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Lake Elsinore: a southern California African American resort area during the Jim Crow era, 1920s-1960s, and the challenges of historic preservation commemoration
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Lake Elsinore: a southern California African American resort area during the Jim Crow era, 1920s-1960s, and the challenges of historic preservation commemoration
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Content
LAKE ELSINORE:
A SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA AFRICAN AMERICAN RESORT AREA
DURING THE JIM CROW ERA, 1920s-1960s,
AND THE CHALLENGES OF HISTORIC PRESERVATION
COMMEMORATION
by
Alison Rose Jefferson
____________________________________________________________________
A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF HISTORIC PRESERVATION
December 2007
Copyright 2007 Alison Rose Jefferson
Acknowledgements
I want to thank all of the people who assisted me in my research for this
project, and who offered me support and encouragement in the writing and editing of
my Master's thesis.
ii
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements ii
List of Figures iv
Abstract vii
Introduction 1
Chapter 1. A Brief History of Resorts and Vacationing 8
Chapter 2. Far West Leisure and Entrepreneurial Pursuits in Lake Elsinore, 48
a Southern California Resort Town
Chapter 3. Commemoration of Cultural Significance Resources When 161
Integrity is Challenged
Bibliography 173
Appendix A. Lake Elsinore Built Cultural Resources 190
Appendix B. Selected Heritage Trail Resources 192
iii
List of Figures
Figure 1. Cover of the 1940 edition of the Negro Motorist Green Book, 28
published from 1936 to 1963.
Figure 2. California Eagle Newspaper, Summer 1925. 51
Figure 3. California Eagle Newspaper, Summer 1925. Detail of 52
advertisements in Figure 2.
Map 1. Lake Elsinore and environs, Riverside County, California. 54
Figure 4. View of Lake Elsinore from Lakeshore Drive in Southern 61
California, 1895.
Map 2. Lake Elsinore Hot Springs Brochure. 63
Figure 5. Davie and Merrifield Building, Lake Elsinore, 1906. 66
Figure 6. California Eagle Newspaper, October 1, 1921. 69
Figure 7. Rieves Inn stationery with a letter from A’Lelia Walker to 70
Mr. Ransom, 1924.
Figure 8. A’Lelia Walker (1885-1931). 72
Map 3. Lake Elsinore African American Resort Community, selective sites. 73
Figure 9. African Americans at Lake Elsinore, circa 1921. 77
Figure 10. California Eagle Newspaper, August 7, 1925. 78
Figure 11. Board of Directors of the Lake Shore Beach Company. 81
Figure 12. Text on photo page reads: “At Lake Elsinore, April 1931, 82
Mrs. Dorothy Stevenson, wife of the famous movie star,
‘Step-‘n-Fetch-It.’”
Figure 13. “Second Baptist Operates Own Beach House on Lake Elsinore,” 84
California Eagle Newspaper, Thursday, August 11, 1949.
Figure 14. Lake Shore Beach, Lake Elsinore, circa 1930. 98
iv
Figure 15. Lake Shore Beach Site, Lake Elsinore, circa 1930. 99
Figure 16. Lake Shore Beach, Lake Elsinore, circa 1930s. 100
Figure 17. California Eagle Newspaper, May through June 1925 102
advertisement.
Figure 18. California Eagle Newspaper, June 24, 1922. 103
Figure 19. Memorial Day, Lake Elsinore, May 30, 1927. 104
Figure 20. California Eagle Newspaper, Friday, May 29, 1925. 105
Figure 21. View looking southwest over the Lake Elsinore Valley 107
from the roof of Barbara Anderson’s home, 2006.
Figure 22. Aimee’s Castle, Aimee Semple McPherson’s home modeled 109
after a Middle Eastern castle, Lake Elsinore, California, ca. 1930s.
Figure 23. Boat Races on Lake Elsinore, 1937. 110
Figure 24. Sisters Mable and Ida Miller, circa 1922 at a Lake Elsinore 112
beach area open to Negroes.
Figure 25. Lake Elsinore, 1948. 113
Figure 26. Charlotta Bass, second from right, and a group of her friends 115
in a back yard, circa 1960s.
Figure 27. An advertisement which ran in several issues in 1930 for 119
Lake Elsinore establishments which catered to Negroes.
Figure 28. Members of the Independent Church of Elsinore. 120
Figure 29. Members of the Independent Church of Elsinore, 1940s-1952. 121
Figure 30. Top: Letterhead of the Jewish Cultural Club of Elsinore. 123
Bottom: Entry door to the Jewish Cultural and Social Center
which was owned by the club.
Figure 31. California Eagle Newspaper, Summer 1925. 125
v
Figure 32. The Lucas Family rented space for their trailer during August 128
in the 1940s at the Lake Elsinore Hotel.
Figure 33. Miller’s Café at Pottery and Langstaff, Lake Elsinore, circa 1950s. 132
Figure 34. Left, actor Clarence Muse, his wife Ena; right, Mildred Saunders 135
and unidentified man on her screened in porch sharing a meal at
Lake Elsinore, circa 1937-1938.
Figure 35. On the boat at Lake Elsinore circa 1946. 137
Figure 36. The Neal Family Reunion, Yarborough Park, Lake Elsinore, CA. 139
Sat., August 13, 2005.
Figure 37. A grand family outing after the water refurbishment of 145
Lake Elsinore, 1964.
Figure 38. West end of Lake Elsinore and Riverside Drive from the 147
Ortega Highway, circa 1950s.
Figure 39. Sepia USA Magazine, August 1952. 148
Figure 40. At the backyard pool of the Rutherford home at Lake Elsinore 149
on Lewis Street, circa 1950s.
Figure 41. Griffith family children and friend on a play date at Lake Elsinore, 151
circa early 1960s.
Figure 42. Lake Elsinore circa 1950s/early 1960s. 152
Figure 43. Robbie and Colonel Harvey at their home in the Sedco Hills 157
area of Lake Elsinore, 1980
Figure 44. Lake Elsinore, 2006. 158
vi
vii
Abstract
As soon as African Americans could afford leisure experiences after the end
of American slavery, they joined Euro-Americans at resorts and in travel to other
places domestically and overseas. Being able to take a vacation or an overnight trip
for pleasure became a critical marker and entitlement of middle class status.
This thesis examines the Lake Elsinore resort in Riverside County,
California, and the involvement of African American actors in the area’s history and
development during the period of legal segregation in the 20
th
century — an issue
overlooked in the past. The cultural landscape of this African American resort
community presents challenges and opportunities under current preservation policy
for commemoration, because significant built artifacts are not extant in this heritage
area. When physical traces are lost, how do we memorialize in the collective history
a more expansive view of the citizenry, when historic preservation efforts in the
United States emphasize tangible aspects of culture?
Introduction
Since the time of the Greeks and Romans in antiquity, people have traveled
to places away from their homes for pleasure, health cures, culture, self-
improvement and spiritual rejuvenation, recreation, relaxation and distraction. Not
until after the Industrial Revolution in the 19
th
century, however, did travel and
vacations become a privilege that Americans other than just the wealthy or elite
could enjoy. Being able to take a vacation — an overnight trip for pleasure, and not
just a Sunday afternoon visiting an amusement park — became a critical marker and
entitlement of middle class status. As soon as African Americans could afford
leisure experiences after the end of American slavery, they joined Euro-Americans at
famous and not so well-known resorts, first on the Eastern seaboard, later in other
parts of the United States, and in travel to other places domestically and overseas.
Some of these resorts continue to thrive today. Others are only a memory, if that.
1
This thesis examines the Lake Elsinore resort community in Riverside
County, California, and the African American visitors, residents and entrepreneurs
who were actors in the area’s history during the period of legal segregation in the
20
th
century. These Negro resort actors embraced the California booster dream of a
leisure lifestyle with outdoor recreation and living for health and rejuvenation, along
with the real estate development opportunity. At Lake Elsinore, African American
families were able to enjoy one type of recreational setting offered by Southern
1
Maxine Feifer, Tourism In History: From Imperial Rome to the Present, (Stein and Day Publishers:
New York, 1985), 167; Cindy Sondik Aron, Working At Play: A History of Vacations in the United
States, (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1999), 5.
1
California, during a very challenging and sometimes painful time in Californian and
American history.
Other well-known and popular Southern California African American
vacation and recreation destinations that flourished from the 1910s to the 1960s
included Bruces’ Beach in Manhattan Beach/Los Angeles County, Santa Monica
Beach near Pico Blvd. (known by some as “The Ink Well”), Val Verde in Santa
Clarita Valley/Los Angeles County, and Murray’s Dude Ranch in Apple Valley/San
Bernardino County.
Many happy times and memories were shared at Lake Elsinore and the other
resort areas open to Negro Californians. Despite the trials African Americans faced
from discrimination, they were able to find places to let their ‘souls breathe and
celebrate,’ and where they could shed inhibitions. At these places, among
themselves, Negroes could be insulated from racial harassment, avoid
unpleasantness, and hopefully prepare for whatever might come when they returned
home to their daily routines.
2
Free time is one of the most treasured parts of our lives. The ability to
choose how we spend our free time in many ways lies at the heart of what we
understand the word ‘freedom’ to mean. This was especially true of African
Americans during the period of interest of this thesis study, who were determined to
2
Mark Foster, “In the Face of ‘Jim Crow’: Prosperous Blacks and Vacations, Travel and Outdoor
Leisure, 1890-1945,” The Journal of Negro History, V. 84, No. 2 (Spring, 1999): 130-131, 135.
2
overcome the legacy of the forced labor of slavery, and its aftermath, the racial
barriers imposed by Jim Crow laws, in order to enjoy leisure in their own country.
3
As de facto and de jure segregation lessened and became illegal, and as the
economies of traveling greater distances became more affordable for all Americans,
more options for recreational activities became available to African Americans in
particular. Some leisure sites frequented by African American Southern Californians
from the 1920s to the 1960s in the Southland, as well as some of these types of
vacation communities in other parts of the United States, no longer serve the needs
of a population that now has many more opportunities to explore and travel to a far
broader array of destinations.
During the 20
th
century, resorts and leisure activities gained attention for
scholarly investigation. Because there was no “requisite manufacturing base and an
industrial working class on the road to self-consciousness, the resort was far from
being a typical production of the Industrial Revolution.” Resorts depend on a market
that starts off mostly outside the community; they require public space and amenities
in order to attract visitors. Sources of resort life have therefore typically been
geographically diverse and fragmentary, a condition many scholars choose to avoid.
4
Many stories about these places, and the structures that housed their various
leisure experiences, are being lost, because our society has neglected to document
3
Ibid., 131, 135; and Deborah Slaton, Chad Randl and Lauren Van Demme, ed., Preserve and Play:
Preserving Historic Recreation and Entertainment Sites, Conference Proceedings, (Washington D.C.:
Historic Preservation Education Foundation, 2006), xiii.
4
Theodore, Corbett, The Making of American Resorts: Saratoga Springs, Ballston Spa, Lake George,
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 3.
3
them. This lack of documentation is especially true for the African American resort
experience. Such documentation of these cultural landscapes is especially valuable,
since it offers important information to historians and the general public about the
ethnic diversity of California, and about people and events less familiar to many.
