Pioneer Memories: Leona Thornton

Continuing with the collected memories of several pioneers that were printed in a 1938 newspaper, this one is from Leona Thornton who came to the valley at the turn of the century. I quote the article and my inserted comments are in brackets.
Col. Thomas Thornton and his wife Leona were transplanted Southerners. Col. Thornton was a successful LA lawyer and a big deal in LA politics. In 1917, the Thorntons built a grand southern-style mansion near Briggs Avenue, high up in the sagebrush above Foothill.

The interview with Leona Thornton is paraphrased in the article: “She remembers driving here in 1900 with horse and carriage from Pasadena and stopping under a huge cypress tree on Briggs Avenue. She looked about and beheld the beauties of the valley with the wonderful view below. She remarked on the atmosphere of the place and decided to have a home here. At that time Miss Drennan and Miss Gordon were dispensing a gracious hospitality at Fairmont Hotel. [The Fairmont Hotel was a resort hotel on what is today Fairmont Avenue near the CV Sheriff’s Station.] The cuisine of their table was becoming known the length and breadth of the land, and there her mother [Leona’s mother] stayed for a time.”

The Thorntons initially bought an existing house near the Fairmont Hotel above Foothill, but a few years later began construction of their own home nearby.
“Later, upon their return from South America, [they] began the construction of ‘The Poplars,’ modeled after her childhood home in Tennessee.”

The house was indeed a mansion in the classic southern style. White with three stories with grand columns in front, it sat on five landscaped acres. A long straight drive issued from huge iron gates on Mountain Avenue. Anecdotally we hear that Col. Thornton tied the mansion to the ground with hidden steel cables, because of the destructive Santa Ana winds that had flattened several valley homes at the turn of the century.

“These two homes [one they bought and one they built] were the only ones in the 80 acres east of Briggs Avenue, with the exception of the small rock house belonging to Mr. Escalle who later went to France.”

Indeed, in old photos of the valley the Thornton estate is conspicuous rising above the desert-like sagebrush landscape above Foothill.

A word about Mr. Escalle: She was referring to Gustave Escalle. Gustave and his brother Pierre came to the valley very early, in 1887, from Grenoble, France. They came from a five-generation family of stonemasons, and naturally applied their talents to the rocky valley, building many of the stone structures that still stand here. After WWI, Gustave returned to France. But he was badly affected some years later by the devastation of WWII and, in the late ’40s, the Crescenta Valley community banded together to send aid to Gustave Escalle.

Leona Thornton finishes her memories by talking about a most important subject: water.

“Their [Thorntons’] water supply came from Castle Springs in Pickens Canyon near Castle del Crescenta. [Castle Springs still flows! At the end of Canalda Avenue, off Ocean View, a trail crosses a pipe through which the water can be heard flowing. Just above Canalda was the old Gould Castle, sometimes called Castle del Crescenta.] There was a water share for each acre and it proved ample until other homes were built in the vicinity. Then there was a severe shortage. Six or seven years ago the Thorntons joined the Mountain Water Company and turned their water shares into that company.” If you wanted water back then you had to buy shares in one of several local water companies, private organizations that “owned” and sold the water coming from springs in the mountains.

The Thorntons later moved and their mansion was then owned by Dwayne Esper, a maker and distributor of porn and exploitation films in the ’30s and ’40s. After that it was owned by the Bishop family. In the 1960s the Bishops fought tooth and nail to prevent their home from being seized by eminent domain by the school district. They lost the battle, and Mountain Avenue School was built.