The Helen Eaton House – Rebuilt after the 1908 Fire

One good result of the big fire of 1908 was the beautiful Helen Eaton House at 2620 Foothill Blvd. The Eaton House is the two-story yellow Victorian that is home to New Star Realty and a taekwondo studio. It is fronted by a giant Moreton Bay Fig tree.

So who was Helen Eaton? She was the first wife of Frederick Eaton, a man central to the history of Los Angeles. Fred Eaton was a true son of Los Angeles, one of the first Americans born there in 1855. His father was a judge and young Eaton grew up in Pasadena. Eaton Canyon is named for his family and Fair Oaks Boulevard is named for the family estate.

As young Fred Eaton grew into manhood, he became a city-builder, designing parks and infrastructure projects. He was head of the water department and actually hired William Mulholland. He served as LA’s mayor at the end of the 19th century. But his largest accomplishment was the conception of the Los Angeles Aqueduct. As a young man, he visited the Owens Valley and saw its potential as a water source for LA. With that in mind he bought thousands of acres above Bishop. He owned what is today known as the Long Valley Caldera, the volcanic depression adjacent to Mammoth. William Mulholland usually gets the credit for the aqueduct but Eaton was the visionary who pushed it forward.

Fred was married to Helen L. Eaton through the decades that he was a leader of Los Angeles’ growth and they had three children. In 1903 the couple divorced. Helen, when asked by reporters the cause of the divorce, gave a one-word reply: “whisky.”

Helen made her way to the Crescenta Valley, apparently because of her love for riding horses. She bought 10 acres on the southwest corner of Foothill and Rosemont Avenue. The house was a single-story ranch house backed by a huge olive orchard. The tiny remnant of that olive orchard is the street trees on Mary Street west of Rosemont. It was that house that burned in the 1908 fire that I just wrote about.

Helen rebuilt the house in a grand style, the very house we see today – a two-story Colonial-style house with columns in the front, wide porches front and back, second-floor balconies and a beautiful interior. She moved into it with her oldest daughter, Helen Eaton Armstrong, and her husband.

The property that Fred Eaton had acquired in the Eastern Sierra continued to be used by the family. Fred Eaton’s idea had been to sell his land to Los Angeles and to build a dam where Crowley Lake is today, creating a massive storage reservoir. Eaton was too inflexible on price and had a falling out with William Mulholland, who instead built the now infamous St. Francis Dam. That left Long Valley as a playground for the Eaton kids, now all adults. The eldest daughter, Helen Armstrong, ran a hot springs resort there called Whitmore Tubs, splitting her time between La Crescenta and the Eastern Sierra.

In 1919, we find a newspaper ad for the La Crescenta Eaton House, apparently promoting it as a health resort. Indeed, in 1942 we find another ad showing the house as a women-only sanitarium for the convalescent and elderly “in a lovely Colonial home.” Helen Eaton died in 1934 and it’s unknown how long she stayed in the house. Daughter Helen Armstrong built a house just around the corner on Rosemont, a house that is still there.

The Eaton house since then has had a variety of retail and office uses. At some point, probably the ’70s, someone did an exterior remodel that gave the house more of a Victorian look. The massive Moreton Bay Fig tree that fronts the house seems to have been there all along, for it is seen in the earliest photos already taller than the house.

The 110-year-old Eaton House is a remnant of a time when this area of La Crescenta was a refuge for the wealthy. It’s also a distant connection to the growth of Los Angeles.

  mike lawler