5
Much of the history and many of the structures of the African American
resort community at Lake Elsinore have been lost. In using the Lake Elsinore
African American resort community as a case study for this thesis, I will show that
there are ways in which historic preservation efforts can recognize the more
inclusive diverse cultural heritage of a community that has been marginalized and
overlooked when its historic sites no longer exist or have been transformed in other
ways.
6
Saving a public past for any city or town is a political, as well as historical
and cultural process, whether it is intended to be or not. Decisions about what is to
be remembered and protected situate the narratives of cultural identity in the
collective memory of and history about a place. Looking towards the future, in
addition to the landmark designation of significant architectural or social history sites
associated with the multiple cultural landscapes of communities, the public and
5
“Five Views: An Ethnic Historic Site Survey of California,” California Department of Park &
Recreation, Office of Historic Preservation, December 1988. From the Internet:
http://www.cr.nps.gov/history/online_books/5views/5views.htm.
6
Delores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History, (Cambridge, MA: The
MIT Press, 1995), 7-9.
4
private, cultural and civic infrastructure must come up with innovative programs in
order to properly recognize various marginalized groups.
7
To research resort sites like Lake Elsinore, and the African American
experience there, one must search in unusual ways and places for material that might
provide insight into these communities’ development. Sometimes in place of built
artifacts, oral histories, archival sources, maps and photographs may be the only way
to connect the heritage and places to cultural landscapes, such as that at the Lake
Elsinore African American resort community.
8
Chapter 1 offers a brief history of the origins and values of the Western
European vacation experience and the evolution of leisure choices, from the time of
Imperial Roman antiquity, through the Grand Tour of the British traveler of the late
19
th
century, to the post-Industrial Revolution American vacation. Some types and
sites of European leisure choices influenced the development of the modern vacation
experience in both Europe and America. A few favorite early American vacation
experiences that evolved out of European leisure choices are examined. Finally, I
7
Ibid., 7-9, 12-13, 52 & 61.
8
I gained some good insights into development of my research methodology from reading several
resort community histories, especially Theodore Corbett‘s The Making of American Resorts: Saratoga
Springs, Ballston Spa, Lake George. Others which were useful include: Milton Lawrence Culver, Jr.,
The Island, the Oasis, and the City: Santa Catalina, Palm Springs, Los Angeles, and Southern
California’s Shaping of American Life and Leisure, (PhD Dissertation, University of California, Los
Angeles, 2004); Stefan Kanfer, A Summer World: The Attempt to Build a Jewish Eden in the Catskills,
From the Days of the Ghetto to the Rise and Decline of the Borscht Belt, (Farrar Straus Giroux: New
York, 1989); Jill Nelson, Finding Martha’s Vineyard: African Americans at Home on an Island,
(Doubleday: New York, 2005); Marsha Dean Phelts, An American Beach for African Americans,
(Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1997); and Lewis Walker and Ben C. Wilson, Black
Eden: The Idlewild Community, (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2002).
5
present examples of African American vacation sites that formed outside of
California during the Jim Crow era from the late 1800s to the early 1960s.
In Chapter 2, I present the historic context of the development of the city of
Lake Elsinore and the Valley as a resort and recreational area, from the late 1800s
into the 20
th
century and the new millennium. Included in this discussion are sites
and agents of the African American resort community, and its evolution and
heritage. I also discuss common patterns of many African American vacation
retreats across America, and why it is important to preserve the heritage of these
sites.
Finally, Chapter 3 examines the challenges and opportunities presented when
looking for ways to commemorate cultural resources in a cultural landscape like the
historic African American community at Lake Elsinore, when its built integrity has
been dramatically altered over time. I present a discussion of historic preservation
policy, and efforts today in general and in the city of Lake Elsinore specifically.
Finally, I offer an alternative to landmark designations to commemorate the African
American heritage, which could be a part of a larger program that memorializes the
collective history of the Lake Elsinore Valley.
The group name used to describe African Americans has evolved over the
years. In this thesis I try to use the words “Negro” and “Colored” to identify people
of African decent in America during the Jim Crow era, as these are the names they
and others would have used. I also use “Black” and “African American” throughout
the thesis; these are more contemporary group identifiers for people of African
6
decent in America, and serve as universal group identifiers that cross historical time
periods.
I hope my research efforts will help add the historic, African American
cultural landscape to the ‘collective memory’ of the heritage of the region, by giving
voice to places where this group of people was present, prospered in the past, and
contributed to the growth and character of the local community and California. The
lives of those African Americans, who were able to defy the odds of relentless
oppression to become successful citizens with the ability to take vacations and buy
second homes during the Jim Crow era, deserve as much attention and
commemoration as the stories of those who achieved less, and who did not have such
distressingly narrower opportunities.
9
9
Foster, 130.
7
Chapter 1
A Brief History of Resorts and Vacationing
Western European
The habits and tastes of the Western European — particularly Anglo-Saxon
— tourists that are with us today had their beginnings with the Romans. From their
time to the present, cultural directives, social constraints and economic limitations
have all influenced this experience of distraction and relaxation. The types of
vacation taken continue to announce much about the vacationers. Leisure choices
are exercises in self-definition, which say something about class and economic
status, as well as personal aspirations and private goals. Sets of rituals have
developed in connection with vacation experiences at various locations, which create
individual and collective memories that provide selective visions for each
vacationer.
10
As early as the second century Before Common Era (BCE), upper and middle
class citizens of Rome made elaborate preparations to go for holiday excursions by
the sea at the popular destination of what was then known as the Italian Riviera, on
the Gulf of Naples. The 100-mile carriage ride to Southern Italy was a four-day
journey from the Imperial capital, on paved roads that were probably smoother than
many in the 18
th
century. Throughout the Roman Empire there was an infrastructure
10
Feifer, 3. Feifer notes there are other cultural traditions of tourism in the Middle East and Asia
which also date to antiquity that developed independently of Europe. She and Fred Inglis observe in
The Delicious History of the Holiday that the English were the most “representative” tourists among
the Europeans. We can infer that the English tradition also had a tremendous influence on the
American vacation experience; Aron, 2-3; and Orvar Lofgren, On Holiday: A History of Vacationing,
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999), 2-5.
8
in place — communications, maps and guidebooks of sorts, as well as roads and inns
— to accommodate business and leisure travelers. Although Greeks traveled across
their own land to the sacred (Olympic) games, the first European culture to travel en
masse for distraction and escape was Imperial Rome. Second century Common Era
(CE) marked the height of Roman mass tourism.
11
As travel was slow, and few were permitted long periods away from work,
Romans did not normally journey to faraway cultural attractions unless this was
combined with other activities, such as work for the military; at these times wives
and children were allowed on the trips. But during the spring and autumn recesses of
government there was plenty of opportunity for shorter pleasure jaunts. The weather
in Italy at these times of the year would have been most ideal for the large population
of bureaucrats and officials who were solvent, urban, and not tied to the land, to
venture off for several weeks of sightseeing and relaxation.
12
Not much is known about the tourists of the Imperial Roman era, other than
from the writings of the great social commentators, and the artifacts and structures
they used in their daily activities. From these fragments it appears the family-style
Roman tourist of this period, eating oysters on the Bay of Naples, had much in
common with the package tourists of the late 20
th
century. After the confinement of
11
Feifer, 8, 10-11; Today the Northern Italian coastline in the Liguria region which borders France is
known as the Italian Riviera.
12
Ibid., 10.
9
work, they wanted to take in as much pleasure as possible in their time off, and they
were impatient when they did not get what they wanted.
13
Once travelers arrived in the Riviera towns, a variety of accommodations,
restaurants and activities existed to suit their tastes and budgets. The wealthy
generally stayed in villas with their or someone else’s servants, who took care of
their needs, including meal preparation. The middle-classes stayed in boarding
houses, and the gamblers and prostitutes at inns. There was also a large retirement
community in the area.
14
Recreational and social activities were many. The visitors might begin the
day fishing and swimming. There was sailing during the day and under the
moonlight, and strolls in the formal gardens, on the tree-lined streets and along the
beach. Vacationers were guests at endless villa-house, beach and boat parties. A
visit to the sulphur hot springs was a must for all vacationers. For the cultural
tourists there was sightseeing at historic sites, and the docks. People-watching and
lots of drinking and eating of delicious foods were other vacation pastimes.
Gladiator combat, theatre and literary event attendance appealed to many.
15
Although passenger ships did not arrive until the 19
th
century, cultural
tourists among the Romans who could afford a longer trip traveled by wooden cargo
boats to Greece, and to Asia Minor, with stops at Jerusalem and Egypt. In many
cases these tourists visited the ancient ruins with local guides leading the way,
13
Ibid., 10.
14
Ibid., 12-13, 15.
15
Ibid., 12-16.
10
looked at art, and brought home souvenirs to their villas for display in “the art
room.”
16
From the time that Christianity began to take root in the West, around 365
CE, all “pleasure” was sublimated to piety. Pilgrimage became the prominent form
of tourism; during the early part of this period not many were able to make these
journeys. As Christianity spread in Europe during the Dark Ages, it became a
difficult time to travel. The barbarians allowed the road, communication and
accommodation infrastructure the Romans had built to fall apart. The unified Roman
Empire became domains of small, warring factions, and the hazardous conditions
prevented many people from taking to the road.
17
By the mid-13
th
century, after the great European church-building period,
when wealth poured into the monasteries that became the cultural repositories of the
era, and the Moors relinquished Spain, masses of people took to the roads to reap the
purported benefits of pilgrimage to correct moral infirmity and to cure physical
ailments. Pilgrims came from all social classes — except the poor, who were tied to
the land. During the 14
th
century, and into the 15
th
century, pilgrims began to go
sightseeing as they visited churches and Christian relics. Although pious
motivations began to wane at the dawn of the Protestant Reformation and the
Renaissance, pilgrimage continued to be the only legitimate way for most people to
leave home. To assist pilgrims, a new travel infrastructure emerged in Europe and in
the Holy Land environs of Asia Minor, along with the new literary genre of the
16
Ibid., 15-24, 27.
17
Feifer, 27-28.
11
travel guide. Even with the latest infrastructure in place, travel preparations
continued to be extensive, and foreign travel was an exceptional event. A year of
travel cost the rich or more well off (mostly male) pilgrims their customary income
for that time period. Some travel by pilgrims was sponsored by the local religious
orders.
18
The Renaissance traveler was called a “merchant of light” by Sir Francis
Bacon, for he was a tourist who traveled “to be broadened,” and not to relax. The
English version of this trekker was generally a wealthy, young, unmarried, educated
man in his early twenties, traveling to see how the world was run so as to prepare
himself for membership of the ruling class. This extended excursion of the
privileged male included a tour through the countries of Europe, with stops at the
important cities. His itinerary always included Italy, with visits to its various
churches, shrines and other sites, and he took in all the fashionable and other cultural
offerings available to him. Although his socioeconomic survey did not include
pleasure stops, this young traveler did stop at a spa town, such Baden in Switzerland,
if he was nearby.
