacing Asian workers.
Close to the packing plants, the Limoneira Company provided housing for Mexican employees and a segregated school, Olivelands, for their children. There were some middle-class Mexicans living in separate neighborhoods closer to town, but the remaining poor were gathered into villages, or colonias, hidden among the lemon groves near the Santa Clara River, an area Anglos called Spanish Town. The modest homes in Spanish Town had a wood-burning stove for heat and cooking, but no electricity or indoor plumbing. During the picking season, the days were long. A bell rang at 5:30 A.M. and work sometimes continued around the clock.10
Main Street in Santa Paula looked like any prosperous American small town, with parked cars and crowded sidewalks on weekends. In March 1928, the Piggy Wiggly market celebrated three years serving the community. Cooking classes for local ladies were planned for the twelfth. “A beautiful home” was advertised for $150, and a Tom Mix western was playing at the Mission Theater.11
Main Street, Santa Paula, in the 1920s (Santa Paula Historical Society)
Santa Paula was a tight-knit community, with churches, schools, and active social and fraternal organizations including Rotary, Elks, Lions, Moose, Masons, Knights of Pythias, and the American Legion. Also, like similar American small towns, not just in the South, Santa Paula was home to a proud chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. In full hooded regalia, the local klavern gathered for an after-dark portrait in 1924.12 Despite the disguises, locals claimed they could recognize friends and civic leaders by looking at their shoes.
Visitors to Santa Paula, including movie stars, came to spend the night and surreptitiously test the boundaries of prohibition at the Tudor-styled Glen Tavern Inn, built in 1911. It wasn’t uncommon for Santa Clara River Valley residents to take a two-hour ride to “the city” to shop, see the latest vaudeville show on theater-lined Broadway, or check out a first-run movie.
In October 1927, the marquee on the Million Dollar Theater in downtown Los Angeles announced the opening of The Temptress, the latest Greta Garbo film. The alluring Swedish star played the part of Elena, a seductive courtesan who drove men to desperation. In a climactic scene, a jilted lover dynamites a large dam built by a rival. Although the story is set in Europe and Argentina, The Temptress was shot mainly on Hollywood film stages. But one brief sequence was obviously photographed on location, showing a large concrete dam in construction. The scene would have startled moviegoers from San Francisquito Canyon. The partially finished structure, with men at work and a crane overhead, was the St. Francis Dam.13
Few people recognized this unheralded movie cameo, but in the town of Saugus, near the eastern end of the Santa Clara River Valley, the St. Francis Dam had long been the subject of gossip. The Saugus post office, overseen by thirty-five-year-old Mrs. A.M. Rumsey, was a place not only to pick up mail but share local news. Mrs. Rumsey, married to a telegraph operator and station agent for the Southern Pacific Railroad, was appointed postmistress in 1922, just as initial work on the St. Francis Dam began. She heard stories about progress on the job, and rumors of recent problems.
During 1927, as the level of the reservoir crept up behind the 208-foot-high concrete wall, hydrostatic pressure increased and cracks appeared. In the middle of the dam, there were two long fissures, about eighty feet apart, on either side of the five outlets that ran down the center of the structure. The cracks extended from the crest of the dam almost to the canyon floor. Later, two shorter fissures appeared, running at approximately 45 degrees from the middle of each abutment. Not surprised, Mulholland ordered Bureau of Water Works and Supply workers to fill them with oakum, a mix of hemp and tar, and seal the patch with cement grout.14
San Francisquito Canyon residents remembered armed guards who arrived the previous May to protect the structure from dynamiters. Adding to their anxiety, a minor earthquake was felt on March 10. There also were predictions that rainstorms were on the way that could overfill the reservoir.