Mineral spas in this era served as much the same purpose as holiday resorts
in the present one: the visitor simply took a little tonic exercise, relaxed, ate
well, and made new friends. The days were spent “around the pool,” dipping,
or sipping if the waters were to be taken internally, and socializing...For those
that were truly infirmed Baden was a serious place with public baths for the
proletarian visitors and private baths housed at the local inns for paying
guests.
19
18
Ibid., 28-31, 40.
19
Ibid., 64-70.
12
For the English, travel throughout Europe continued in the 17
th
and 18
th
centuries to be a finishing school for the education and refinement of young men. A
few tough women began to be seen traveling independently, but not alone. The
Puritan ethic still dictated that at least the pretense of travel, whether domestic or
foreign, was for self-improvement: to acquire education about the world or to better
one’s health. As England was prosperous and powerful, the great colonist abroad
and the greatest industrialist at home, “there was more money than ever for travel,
and social aspirations soared.”
20
Many of the young well-to-do travelers on what became known as the ‘Grand
Tour’ were now of the impressionable age of around sixteen years old, having
recently graduated from university, and escorted by a middle-aged tutor. As comfort
now became more of a priority, sometimes other functionaries and servants went
along. At those times that the young charges might meet up with other English boys
on their Grand Tour:
…to the timid tutor’s silent chagrin, the boys [would] enthusiastically
[gossip] about mutual friends from Cambridge or Oxford or Edinburgh,
singing favourite songs at top volume, and [trade] off-colour jokes – in much
the same mood as a crowd of young backpackers…nowadays.
21
The same people that would go off on a Grand Tour during this period also
discovered the seaside or inland towns at home and abroad, in order to take in the
newly-affirmed life-giving properties of salty and mineral waters, warm or cold, to
cure various afflictions. The members of fashionable society began to gather, to
20
Ibid., 98-99; and Fred Inglis, The Delicious History of the Holiday, (London: Routledge, 2000) 11,
17-18.
21
Feifer, 99-101.
13
socialize, and to rent and build housing in these towns, such as Bath and Brighton in
England. A new type of urban space was created, which became known as a ‘spa
town,’ watering-place or resort. The most successful possessed a combination of
urban sophistication and rural charm.
22
A Grand Tour of England was also established during the same period as that
of visits to the Continent. Although somewhat less exotic than the landscapes and
antiquities of Tuscany or Rome, the domestic English tourist could view the
picturesque and sublime countryside, and the ruins left behind by the disbanding of
the Catholic monasteries two hundred years earlier. Landscape painting, and the
new abundance of travel writing of various sorts, captured and presented a vision and
experience of the landscape that helped to create meaning for the tourists, and to
encourage more people to get out on the roads to see the sites for themselves.
23
These elite and aristocratic European travelers led the way for their
counterparts in the United States, as well as the middle and working class tourists
and vacationers of the 19
th
century and early 20
th
century on both sides of the
Atlantic Ocean. Resorts developed because of their natural resources, the hosts’
abilities to attract visitors because of the amenities provided, and the transportation
options which made it easier to travel. In Europe and the United States, as the by-
products of the Industrial Revolution spread to benefit more of the masses, and
people moved further across the American Frontier, the Puritan strain began to thin
22
Inglis, 16, 40-42; Theodore Corbett, The Making of American Resorts: Saratoga Springs, Ballston
Spa, Lake George, (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 15-17; and Aron, 17.
23
Inglis, 30-34.
14
out. As vacation communities evolved in the 19
th
century, the hosts were concerned
with providing “a restful, healthful and entertaining experience that would appeal to
the broadest respectable public.”
24
American
Spas were the first form of vacation life for the American colonists in the late
17
th
and early 18
th
century; they learned about the mineral springs from the Native
Americans. The Puritan ethic did not allow for “aimless pleasure,” however. At
spas, they could allow for the enjoyment of socializing, relaxation and recreational
activities as side products of an excursion that was primarily in the pursuit of health
and escape from disease. It was difficult to get to the early spring sites. The
colonists traveled by stagecoach on primitive roads, or by boat when that was a more
convenient mode of transportation. Even for the more affluent colonial, these early
American spas were not necessarily comfortable places; the amenities were very
basic.
25
Spa bathing and drinking took place at springs throughout all the Eastern
United States, and later in other parts of the nation; a few continue to be fashionable
resorts even today. Lynn Springs, near Boston, was a popular early mineral water
spring; later, John Adams went to Stafford Springs in Connecticut “to take the cure.”
There were other well-liked springs in Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Jersey.
24
Theodore Corbett, The Making of American Resorts: Saratoga Springs, Ballston Spa, Lake George,
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 1, 8, 11, 15; and Horace Sutton, Travellers:
The American Tourist from Stagecoach to Space Shuttle, (New York, NY: William Morrow and
Company, Inc., 1980), 28.
25
Sutton, 11-13 and Aron, 17-18.
15
George Washington visited many springs throughout the colonies, including
Berkeley Springs in Virginia, to cure his rheumatic fever in 1761. White Sulphur
Springs was another Virginia spa enjoyed by many. Spas flourished in
Pennsylvania, such as Yellow Springs, and Bristol, outside of Philadelphia, with
visitors arriving from various parts of the country and from the West Indies.
…Yellow Springs and Bristol Springs had become so popular and so
fashionable that some Quakers succumbed to the allure and visited the
springs on the Sabbath. Protestant ministers decried the people’s
“immoderate and growing fondness for pleasure, luxury, gaming, dissipation,
and their concomitant vices.” When some entrepreneurs tried to organize a
lottery to build yet another spa, the clergy stomped off in a body to urge the
governor to prohibit the scheme “for erecting public gardens with Bath and
Bagnios among us.” The clergymen had the last and the compelling word. If
hot and cold baths were so necessary to good health, they said, then proper
facilities could be added to the hospitals.
26
In New York, mineral water resort life emerged in Ballston Spa, Caldwell, at
Lake George and Saratoga Springs, from the end of the American Revolution to the
end of the 19
th
century. Saratoga Springs was the first town in the U.S. “to base its
continuous prosperity and growth on its ability to become a center of entertainment,”
and it offered access to elites and the burgeoning middle class. In promotional
efforts to draw clientele, Saratoga Springs was the first resort to market to the middle
class the idea that they had an opportunity to “rub shoulders with the rich and
famous.” As the 19
th
century marched forward, the crowd that visited the resort
became very diverse in class and age, including: wealthy and sophisticated
“fashionables;” politicians with varied pedigrees, to “pretentious belles;” “gentlemen
26
Ibid., 17 and Sutton, 11-14.
16
of the turf” (country squires); rich tradesmen and farmers; clergy of various religious
persuasions with their families; the learned and unlearned; men and more women; as
well as the invalid.
27
The upper classes visited the Saratoga Springs resort typically for the
amenities: the public space amenities served as an elegant background for leisure
activities. They carried on their social activities at: the springs; the hotels and on
their porch areas; in the public gardens, squares, parks, promenades and cemeteries;
and at the entertainment venues, including the theatre, the racetrack, and various
types of gambling and nightlife establishments. The middle classes, on the other
hand, went in search of health and spiritual revival. They and the working class
visitors to Saratoga Springs stayed a shorter period of time than upper class visitors.
The early entrepreneurial and civic-minded landowners played a key role in
the development of the original settlement, with sections of land plotted for more
modest middle and laboring classes, as well as more affluent housing budgets. The
housing options included large and small hotels, boarding houses, cure institutes and
private homes. Almost every dwelling in the town had the potential of being rented
to visitors.
28
Women had many employment and business opportunities at a resort like
Saratoga Springs that were not open to them in industrial cities, with boarding
houses and hotels. Women in general made up the majority of the workforce at the
27
Corbett, 1, 59, 223, 226-227.
28
Ibid., 18, 60, 65, 74, 79-80, 83, 98, 136-137, 226; and Myra B. Young Armstead, “Lord, Please
Don’t Take Me in August:” African Americans in Newport and Saratoga Springs, 1870-1930,
(Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1999) 39.
17
resort, in household and hotel domestic service jobs. Owning or running a boarding
house or a hotel was an acceptable and respectable role for a middle-class, single or
married woman, using her domestic skills to support her family. In 1873, “women
ran more than half the quality boarding houses advertised in guides and several of
them were hotel proprietors.”
29
Again following the European tradition, in the late 18
th
century to middle 19
th
century Americans also sought health and amusement at seaside watering places
such as Newport, Rhode Island, Cape May, New Jersey and Martha’s Vineyard,
Massachusetts. At these and other coastal resorts it was believed cold sea baths had
therapeutic potential, and “an aesthetic appreciation of the sublimity of sea and
shoreline” developed.
30
By the 1760s, Newport, Rhode Island had emerged as a holiday destination
for the colonial elites and as “the most elegant social center of the colonies.” It
continues to be popular today with vacationers. The ship captains who managed the
trading routes between Newport and the Southern and West Indian ports advertised
the pleasures of the Rhode Island coast. Southern planters and prosperous
Philadelphia merchants, families from Baltimore and New York, and some
vacationers from the West Indies, sometimes spent four to five months there. The
expatriate from Europe thought the Rhode Island summer climate to be like that of
Italy. Getting to Newport was a long, expensive and challenging trip. In the 18
th
29
Corbett, 98, 156.
30
Aron, 20-21.
18
century sea routes were the only ways to get to the Rhode Island coastal city, since as
late as 1767 there were no roads from the Eastern cities into New England.
31
Newport was a principal North American colonial trading post before it was
transformed into a summer resort in the 18
th
century. The merchants of the city
engaged in the triangle trade of slaves between America, Africa and the West Indies.
Rum made in Newport, along with flour and iron, was traded by city merchants on
the West African coast for slaves. Transported back across the Atlantic to the West
Indies, the slaves were then sold to sugar cane and rice planters. The slaves in the
Caribbean made molasses that was shipped back to Newport for distilling into rum.
Slaves were also shipped to Newport and sold in New England until slavery was
abolished in 1807.
32
The early seasonal visitors to Newport stayed in boarding houses or rented
local farmhouses. As the 19
th
century progressed, visitors could stay in hotels; by
mid-century, cottages were being built “for exclusive summer residence.” Famous
artists, writers and intellectuals, like Bostonians Oliver Wendell Holmes, Julia Ward
Howe and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, sought inspiration from the environs of
Newport. In the 1870s “fashionable society” discovered Newport, and from the last
quarter of the 19
th
century forward Newport became “the summer home of
31
Ibid., 16-17, 21; Armstead, 14; and Sutton, 16.
32
Armstead, 14; and Richard C.Youngken, African Americans in Newport: An Introduction to the
Heritage of African Americans In Newport, Rhode Island, 1700-1945, (Newport, RI: Rhode Island
Historical Preservation & Heritage Commission and the Newport Historical Society, 1998), 3-7.
19
America’s wealthiest families,” where they built palatial estates in historical revival
architectural styles.
33
By the mid-19
th
century the summer colony popularity of Cape May and
Long Branch on the New Jersey shore overshadowed the nationally-known Newport.
Like other resorts in America, the New Jersey seaside vacation spots emerged with
the rapidly developing cities of the 18
th
century. Initially accessible only by the
Atlantic Ocean or the Delaware Bay, Cape May was particularly popular with
residents from Philadelphia and the southern states. With several hotels by 1850, it
was the most famous seaside resort in the United States, and it retained that status for
the remainder of the 19
th
century. In the later decades of the 19
th
century, the
combination of sea and land transportation infrastructure improvements — such as
railroads, better road access, steamships, new facilities for day-trippers, and
residential cottage development — made Cape May more accessible to a broader
range of visitors and influenced the city’s growth.
34
In 1976 the city of Cape May was designated a National Historic Landmark.
The city has the most complete in situ grouping of mid-19
th
century Victorian style
buildings east of the Mississippi River. After being overlooked as a vacation
destination during the early part of the 20
th
century, due to changes in public taste
and “the consequence of being off the beaten path,” a new post-1950s auto
33
Armstead, 14; and Kay Davis, Class and Leisure at America’s First Resort: Newport, Rhode
Island, 1870-1914, From the Internet:
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MA01/davis/newport/newport%20history/newport_overview.html.
34
Cleveland Amory, The Last Resorts, (New York: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, 1952), 19; and
Emil R. Salvini, The Summer City by the Sea: Cape May, New Jersey, An Illustrated History, (New
Brunswick, NY: Rutgers University Press), 17, 20, 32, 40.
20
thoroughfare was a catalyst for tourism and year-round population growth. The
reemphasis on the historic architecture of Cape May has helped to revive the
economic fortune of the town by expanding the shore summer season from early
April to late October.
35
By the late 19
th
century, tourism had replaced the whaling industry on the
island of Martha’s Vineyard as the area’s most profitable business enterprise.
Commercial tourism there grew out of annual Methodist revival meetings held at an
area they named Wesleyan Grove. In 1835, worshippers began to stay in tent camps
in this open field area leased by the religious organization. The Methodists
pioneered and dominated religious resort development of the 19
th
century. People
who went to these summer camp meetings sought educational and spiritual goals, as
well as leisure activities. They could renew their faith, gain self-improvement, and
get away from home to a new setting to socialize with friends and strangers.
Wesleyan Grove grew dramatically in the middle decades of the 19
th
century,
“acquiring a national reputation as one of the most successful and institutionally
stable of the Methodist camp meetings.”
36
In the 1850s, the growth of secular pastimes among those who attended the
camp meetings became a concern of the more pious, who wanted “to preserve a
spiritual atmosphere as their community grew.” In the 1860s, Wesleyan Grove and
some adjacent land were purchased by the newly-formed Martha’s Vineyard Camp-
35
Salvini, 112-113, 124.
36
Dona Brown, Inventing New England: Regional Tourism In The Nineteenth Century, (Smithsonian
Institution Press: Washington, DC, 1995), 77; Aron, 102-106; and Jill Nelson, Finding Martha’s
Vineyard: African Americans At Home On An Island, (New York, NY: Doubleday, 2005), 22.
21
Meeting Association. This organization included church leaders and elected officers
who managed the camp and leased and sold the tent and — later — cottage spaces.
During this era the communal tents set up by local church groups on the earlier camp
meeting grounds began to be replaced by private family tents, and the first
permanent residences were built on the grounds. Ellen Weiss, an architectural
historian and a summer resident in the area, suggests that the tents were replaced by
tiny, ornate gingerbread cottages, whose architecture combined design elements of
the early tents, church architecture and cottages.
37
By the late 1860s, land speculators and astute entrepreneurs also saw
potential profit in settings like Martha’s Vineyard. Early developers realized that
those who came to the island for religious reasons also enjoyed the “clean ocean,
pristine beaches, rolling hills and bluffs, ponds, and cool breezes — and that there
was money to be made.” These land speculators purchased land, offered cottage lots
for sale, built hotels and wharves, and invested in rail lines near the Methodists and
other religious denomination enclaves. The Christian influence of nearby places like
Wesleyan Grove on Martha’s Vineyard was not seen as a liability, because
increasing numbers of the middle class were seeking resorts where this type of
influence prevailed. An area like Wesleyan Grove was not unique; by 1870, many
other camp meeting locations, such as Ocean Groove, New Jersey, and Rehoboth,
Delaware, were being turned into permanent, more diverse vacation communities.
38
37
Nelson, 24; Brown, 77-78; Aron, 104-105; and Lofguen, 143.
38
Ibid., 105-108; Brown, 79-82, 102; and Nelson, 22.
22
Those that frequented Wesleyan Grove and the cottages built there in the
1860s and 1870s were not genteel, wealthy or particularly well educated people who
were accustomed to summer leisure and travel. At the time, only a few who
vacationed there had white collar professional status which allowed taking time off
for extensive summer leisure. Instead, the majority of the visitors to Wesleyan
Grove were artisans and shopkeepers of varying degrees of wealth and status:
coopers, blacksmiths, tanners, watchmakers, grocers, teamsters, milliners and
merchant tailors. Some were also employed in office occupations as agents for
factories, bookkeepers and clerks. These industrious citizens were all rooted in the
urban communities they lived in during the rest of the year. The cottage experience
of visitors at Wesleyan Grove environs was characterized by a comfort, rural
simplicity, privacy and domestic informality, rather than the formality and
conventionality of the great resort hotels and mansions of places like Saratoga and
Newport.
39
Beginning in the late 1860s, new residential developments around Wesleyan
Grove copied the circular design of the campgrounds and added parks and other
amenities that would attract more affluent vacationers. This late 19
th
century
settlement area around and including the grounds of the camp meeting was renamed
Oak Bluffs in 1907. After losing some of its temporary features with the
establishment of a more permanent infrastructure and institutions, by the 1890s
religious resorts like Oak Bluffs and Ocean Grove were attracting a more “genteel”
39
Brown, 82-85, 90, 102.
23
clientele. As those attracted to these summer communities became more affluent,
the cottage residents were more secular in their expectations of leisure and
enjoyment. Along with camp meetings, a range of activities, such as billiards,
dancing, roller skating, croquet, concerts and readings, became acceptable forms of
diversion.
40
African American
As resort towns developed in the 19
th
century and the early 20
th
century,
African Americans were part of the social mixture as year-round residents, service
workers and entrepreneurs. In the late 19
th
century, after the dismantling of slavery,
a small but growing upwardly mobile African American middle class could afford to
travel for vacations at spas, seaside and mountain resorts, and occasionally in
Europe. This group of Colored folk throughout the United States more or less
mirrored the resort-based leisure consumption of White middle and upper class
Americans at the time.
41
Between the 1910s and 1930s, a greater variety of people — working class
whites, immigrants, middle class and working class African Americans — outside of
the White American middle and upper classes were able to take more than a day
excursion to the beach, a lake or an amusement park. By the end of 1940, paid
vacations were institutionalized as part of employee compensation and as part of “the
American way of life” for all working people.
42
40
Ibid., 94-95, 98, 100; Nelson, 26, 28; and Aron, 110.
41
Armstead, 18-22; and Gatewood, 7, 200-201, 248.
42
Aron, 10, 184, 207, 238, 248; and Lofguen, 109-110.
24
The resorts at Saratoga Springs, Newport, Cape May, Martha’s Vineyard, and
several other locations throughout America, attracted a Negro clientele for summer
vacations, along with White patrons. Those resort towns that the Colored middle
class visited had sizable Negro populations with establishments that catered to their
accommodation needs. As early as 1894, “distinctly Black resorts emerged as the
most trouble free vacation option” during the era of segregation, when African
Americans tourists began to experience restrictions at mainstream resorts. There
were several vacation sites throughout the United States that catered to a Negro
clientele during this period, with varying degrees of success and longevity. Hillside
Inn in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania, and Highland Beach, Maryland, were
open for business in the Atlantic coastal states. Idlewild, Michigan, was one of
several retreats in the Midwest. The south featured more than one beach area that
served Negro vacationers, including American Beach at Amelia Island, in Florida,
and the Gulfside Resort outside of Biloxi, Mississippi.
43
43
Armstead, 18-22, 36; Aron, 213-216; Gatewood, 7, 45; Shirlee Taylor Haizlip, “The Black
Resorts.” American Legacy Magazine, Summer 1996, 12, 14. Haizlip calls to our attention the fact
that of the popular Eastern seaboard vacation spots which historically served the African American
upper classes, three continue to thrive in contemporary times: Highland Beach (MD), Sag Harbor on
Long Island (NY) and Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard (MA); Stephen Birmingham, Certain
People: America’s Black Elite, (Boston , MA: Little, Brown and Company, 1977), 94; Jill Nelson,
Nanine Alexander and Pamela Douglas, “A Summer Place: Black resorts are havens, communities of
neighbors and real property,” Black Enterprise Magazine, August 1981, 57; Foster, 136-144; F.R.
Washington, “Recreational Facilities for Negroes,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and
Social Science, Vol. 140 (Nov. 1928), 279-280; Gulfport was a Negro Chautaugua (self-improvement)
resort begun in the 1920s by Rev. Robert E. Jones, one of the first African American bishops in the
Methodist Episcopal denomination; Richard Bardolph, The Negro Vanguard, (New York: Rinehart &
Company, Inc., 1959), 108; and “Methodist Churches and Landmarks in Mississippi,” From the
Internet: http://library.millsaps.edu/index.php/archives/jb-cain-archives-of-mississippi-
methodism/exhibits/historic-methodist-churches-and-landmarks-in-mississippi/complete-list/.
25
Jews also faced exclusion and discrimination at many mainstream vacation
places as early as the 1870s, and through the Depression years of the 1930s. The
Jewish press published information about lodgings and other facilities where they
were not welcome. Word of mouth also helped both Jewish and Black travelers to
know where they were welcome, and where they were not. Vacation places they
built for themselves, and Jewish heritage sites, were also featured in the press and
guidebooks. Jewish resorts flourished in the Catskill Mountains in New York;
Atlantic City, New Jersey; South Haven, Michigan; the Pocono Mountains in
Pennsylvania; and in Florida’s Miami Beach.
44
As Negro mobility and yearning for leisure travel increased in spite of the
possible inconveniences, special travel guides were created to inform African
Americans about services and facilities available to them as travelers on the road.
One such guide published from 1936 to 1963, The Negro Motorist Green Book,
promised “to give the Negro traveler information that will keep him from running
into difficulties, embarrassments and to make his trips more enjoyable.” Many
Black resorts were regularly listed in The Green Book. During this era, the United
States Department of the Interior even published “A Directory of Negro Hotels and
Guest Houses.” In addition to guidebooks and word of mouth, African American
44
Aron, 218; Lofguen, 106; The Negro Motorist Green Book, (New York: Victor H. Green & Co.,
1949), From the Internet:
http://www.autolife.umd.umich.edu/Race/R_Casestudy/Negro_motorist_green_bk.htm, 1; Avi Y.