Like the Chief, most of the men who worked for the BWWS and Bureau of Power and Light (BPL) seemed unconcerned—even those who lived in Powerhouse 2, a mile and a half below the dam site. When one worker shared his doubts, his colleagues told him, “You are getting old and childish.”15 A few BPL veterans enjoyed ribbing apprehensive visitors. A S
augus resident who farmed near the Harry Carey Indian Trading Post visited the dam site only once, but he’d seen the ruins of the Lower Otay dam after it collapsed in 1911. The memory made him anxious. The visitor didn’t laugh when he overheard a young man joke to a friend, “Well, goodbye, Ed. I will see you again if the dam don’t break.”16
By March 7, 1928, the level of the St. Francis reservoir was only three inches below the span of eleven rectangular spillways that allowed windblown overflow to stream down the dam’s stair-stepped face. Behind the concrete barrier, the St. Francis Reservoir reached into small canyons with jagged fingers. A few months before, eleven-year-old Bob Phillips, son of veteran DWP engineer J.E. Phillips, visited the site and was given a tour by dam keeper Tony Harnischfeger. Tony showed him a metering device that measured the level of the water in the reservoir, and let the boy see the valves that opened and closed the spillway gates. When he walked across the sixteen-foot-wide top of the dam, the youngster was impressed. “I thought, gee whiz … it was awe-inspiring,” he remembered as an old man. “The men around here built this!” He also was anxious. “There was only this little pipe rail to keep me from falling off. It was a long way down, and I was glad to get off.”17
Water overflows the spillways of the St. Francis Dam, late 1927. (Santa Clarita Valley Historical Society)
By March 10, Chester Smith, who owned farm- and ranchland in San Francisquito Canyon, had long thought conditions at the dam “looked suspicious.” He questioned assistant dam keeper Jack Ely: “Ely, what are you sons of guns going to do here, going to flood us out down below?” Ely respected Bill Mulholland’s leadership and expertise. His wife, Margaret, was good friends with the wife of the Chief’s son Perry. Playing along with “the gag,” the BWWS man responded with a straight-faced reply: “We expect this dam to break at any minute!”18
Some time after four P.M. on March 12, 1928, twenty-nine-year-old laborer Jeff Isaacks showed up at the Saugus Post Office to deliver and pick up mail for the workers and families at Powerhouse 2.19 Only on the job for four months, Isaacks lived with his wife, Florence, and their three children downstream from the powerhouse. As Isaacks waited for Postmistress Rumsey to sort through envelopes and packages, he might have told her that William Mulholland and Harvey Van Norman had visited earlier in the day. It wasn’t an unusual occurrence.
Until six weeks before, forty-one-year-old Tony had lived with his mother, Mary, and his young son, Coder, in a cottage a quarter of a mile below the dam. Mrs. Harnischfeger had moved out after twenty-seven-year-old Leona Johnson arrived. Both Tony and Leona had been married before, and during a trip to the resort town of Oceanside, they published an announcement in the local newspaper reporting plans to make it legal, but for now, in the careful parlance of the day, Leona was known as a “governess” for Tony’s son, or simply the dam keeper’s “sweetheart.”
Tony was a fifteen-year veteran of the Bureau of Water Works and Supply and knew the St. Francis Dam better than most. He examined the structure daily and kept a record as conditions changed. When Harnischfeger checked on the morning of March 12, he noticed that water was leaking from the west abutment. It looked muddy, a disturbing sign that the foundation of the St. Francis Dam might be failing.
Tony Harnischfeger and his wife, Gladys, near Jawbone Canyon (Santa Clarita Valley Historical Society)
The dam keeper alerted his bosses. When William Mulholland and Harvey Van Norman showed up around 10:30 A.M., they immediately took a close look and found the flow running clear and the foundation apparently safe. Whatever Harnischfeger believed, he was in no position to challenge the Chief.
Tony Harnischfeger has been called “the great enigma” of the St. Francis Dam disaster.20 Despite evidence of leaking concrete and saturated abutments, some said he told them there was nothing to worry about. He reportedly assured one visitor “there was absolutely no danger whatever.”21 Others shared rumors that Tony was scared. Retired construction-company owner William Hoke talked with him on March 10. Hoke said that Harnischfeger told him: “I have made a few little remarks, perhaps I have talked too much, it has been referred to me that if I keep on talking in the manner I have, I might not retain my position.”22
After William Mulholland and Harvey Van Norman finished their inspection, they stopped at Powerhouse 2 before returning to Los Angeles for a late lunch. Van Norman gave orders to block the adit, or opening, that diverted flow from the Aqueduct into the reservoir. He also instructed workers to open three six-by-six-foot gates to allow water from behind the dam to escape into the channel that ran along the canyon floor. The BWWS Assistant Chief Engineer explained he was doing this as a normal precaution against the possibility that wind or rain from an approaching storm might pile up debris and clog the spillways, or splash too much water over the top of the dam.