Decter and Melissa Martens, eds., The Other Promised Land: Vacationing, Identity, and the Jewish
American Dream, (Baltimore: The Jewish Museum of Maryland, Inc., 2005), 5; Judith Endelman,
“Vacation: Days: Jews in the American Landscape, in ed. Decter and Martens, 18, 20-21; Sutton, 42;
Price M. Cobbs, My American Life: From Rage to Entitlement, (New York: Atria Books/Simon &
Schuster, Inc., 2005), 27; and Walker and Wilson, 119.
26
newspapers, mass-circulation magazines and city directories advertised hotels and
other services available to Negro travelers in various regions of the country.
45
(See
Figure 1.)
Although there were some commercial accommodations throughout the
United States where Negro travelers could find lodging and meals, these
establishments were not common. Until the end of legal segregation in the 1960s,
Negroes mostly traveled to places where they could “[stay] in private homes with
friends, or friends of friends, relatives, colleagues…, or church people [they] knew
or who had been told of [them]. Sometimes they would be asked to pay, sometimes
not.”
46
Saratoga Springs, New York and Newport, Rhode Island
Negroes were household slaves on rural estates in Saratoga Springs from the time of
the earliest American settlements. The 1790 census also listed a number of free
Negroes. From 1785 to 1827, several laws were passed in the state of New York to
give African Americans their freedom, and to end slavery in the state. With freedom
post-1827, Negroes were only allowed to work in the lower strata of resort
employment, as domestic and unskilled labor, and had little opportunities beyond
that. A few Negroes obtained work as entertainers.
47
45
Armstead, 18; The Green Book, 1; Endelman, in eds. Decter and Martens, 20-21; Foster 136-137;
“America on the Move,” Exhibit, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution,
From the Internet: http://americanhistory.si.edu/ONTHEMOVE/collection/object_583.html; and
Sarah Allaback, ed., Resorts & Recreation: A Historic Theme Study of the New Jersey Coastal
Heritage Trail Route, 1995, From the Internet:
http://www.cr.nps.gov/history/online_books/nj1/chap4.htm.
46
Cobbs, 27; and Gatewood, 202.
47
Corbett, 146-148, 150-151, 154; and Armstead, 21-22.
27
Figure 1. Cover of the 1940 edition of the Negro Motorist Green Book, published from 1936 to 1963.
The guide listed accommodation that would serve African American travelers throughout the United
States during the Jim Crow era, before civil rights laws made racial discrimination and segregation
illegal. Most Negro travelers stayed at both friends and Black-owned establishments because of
discriminatory practices that were encountered at facilities while traveling on the open road. Prepared
in conjunction with the United States Travel Bureau, the 1940 edition cost 25 cents and listed “Hotels,
Taverns, Garages, Night Clubs, Restaurants, Service-Stations, Automobiles, Tourist-Homes, Road-
Houses, Barber-Shops, Beauty-Parlors.”
48
48
“America on the Move” Exhibit, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution,
From the Internet: http://americanhistory.si.edu/ONTHEMOVE/collection/object_583.html.
28
Until the 1840s, Negro women made up the majority of the workforce at
many U.S. resorts. Many males of African American decent worked as waiters. As
resort work was seasonal, most workers held down a series of jobs to patch together
their year-round income. Well into the 20
th
century there was a strong job
information and recruitment network in the Negro community, which was especially
enticing to students and teachers who could utilize their vacation time by working at
the resorts.
49
As the 19
th
century went on, Negroes were permanently pushed out of many
of the better domestic service jobs and skilled trades they had previously held at
Saratoga Springs, by White competition. This preference for hiring White, European
immigrant domestics increased across the country as the century advanced. By the
late 19
th
century, many respectable Negro women — like Euro-American women —
used their housewifery skills to operate lodging facilities and other businesses that
catered to summer visitors. At Saratoga Springs and other early resorts, some of
these facilities served African American seasonal workers and tourists, others served
Whites, and some served a mixed clientele. Some seasonal and year-round
businesses included laundry services, nightclubs, restaurants, barbershops,
dressmaking and tailoring, transportation, and spas or bathhouses.
50
Although Negroes may have been part of the social mix in resort towns since
their early days, in accordance with the customs of the day throughout the 19
th
century to the mid-20
th
century they faced discrimination and prejudice. Separate
49
Corbett, 144-145, 150; and Armstead, 73-77, 93-94
50
Corbett, 5, 144-145, 150; and Armstead, 21-22, 73-75, 83.
29
African American institutions, such as churches and voluntary associations, were
built to accommodate Negro exclusion from similar Anglo American organizations.
After the Civil War, and during the American era of segregation, Negro tourists were
barred from staying in White hotels. At Saratoga Springs they stayed with friends,
or rented rooms or cottages from African American proprietors in the “Quarter de
Africaine.” They also suffered other restrictions: at many resorts during this period,
Negroes were only welcome if they were employed at a particular establishment.
51
In the region of Newport, Rhode Island, during the 18
th
century, the majority
of slaves and free African descendents worked in domestic service, agricultural
goods production, and services associated with rum production, ship-building, wharf
warehousing and marine trades. Many slaves also labored in the trades of furniture
and cabinet makers, silver/goldsmiths, local builders and stonemasons. As early as
the mid-1700s, leading church figures and their associates denounced the practice of
slavery, and created religious and educational programs for Negroes. With
encouragement from vocal anti-slavery activists, many Negroes were granted or
purchased their freedom in the years of foment preceding and during the
Revolutionary War. The oldest African American mutual aid society in the United
States, the African Union Society, was established by the Negro community of
Newport in the early 1780s.
52
51
Armstead, 18, 28-29, 74; Gatewood, 200-202; Lofguen, 106; and Gretchen Sullivan Sorin and Jane
W. Rehl, Honorable Work: African Americans in the Resort Community of Saratoga Springs, 1870-
1970, (Saratoga Springs, NY: Historical Society of Saratoga Springs, 1992), 22-31.
52
Armstead, 30; and Youngken, 11-12, 18-20.
30
In the early 19
th
century, many free Negroes continued to be employed in
domestic service and the marine trades. Some continued their pre-manumission
living arrangement with their former owners. Others settled into neighborhoods
where they continued as domestic employees or were independent service-related
entrepreneurs such as teamsters, laborers, coopers, cordwainers, caterers,
blacksmiths, house painters and gardeners. Both classes of these workers
participated in and supported the development of the resort-based economy of
Newport.
53
Prior to the decade of the Civil War, and through at least 1900, there were a
few flourishing African American businesses in both Saratoga Springs and Newport,
some of which were of service to European American seasonal visitors. George
Crum was a successful chef and later independent restaurateur in Saratoga Springs,
who is purported to have (with his sister) invented the potato chip.
Restaurant owner, caterer and real estate developer, George T. Downing, first
opened establishments catering to White summer visitors at Newport in 1846.
Already a successful restaurateur in New York City, Washington, D.C. and
Providence, Rhode Island, with a clientele made up of many of the social elites,
Downing’s Newport establishments were patronized by his high society friends who
began to summer on the Rhode Island coast. In 1854 he built the Sea Grit Hotel,
which was described as “sumptuously furnished for a resort for the wealthy.” After
53
Youngken , 23.
31
the hotel was destroyed suspiciously by fire in 1860, the entrepreneur constructed the
Downing Block on the site, the first commercial retail project in Newport.
After accumulating substantial capital out west during the California Gold
Rush, Benjamin J. Burton returned to Newport to launch a transportation business
that included baggage transfer services for the summer resort crowd. Towards the
end of the 19
th
century his business also included taxi and bus services, “the latter
providing Newport with its first mass transit operation.”
54
In the 1890s, brothers David B. and John T. Allen began a restaurant and
catering business; their Hygeia Spa was a well-known cafe at the turn of the 20
th
century at Newport’s Easton’s Beach. The widowed mother of Stanley Beaumont
Braithwaite established a “tourist home” on the city’s DeBlois Street in the 1890s.
In the early to mid-20
th
century, Braithwaite, a nationally-known African American
poet and literary critic “…was a distinguished college professor for 10 years at
Atlanta University and a personal and literary friend of major American poets Robert
Frost, Edgar Arlington Robinson, Amy Lowell, James Weldon Johnson, Counter
Cullen and Black nationalist / scholar W.E.B. DuBois, among others.”
55
At Saratoga Springs in the 20
th
century there were successful clubs and
restaurants in the heart of the Black neighborhood which served an interracial
clientele of both tourists and workers. Patrons went to places like Jack’s Cabaret
(c.1916-1962) to see a show, or to Hattie’s Chicken Shack (1939-present) for fried
chicken. As in the White community, during the prohibition era of the 1920s there
54
Ibid., 31, 33, 51; Armstead, 22-23, 77; and Sorin, 22-27.
55
Youngken, 42, 51-52; and Armstead, 74.
32
were speakeasies and illegal gambling establishments situated in the African
American business community.
56
Cape May, New Jersey
Although their movements were very restricted, some free Negroes began
settling in the city of Cape May, New Jersey, in the first half of the 1800s, for
employment in the fishing and resort industries. In 1846, African American Stephen
Smith, a lumber and coal merchant as well as real estate entrepreneur, built a family
vacation home at Cape May out of materials from his lumber yard. This was the
same year slavery was permanently abolished in New Jersey, although this economic
institution did linger in the state until the Civil War. A resident of Philadelphia who
was born a slave in Columbia, Pennsylvania, in 1795, Smith purchased his freedom
and was set up in business by his former owner, Revolutionary War General Thomas
Boude. Smith was said to have been the wealthiest Negro American of his era.
57
In oral histories passed down by African American families living in Cape
May from the last half of the 19
th
century, it is said that abolitionist Harriet Tubman
worked in the local hotels under an assumed name, while hiding from bounty
hunters, to earn money to assist in the funding of the Underground Railroad. As
early as the late 1870s, the Banneker Hotel at Cape May, New Jersey, catered to
56
Armstead, 73, 86, 132-133; and Sorin, 23-24.
57
Stephen Smith House, brochure published by the Center for Community Arts, Cape May, New
Jersey, 1996; Kim Mulford, “A Proud Past at the Shore,” Courier Post, August 7, 2006, From the
Internet:
http://www.courierpostonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060807/LIVING/608070316/-
1/ARCHIVES; and Douglas Harper, “Slavery In the North,” From the Internet:
http://www.slavenorth.com/newjersey.htm; and Birmingham, 116.
33
upper class Negro vacationers. Many from Washington, D.C., Baltimore and
Philadelphia spent a portion of each summer at this resort. By 1911, the Hotel Dale,
a Cape May African American establishment, was providing hospitality and fine
amenities to such distinguished guests as W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T.
Washington.
58
Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts
Like other places in the United States, Negroes came to Martha’s Vineyard as
part of the slave trade with the earliest European settlers or shortly thereafter.
Slavery was legal in Massachusetts until 1783, but there is documentation reporting
Negro indentured servitude well into the 19
th
century. During the first half of the
1800s, Blacks represented skilled workers, laborers, and at least one whaling captain.
People of color were allowed to participate in the Methodist camp meetings from
their beginnings in the 19
th
century. Some participated as occasional preachers, but
few were permanent residents of Wesleyan Grove. The African American
community of the Vineyard was small throughout the 19
th
century. Those Negroes
arriving at the end of the 19
th
and the beginning of the 20
th
century sought work and
residential opportunities in the more hospitable northern environment.
59
58
Stephen Smith House, brochure; Gatewood, 45; Hotel Dale, brochure, published by the Center for
Community Arts, Cape May, New Jersey, 1993; Avon, 213; Salvini, 16; and Mulford, Courier Post,
August 7, 2006.
59
Nelson, 17, 19, 23; Jacqueline L. Holland, “The African-American Presence On Martha’s Vineyard
in Arthur Railton, ed., African Americans on Martha’s Vineyard: A Special Edition of The Dukes
Count Intelligencer, (Published by the Martha’s Vineyard Historical Society, October 1997), 1-5; and
Adelaide M. Cromwell, “The History of Oak Bluffs As a Popular Resort for Blacks,” in Railton, 48-
52.
34
During the transitional years between the 19
th
and 20
th
centuries, an
increasing number of African Americans came to Martha’s Vineyard to work as
servants in the summer homes of Euro-American families from Boston and other
Eastern cities. As the transitional years passed, some Negroes became year-round
homeowners and small business owners. These entrepreneurs operated guest houses
for Negroes, such as Thayer Cottage and the Promenade Hotel. Its doors still open
today, Shearer Cottage was opened around 1917, the longest-lived and best-known
of these establishments. Other early businesses run by African Americans included a
guest house that serviced only White European descendents, a dining hall, a gas
station, a barbershop, a laundry, and a shoe shine and cobbler establishment.
60
During the time when accommodations were segregated, the guest houses —
run for the most part by African American women entrepreneurs — introduced the
Vineyard to a class of Negroes who were government workers, teachers, doctors,
lawyers, artists and small business owners with disposable income to spend on
summer vacations. Many of these early guests bought summer homes that continue
today to be passed down through the generations of those early Negro families.
Some of the homeowners also “quietly took in guests” for extra income.
61
As award-winning filmmaker and MacArthur Fellow Stanley Nelson notes in
his documentary film A Place of Our Own, about his family’s experiences on the
island of Martha’s Vineyard at Oak Bluffs, starting in the late 19
th
century more
60
Cromwell, 52, 56; and Nelson, 28-29.
61
Nelson, 31-33; and Cromwell, “The History of Oak Bluffs As a Popular Resort for Blacks,” in
Railton, 56, 58-60.
35
affluent African Americans in the eastern half of the United States built summer
communities to rest, socialize, and expose their children to a positive vision of Black
life.
Post-World War II, an increasing number of African Americans began to
come for a summer respite on the Vineyard from cities such as Boston, New York
and Washington, D.C. Many cottages were available to rent or buy at prices that
were within the budgets of the burgeoning class of Black strivers who wanted this
type of rustic, seaside retreat. The 1950s and 1960s saw a period on the island
where, in Oak Bluffs and other towns, more than a few houses were empty and
boarded up for many years. As late as the early 1970s, one could “…purchase a
large cottage for four or five figures.” In recent times, Oak Bluffs continues to serve
a predominately African American community of summer and year-round residents
and visitors.
62
Nowadays, class and financial ability for the most part supersede race in
property transactions on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, and vacationers — Black
as well as White — come from all over the United States to partake in the region’s
leisure offerings. African Americans purchase and build more expensive homes all
around the island. In the early 21
st
century, the cottage lots that were purchased for
prices in the low five figures a few decades ago are worth hundreds of thousands,
and in some cases millions of dollars. Prominent African Americans who have spent
part of their summer there, or purchased a vacation home, from the time of
62
Nelson, 33-34.
36
segregation to the present, include activist singer and actor Paul Robeson and his
wife, Eslanda; singer Ethel Waters; composer Henry T. Burleigh; Rev. Adam
Clayton Powell, Sr. and his son, Adam, Jr., who eventually became a powerful
Congressman from New York City; Massachusetts U.S. Senator Edward W. Brooke;
singer Lionel Richie and the Commodores; film auteur Spike Lee and his family; and
writer B.B. Moore Campbell and her family.
63
Highland Beach, Maryland
With freedom, the new wealth of the emerging urban, Negro middle class and
elite, and the rigid enforcement of racial separation by Jim Crow laws and custom,
some African American vacationers chose during the segregation era to patronize
resort destinations specifically developed for them, usually in the vicinity of White
resorts. Some of these properties were in less desirable areas not coveted by Whites,
but they allowed Negroes to feel safe and welcome, and they would not be exposed
to racist incidents and inferior segregated facilities. Formed in the 1890s by Major
Charles Douglass, Civil War veteran and son of abolitionist Fredrick Douglass,
Highland Beach, on the Chesapeake Bay near Annapolis, Maryland, was the first of
the consciously planned Negro resorts. The community consisted of private
residences, although some owners built their cottages with the idea of “taking in
guests.”
64
63
Ibid., 31-34, 80-84, 238-243; and Cromwell, “The History of Oak Bluffs As a Popular Resort for
Blacks,” in Railton, 59-60, 68.
64
Armstead, 18; S. Foster, 136, 140; Gatewood, 45; Haizlip, 12, 14, 16; Carroll Greene,
“Summertime—In the Highland Beach Tradition,” American Visions V. 1, No. 10 (May/June 1986):
46-48; and Birmingham, 57.
37
Although he died before its construction was finished and he could enjoy it,
Fredrick Douglass would have been a resident at the vacation home at Highland
Beach that he named “Twin Oaks.” Residents and guests of the area have included
Tuskegee educator Booker T. Washington, Paul Robeson, poets Paul Lawrence
Dunbar and Langston Hughes, educator Dr. Mary Church Terrell and her husband,
Washington, D.C. municipal court judge Robert Terrell, author Alex Haley,
comedian Bill Cosby and tennis player Arthur Ashe. The streets are named after
African American political and clerical figures of the Reconstruction era, including
Douglass. By World War I, Highland Beach was the most popular vacation
destination in the Washington-Baltimore area for the Negro educated and
professional classes; others came from Virginia and Pennsylvania to partake of the
social and outdoor recreational offerings. In 1922, when the town was incorporated,
it became the first African American municipality in the state of Maryland.
65
Other Black, Chesapeake Bay vacation communities — Arundel-on-the-Bay,
Venice Beach and Oyster Harbor — were eventually built around Highland Beach.
Today, Douglass’s Twin Oaks is listed on the National Register of Historic Places,
and is maintained as a private house museum featuring exhibits related to the history
of the Douglass family and the Highland Beach area. The town is now part of the
Annapolis metropolitan area. It has remained a small community of mostly single
65
Birmingham, 46, 50; Gatewood, 77; and Haizlip, 14, 16.
38
family homes with no hotels or stores, and is now made up of year-round residents,
many of whom are descendents of the original settlers.
66
Idlewild, Michigan
The period from the second decade of the 20
th
century to the inter-war years
hosted a Great Migration of southern, rural African Americans to the industrial cities
in the Northeast, Midwest and West. Some shrewd entrepreneurs saw an emerging
opportunity to provide places where more affluent Negroes could spend their
disposable income to escape the pressures of the urban environment and the summer
heat at health retreats and other Black resorts. These resort promoters generally
found real estate to develop that was remote in location, or in areas that were less
desirable and not coveted by Whites. One of the most successful Black resorts, at
least for a time, was founded at Idlewild, Michigan.
67
Located about 70 miles north of Grand Rapids in “the heart of the Great
Resort Section of [northwest] Michigan,” this Lake County site became one of the
most popular African American resorts in the Midwest. This rustic retreat was
advertised by Idlewild promoters in marketing pamphlets, promotional films in
Black movie houses, and featured in stories and print ads in the Black press all over
the country. Although Negroes from all over the United States did visit, the majority
66
Highland Beach, Maryland website, From the Internet:
http://www.mdmunicipal.org/cities/index.cfm?townname=HighlandBeach&page=home; Nelson,
Black Enterprise Magazine, August 1981, 57; and the African American Heritage brochure, published
by the Annapolis and Anne Arundel County Conference & Visitors Bureau and the Maryland
Heritage Areas Authority.
67
Foster, 138-140; Lewis Walker and Ben C. Wilson, Black Eden: The Idlewild Community, (East
Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2002), xi, 1, 4, 6, 21-22; and Armstead, 19.
39
of the vacationers to this Arcadian playground arrived from the leading cities of the
region, such as Grand Rapids, Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, Fort Wayne and Gary in
Michigan, Illinois, Ohio and Indiana.
68
Initially, White promoters purchased 2,700 acres of cutover timberland,
which included Lake Idlewild, to subdivide. The land was acquired from lumber
companies and from the Michigan Railroad, which was in receivership for back
taxes. Through African American salespersons, the developers sold lots for the
explicit purpose of creating a Negro vacation community. The community’s growth
accelerated, especially after improvements were made, including the building of “a
Club House, a hotel with modern laundry facilities, some twenty guest cottages, ice
houses, an electric plant, a dancing pavilion, a barbershop, a billiard hall, a
superintendent’s cottage, improved roads, an athletic field, tennis courts, baseball
fields, an athletic track, a railroad station, a post office, telephone service, a school,
and a tabernacle.”
69
Promotional materials and newspapers that enticed the Negro professional
class to purchase lots in the 1920s described Idlewild as:
…an Eden-like playground for blacks [with] sandy beaches, new hotel
accommodations, unpolluted water, boating, swimming, golf and tennis,
horseback riding and nightclubbing.
70
In addition to a place of beauty and relaxation, purchasing land at Idlewild also
represented Negro progress and achievement, just as this economic act did in other
68
Ibid., 19; Walker and Wilson, 1, 21-22, 48; Foster, 136-137; and Washington, 280.
69
Walker and Wilson, 6-7, 21, 23-25.
70
Walker and Wilson, 21.
40
parts of the country. At the end of the 1920s the White promoters sold their interests
in the resort to the Idlewild Lot Owners Association (ILOA). Lot ownership brought
automatic membership in the ILOA, and a board of managers was created to govern
the resort. As a result, African Americans would control the later development of
the location.
71
Dr. Daniel Hale Williams, the first doctor to successfully perform open heart
surgery in the United States, and founder of Provident Hospital in Chicago, was a
draw for the blooming Idlewild resort. He bought a large portion of land, subdivided
and sold much of it to friends and other Negro professionals who resided in
Midwestern cities. These friends included Madam C.J. Walker, cosmetology
millionaire and patron of the arts, Charles W. Chesnutt, lawyer and author of several
books including the Conjure Woman, and Chicago elected officials. W.E.B. DuBois
purchased lots and wrote about Idlewild in the Crisis magazine, the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) mouthpiece. In the
early days of the resort, the presence of and endorsement by people like these
assisted in attracting a broader audience of African American professionals: small
business people, blue collar workers and sporting persons. The heyday of the
Idlewild resort was in the years between 1940 and 1965.
72
71
Ibid., 6-8, 27-28, 64-65.
72
Ibid., 27, 39-40, 51; and Benjamin C. Wilson, “Idlewild: a Black Eden in Michigan,” Michigan
History 65:5 (September/October, 1981): 36. DuBois also wrote about vacation and other destination
places on a regular basis in the magazine Crisis to inform his readership of the conditions of and
opportunities for Negroes throughout the United States.