Probable area of the leak reported by dam keeper Tony Harnischfeger on March 12, 1928 (Los Angeles Department of Water and Power)
In Saugus it was probably late afternoon when Jeff Isaacks said good-bye to Postmistress Rumsey and began the return trip to Powerhouse 2. As it was in the Owens Valley, aside from the invasive presence of Los Angeles water and power operations, the local economy of San Francisquito Canyon was mostly small-scale cattle ranching and subsistence agriculture. Beekeeping was a sideline for some. Gold had been found in 1842, six years before the big Northern California strike. It came from an area of extreme soil erosion between San Francisquito and Bouquet Canyons. Locals called the site the Gold Bowl. After the first shiny discovery, prospectors showed up with picks and shovels, including a few adventuresome Chinese, but since then not much had been uncovered. More-steady income came from quarrying smooth sheets of slate, which were abundant in the canyon walls.
An old San Francisquito Canyon ranch was home to twelve members of the Ruiz family. Henry Ruiz worked for the Bureau of Power and Light and lived in the Powerhouse 1 construction camp above the dam. He rented lodgings on his ranch to Jeff Isaacks and Isaack’s family. On a nearby hillside, a small cemetery was shaded by a large tree. The gathering of burial plots with small white crosses and modest markers contained the remains of generations of local pioneers. There was evidence of a multinational past, with names such as LeBrun, Lelong, Erratchuo, Perea, Rivera, Cooke, Gibson, and Kirkpatrick.
Farther southwest from the St. Francis Dam, another venerable family, the Raggios, owned a ranch, winery, and general store near the old Butterfield Stage station. They arrived in California from Genoa, Italy, in 1878, the same year Bill Mulholland got his first job with the private Los Angeles Water Company. During the time the Chief was supervising drilling operations for the Elizabeth Tunnel, he got to know the old Italian family, and in 1922 the DWP settled a court case about water access for Raggio’s ranch. During construction of the St. Francis Dam, Frank managed mule teams, hauling equipment. His son, Frank Jr., worked as a laborer at the construction site.
The one-room San Francisquito School was near the Raggio ranch. By late afternoon, all but one of the school’s thirteen students were back in their canyon homes. Only three days before, they had posed for a photo on the front porch with their parents and teacher Mrs. Cecelia Small, a widow who lived in a nearby house with a friend’s young son who was a pupil at the little school. When Mrs. Small arrived five years before, local families were standoffish, but the kindly newcomer won them over after she bought a piano, phonograph, and radio to entertain the kids, never failed to remember her students’ birthdays, and bought them gifts to put under a decorated Christmas tree.23 Early on the morning of March 12, Mrs. Small had missed the bus from Saugus, where she’d been visiting relatives. The Chief Operator at Powerhouse 1 picked her up in time for classes and whatever else this busy day would bring.24
The community at Powerhouse 2 was the largest in San Francisquito Canyon. Sixty-seven city employees and their families lived in an informal gathering of wood-framed cottages, just beyond the large rectangular generating station. Four other cottages were a shor
t distance downstream. Married couples and children were provided with rent-free two-bedroom homes. Near the powerhouse, shaded by trees, a two-story Club House served as a dormitory for single men, a dining hall, a social center, and, on Sundays, a church. Three single women worked in the dining-hall kitchen and lived in the Club House.
Students and parents at the San Francisquito School, March 9, 1928. Teacher Cecelia Small is fourth from right. (Santa Clarita Valley Historical Society)
Interior, the Powerhouse 2 Club House (Los Angeles Department of Water and Power)
The Bee School was farther upstream. Fifteen children, including Tony Harnischfeger’s son Coder, took lessons there with teacher Ida May Parker.
E.H. Thomas (he rarely used his given name, Elwin) had an excellent view of the powerhouse community and surrounding area. He lived with his mother at the top of the east canyon wall. Their cabin was beside a large metal tank called the surge chamber, a container to manage water before it took the precipitous “power drop” through giant twin pipes, or penstocks, to drive two electric turbines below.
From his vantage point, Thomas could see power lines that paralleled San Francisquito Creek. One set belonged to the Los Angeles Bureau of Power and Light and drew current from turbines in Powerhouse 2, and the other served Southern California Edison, coming from a separate source to the north. Thomas also could see a side canyon where Lyman Curtis, a laborer, shared a modest home with his wife, Lillian, their three-year-old son, and two bright-eyed, blond-haired daughters, four and almost six years old.