41
Hotels, motels, cottages, nightclubs and restaurants were built to service the
growing crowds of African Americans looking for “an attractive weekend getaway”
and summer retreat. The resort’s night spots became an important stop on “the
chittlin circuit,” where many up-and-coming Negro entertainers honed their acts
before they became famous. Entertainment venues at Idlewild functioned for them
much as as the “Borscht Belt” of the Catskill Mountains in New York functioned for
up-and-coming Jewish performers between the 1930s and 1960s. During the
summer months, many Black entertainers who were denied access to White
audiences had a place to showcase their talent. Many established entertainers also
came to perform at Idlewild: Louie Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Della
Reese, Sammy Davis, Jr., Bill Cosby, Aretha Franklin and B.B. King are a few of the
entertainers who were featured at Idlewild nightclubs.
73
Idlewild began to decline with the end of segregation in the 1960s, as African
Americans chose to go to new places that had excluded them in the past. The
entertainers stopped coming, because they were now able to obtain jobs in many
venues across the country, where both Blacks and Whites could see them perform.
Further, the leaders of the resort were “[unprepared] or [unwilling] to build the
infrastructures needed to position the community to compete successfully with any
challenges that might come from the outside world, race notwithstanding.” Because
73
Walker and Wilson, 48-50, 70-71, 69-119; and Armstead, 19.
42
of their lack of vision, they were unable to make the changes necessary to keep the
crowds coming, and to maintain the vitality of the resort.
74
American Beach, Amelia Island, Florida
American Beach, on Florida’s Amelia Island, was established in 1935, during
the Depression, as “a Black ocean side heaven.” Founded in 1901, the Afro-
American Insurance Company (known as ‘the Afro’) purchased 216 contiguous
acres with one half mile of ocean front through its Pension Bureau, to develop as a
Black beach resort. Although at the time it was purchased this Amelia Island
location was considered remote, it features the finest beaches and tallest dunes on the
island. The Afro offered lots for sale to friends, relatives, employees, and customers.
While many of the beaches in Florida were publicly owned during this era, most of
them either forbade or limited Negroes’ use of them. When the Afro first proposed
the idea to develop the site for Negroes, the Ku Klux Klan held demonstrations in
Jacksonville.
75
Abraham Lincoln Lewis, the visionary leader of the Afro for almost 30 years,
began investing in Florida real estate in Nassau County, where Amelia Island is
located, as early as 1919. Lewis and the company were headquartered in the city of
Jacksonville, about 40 miles south of Amelia Island, and Lewis had some familiarity
with the area before the company’s real estate investment, as his wife’s family had
roots on the island. For many Negroes during the earlier years of the resort,
74
Walker and Wilson, 65-66, 139-140.
75
Armstead, 19; Alan Huffman, “An American Beach,” Preservation Magazine, July/August 2005,
34-36; Marsha Dean Phelts, An American Beach for African Americans, (Gainesville, FL: University
Press of Florida, 1997), 1, 12, 28, 38.
43
“American Beach was the equivalent of going to Disney World today, in terms of its
popularity and prestige.” During the heyday of American Beach from the 1930s to
the 1970s, busloads of excursion groups came from all over the southeast.
76
Lewis and company were involved in several historic building projects before
the American Beach development, including the construction of the 36-acre,
Jacksonville Lincoln Golf and Country Club, in 1929. This was the first Negro
country club in northeast Florida. It featured a stream with a fishing spot, open to
the public, that contained catfish and bream. The club amenities the members and
their guests could choose from included: “a nine-hole golf course, dining room, club
house, swimming pool, shooting range, two clay tennis courts, picnic facilities, and a
recreational playground for children.”
77
In addition to being the site of a very successful Black seaside resort,
American Beach was located at the site of Franklin Town, where a community of
African Americans had resided since 1862. Earlier settlers made a living through
farming, ranching and fishing, and some owned “huge acreages.” Town members
were originally ex-slaves from a nearby plantation, and some descendents of those
families continued to live in Franklin Town at the end of the 20
th
century. One of the
barrier islands, Amelia Island is the only location in the United States where eight
different countries have raised their flags in claim to the area: the French, Spanish,
76
Phelts, 25-30, 34, 38, 64, 74.
77
Ibid., 35; and Huffman, 36.
44
English and Patriots flags; the Green Cross of Florida; and the flags of Mexico, the
Confederacy, and the United States.
78
The slave trade existed on the island from 1781 until Union soldiers occupied
the port city of Fernandina on the north side of the island during the Civil War. The
United States legally banned the importation of slaves in 1808. As Florida was not
acquired by the United States until 1821, however, Amelia Island became an illegal
trade site, where slaves from Africa and the Caribbean could be smuggled to the
mainland and illegally sold across the border of Florida to Georgia and onto other
southern states.
79
During the early years of the American Beach resort, beachfront and near-
beachfront lots were marketed to Negro professionals. Many of these more affluent
families would spend the entire summer at the vacation homes they built at the
beach. By the 1940s, in order to sell more lots, the American Beach developers
decided to sell smaller parcels so that the cost of purchasing land would be more
affordable to a broader audience of potential buyers. Blue collar workers could now
have access to building a cottage at the beach. During the 1940s and 1950s, many
affordable inns and motels sprang up to accommodate visitors during summer days.
When the crowds overflowed at these establishments, lodging proprietors asked
homeowners to take people in. By the 1950s, business was wonderful for the
78
Phelts, 12-16, 18.
79
Ibid., 15.
45
entrepreneurs at American Beach, especially for the owners of lodging and restaurant
establishments.
80
With the abolishment of legal segregation in the 1960s, American Beach —
like the resort town of Idlewild and Black business districts across the U.S. — fell
into decline. These types of entities could not compete with White service providers
and facilities, as their previously-captive African American consumers now explored
the broader array of choices that had previously been unavailable to them. Whites
did not choose to patronize these sites either. In the 1970s, new developers, who had
a different idea about what a beach community should look like, came knocking on
the doors of older African American homeowners, and some of these homeowners
sold their properties. These days the year-round community at American Beach is
small, the buildings are weather-beaten, many of the stores and businesses are
abandoned, and there are many empty lots.
81
Today, American Beach is surrounded by two upscale, manicured and gated
communities — the Ritz-Carlton Amelia Island, and Amelia Island Plantation.
These properties look like many of the new Southern Atlantic coastal residential
developments. Some American Beach landholders sold out, and their lots became
part of these new developments. Lobbying efforts have helped to preserve the
beach’s dunes and remnant forests, protect the remaining buildings, keep properties
together, and establish an American Beach Museum.
82
80
Ibid., 63, 65, 74.
81
Ibid., 120-121; Armstead, 19; Huffman, 35-36
82
Huffman, 36; and Phelts, 120-124.
46
There is other renewed interest in the area. Baby boomers, who are
descendents of longtime stakeholders and others newly acquainted with the area, are
purchasing multiple unwanted properties for their own use and to develop for others
in this quaint community with a “hodgepodge of unconstrained architectural styles.”
In 1992, American Beach became the first site named to the Florida Black Heritage
Trail. The whole community was listed on the National Register of Historic Places
in 2002, and in 2004 the National Park Service created Timucuan Ecological Historic
Preserve from land that came in part from the nouveau, gated community of Amelia
Island Plantation, which included eight and half acres of dunes.
83
The Northeast Florida office of the conservation group, the Trust for Public
Land, is working with Nassau County to acquire and develop the abandoned Evans’
Rendezvous eatery and club, and adjacent property, to create a new cultural center
with parking to accommodate weddings, family reunions and other such events, and
an information kiosk and interpretative signage for visitors. Nassau County will also
create space for the American Beach Museum in a new office building going up a
few blocks from the new cultural center at Evans’ Rendezvous.
84
83
Huffman, 35-36; and Phelts, 12, 121-125.
84
Huffman, 35-37.
47
Chapter 2
Far West Leisure and Entrepreneurial Pursuits in
Lake Elsinore, a Southern California Resort Town
California was “founded on expectation and hope.” Throughout its Native
American, Spanish, Mexican and American history, a diverse group of people from
around the world have been attracted to the state “for opportunity and success,
sunshine and beauty, health and long life and freedom…”
85
During California’s
evolution, however, after it became an American possession in 1850 and well into
the 20
th
century, ethnic groups (of African Americans, Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans,
Native American and Jews) were restricted by the Anglo majority population from
fully taking advantage of the state’s opportunities and amenities.
Very influential in the development of the region was the idea that
“California offered leisure as a way of life.” Charles Lummis, a writer and Southern
California booster, popularized this notion in books and articles in the magazines
Land of Sunshine and Out West. He and other boosters extolled “Southern California
as the playground of the world, a place where Americans would finally learn to
embrace leisure.” On occasion, local residents, including minorities, would have the
opportunity to take a vacation in “the playground of the world.”
86
For Negroes in the later part of the 19
th
century and the beginning of the 20
th
century — while there were more meaningful opportunities and lucrative
85
James J. Rawls and Walton Bean, California: An Interpretive History (Boston: Mc Graw Hill
Higher Education, 1973; reprint 2003), xiii.
86
Culver, 35, 61, 86-88.
48
employment than they had seen in the “south under economic exploitation barely one
step removed from slavery” — pursuing their versions of the “California dream”
meant coping with racially restrictive legislation, bigotry and discrimination in
employment, housing, education, civil rights, and recreation. As Anglo American
power became more entrenched in California, and the African American population
increased, so too did the institutionalized restrictions and racism they experienced.
87
Prior to 1910, Negroes had been able to rent and buy property in various parts
of the city of Los Angeles. Some African American Angelenos, like Biddy Mason
and Robert C. Owens, had been able to acquire substantial real estate holdings and
became leaders of the Negro and greater Los Angeles community. In the early part
of the 20
th
century, the ability of Negroes to buy homes and other property began to
be threatened by restrictive city ordinances and covenants which constrained various
races from buying property in certain areas. Some of the racially discriminatory
measures that came into practice at this time continued until the 1960s.
88
In the 1920s, the city’s African American population was expanding — as
was the Anglo population — and this increase in the African American population
resulted in more of the city’s public and commercial services becoming exclusively
for Anglos. For recreation activities this meant that Negro Angelenos could only
visit certain beach areas, swim at municipal pools on the day before the facility was
87
Lonnie Bunch, “The Great State for the Negro,” in Seeking El Dorado: African Americans In
California, ed. Lawrence De Graaf, Kevin Mulroy and Quintard Taylor (Autry Museum of Western
Heritage and University of Washington Press: Seattle and London, 2001), 138.
88
Ibid., 132-133; and “Five Views: An Ethnic Historic Site Survey of California,” California
Department of Park & Recreation, Office of Historic Preservation, December 1988, From the Internet:
http://www.cr.nps.gov/history/online_books/5views/5views.htm.
49
to be cleaned, or attend movies, concerts and thespian presentations at selective
theatres — or be relegated to sit in segregated seats.
89
Negro Southern Californians were able to locate some vacation and
relaxation spots from the 1920s to the 1960s, where they were mostly free from
bigotry and could enjoy themselves and take pleasure in the sunshine and
picturesque outdoor offerings of California, when discrimination and restrictive real
estate covenants prevented them from buying property in certain areas and using
various public or private facilities. In Southern California, African American
professionals, entertainers, entrepreneurs and their families were able to rent cottages
at certain locations, and in some cases were able to buy homes for weekend outings
and summer vacations. Other African American economic classes made day trips to
or camped at these same areas for weekends and shorter vacations.
90
(See Figures 2
& 3.)
Lake Elsinore Valley History
Lake Elsinore, in Riverside County, has long been known for its natural
attractions. Situated in the Santa Ana Ortega Mountain range, along the interior
route between the cities of Riverside and San Diego, 90 miles from Los Angeles, and
inland from the Pacific coastal town of Laguna Beach, the valley has been
appreciated for its beautiful vistas, climate, water, mineral deposits, adaptable soil
and natural hot springs. The Pai-an-che Indians, the earliest settlers, named the
89
Bunch, “The Great State for the Negro,” 142.
90
Cathy Naro, “A Page From History, How Green Was My Valley: Southland African Americans
Remember Hayrides and Golf Games In Val Verde,” Westways Magazine, February 1995, 71.
50
Figure 2. California Eagle Newspaper, Summer 1925. Note in these advertisements establishments
at three different resorts that were popular with Negroes during the Jim Crow era: Lake Elsinore,
Love Nest Inn/Strider and Sons; Val Verde, Eureka Villa; and Santa Monica, La Bonita Hotel. In the
upper left corner The Walter L. Gordon Co. is advertising insurance and real estate services for Lake
Elsinore, Los Angeles, Watts, Monrovia and Riverside.
51
Figure 3. California Eagle Newspaper, Summer 1925. Detail of advertisements in Figure 2.
52
valley “Etengova Wumona,” which means “Hot Springs by the Little Sea.” The lake
and the hot springs were very important to the spiritual traditions and subsistence of
the tribe.
91
(See Map 1.)
In 1797, Franciscan Padre Juan Santiago was the first Spaniard to see Lake
Elsinore. Assigned to Mission San Juan Capistrano, he entered the Valley from the
ancient trail used by the Indians to traverse the Santa Ana Ortega Mountains from
the Pacific Ocean side. In the earlier part of the 19
th
century few non-Whites used
this trail, but as the century progressed the trail became more frequently used. It
became a favorite camping location for American trappers, due to the shade trees
along the shores of the “Laguna Grande,” as Lake Elsinore was known at that time.
A Mexican land grant was issued to Julian Manriquez in 1844 for Rancho La
Laguna, which included “Laguna Grande” and 20,000-acres surrounding it.
92
When California became part of the United States in the mid-19
th
century,
many new travelers of the courier and adventurer type rode through the Elsinore
Valley along the old trail and stopped to refresh at the lake. On one of his scouting
expeditions, John C. Fremont and his men are said to have traveled along the south
lake trail. Kit Carson, along with other scouts, and stagecoaches like the Butterfield
Stage mail and passenger line, used the valley passage as part of the overland trail
91
In 1972 the town of ‘Elsinore’ was officially named ‘Lake Elsinore.’ Tom Hudson, Lake Elsinore
Valley: Its Story, 1776 – 1977, 3
rd
Printing, (Lake Elsinore, California: Mayhall Print Shop, 2001), 3-
5, 142; Dorothy Georgia Zimmerman, The History of the Elsinore Region, Riverside, County,
California, (Master’s Thesis, University of Southern California, 1934), 1-2; and “Elsinore: A New
Colony in Southern California,” (Los Angeles: Times-Mirror Book & Job Printing Office, 1884),
from the Riverside File, Seaver Center for Western History Research, Natural History Museum of Los
Angeles County, Los Angeles, California,12-13.
92
Ibid., 6-7.
53
Map 1. Lake Elsinore and environs, Riverside County, California. Lake Elsinore, California data,
2004, From the internet: www.city-data.com/city/Lake-Elsinore-California.html
54
that connected California to the rest of the United States. After a succession of
ownerships, including Mexican Augustin Machado and American Abel Stearns, who
both also owned rancho land in the Santa Monica Bay region of Los Angeles
County, Rancho Laguna was purchased by Franklin Heald, William Collier and
Donald Graham in 1883. They established a town on the north side of the lake,
called Elsinore, and began to sell lots. By 1885, Lake Elsinore was on the Santa Fe
transcontinental railroad line which came through San Diego.
93
Heald recognized the potential of the hot springs, along with the Elsinore
Valley’s beauty, to attract “seekers of health, recreation and rest.” By the 1900s
various entrepreneurs had developed numerous hotels, apartments and cottages, as
well as several sanatoriums, to meet the needs of visitors from around the world at
what had become a popular vacation site for “health and pleasure, combined.” The
Valley contained a number of different types of hot and cold mineral water wells that
were said to cure various ills, such as rheumatism, gallstones, indigestion, kidney
and liver trouble, eruptions and constipation. Various social and recreation activities
were available on land and in Lake Elsinore, including hunting, hiking, fishing,
picnicking, swimming, boating, and dancing on summer nights.
The hot springs and mineral waters brought visitors from all over, the
Southern California land boom lured eager buyers to Elsinore and the arrival
of the railroad added to the prosperity.
94
93
Ibid., 7-9 and 23.
94
“Lakes of California: Lake Elsinore,” PG&E Progress, February 1972, Elsinore File, San Diego
Historical Society.
55
Real estate speculators like Heald were aware that tourists were prospective
residents. Originally from Iowa, Franklin Heald was the one of the developers of the
Elsinore town site and region who had the most to do with the growth of the place.
He already had some familiarity with California when he arrived in Pasadena in the
1870s, as his uncle was a founder of Healdsburg in Sonoma County, near San
Francisco. Heald was one of the regions’s late-19
th
century pioneers that California
historian Carey McWilliams saw as coming to build a new land, instead of retire —
one who was a part of the progressive, enterprising, venturesome spirit that so
impressed visitors to the region at that time.
95
Heald was a descendent of Thomas Macy through his mother Sarah Macy
Heald. Macy had been one of the English Quakers who came to America to escape
persecution in England. As a member of the Society of Friends, Heald’s Quaker
background was probably a strong influence on the way he and his partners chose to
develop their “Elsinore Colony.” From the start, the Elsinore community was
viewed as progressive. The founding pioneers were interested in “families of limited
means” being able to afford a “…place that promised to equal Pasadena and
Riverside at about one-fifth of the prices obtain[ed] at those places.” The town
founders created small lots for settlers in the town site, around the valuable hot
springs, as they wanted to “form a dense community, where a mutual and neighborly
95
Zimmerman, 59; “Lakes of California: Lake Elsinore,” San Diego Historical Society; An Illustrated
History of Southern California, (Chicago: Lewis Publishing Co., 1890), 132; Carey McWilliams,
Southern California: An Island on the Land, (Layton, Utah: Gibbs Smith, Publisher/ Peregrine Smith
Books, 1946, 1973), 156; Culver, 127.
56
interest [would] act as a stimulant and encouragement.” Early buyers of land to farm
bought an average of about 35 acres.
96
Pasadena started as an agricultural outpost and grew into a charming town
that sought the emblematically genteel as residents. Located northeast of the city of
Los Angeles, in the San Gabriel Valley between the San Gabriel Mountains and the
Arroyo Seco, the deep ravine that allowed water to pass from those mountains
westward to the sea, it began forming in 1875 and was incorporated as a city in 1896.
Initially the area was an agricultural cooperative owned by the San Gabriel Orange
Grove Association. The balmy climate, and the wilderness of the lower lying areas
of the Arroyo Seco, with its sycamores and other trees, wild grape vines, flowering
plants and other vegetation, cultivated its growth as a health resort and retirement
community.
97
In 1886, the Hotel Raymond was the first of the lavish, large resort hotels to
open in Pasadena for wealthy Easterners looking for a place to escape the cold and
snow of the Atlantic coast winter. Many of the visitors to these hotels returned to
Pasadena as permanent residents. These new Pasadena residents built large homes in
the various fashionable architectural styles of the day, including the elegant
craftsman designs by the architects Charles Sumner Greene and Henry Mather
Greene, and Mediterranean Revival styles. In addition to building stately homes,
96
“Elsinore: A New Colony in Southern California,” from the Riverside File, Seaver Center for
Western History Research, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, Los Angeles, California,
3-4; and An Illustrated History of Southern California, (Chicago: Lewis Publishing Co., 1890) 61,
132-133.
97
Kevin Starr, Inventing the Dream: California Through the Progressive Era, (New York: Oxford
Press, 1985), 99, 102.
57
some bought large estates at the outskirts of the city, where orchards continued to be
extant, and developed various types of gardens around their newly-built homes. In
addition to wealthy Anglos, by the earlier decades of the 20
th
century the population
of Pasadena included Chinese and Mexicans, who had been brought in to work on
the railroad, and Negroes, who moved to the area to start small businesses and work
as servants in the big homes and hotels.
98
Riverside was originally founded as a colony in 1870 by the California Silk
Center Association, whose efforts to develop a silk industry collapsed when their
organizer died. At the time, the old rancho land was being sold off to land
speculators. Other, more successful Riverside settlements were started during this
era, such as the Southern California Colony Association, the New England Colony,
and the English Colony, made up of English and Canadian migrants. The city was
incorporated in 1883, and the county of the same name, Riverside, was created in
1893. The original settlement included a town site and land for farming. After
Mathew Gage brought irrigation from the eastern part of San Bernardino Valley to
Riverside through what became known as the “Gage Canal,” and lots of agricultural
experiments were tried, the area eventually became the center of the orange industry
in California.
99
98
Ibid., 100-101; and “Heritage: A Short History of Pasadena - Pasadena Becomes a City: 1886-
1920,” Pasadena History website, From the Internet: http://www.ci.pasadena.ca.us/History/1886-
1920.asp.
99
Ruth Austen, Riverside: The Heritage, The People, The Vision, (Montgomery, AL: Community
Communications, 1996), 12-17; and William Wilcox Robinson, The Story of Riverside County, (Los
Angeles: Title Insurance Co. & Trust, 1957), 25, 33-35.
58
By the time the new county was formed in 1893, Riverside was becoming
known for “its gracious lifestyle and outstanding fruit production.” The well-to-do
Riverside English and Canadian investors built the first golf course and polo field in
Southern California. By 1895, Riverside was the wealthiest city per capita in the
nation, due to the development of refrigerated railroad cars (that could transport the
orange crops throughout the United States), and innovative irrigation systems that
created the water supply for the area. The first Negro families came to the city with
transplanted Anglo families between 1870 and 1900, and worked as farm laborers,
particularly in the citrus industry and as road builders. They competed with Japanese
and Mexicans for the jobs that were available to minority groups. A few African
American entrepreneurs developed impressive grocery store and trash collection
businesses.
100
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Beyond the town site, citrus, walnut, apricot and olive groves alternated with
groves of eucalyptus trees and open spaces where rabbits and coveys of quail
made their homes. Beyond the fringe of development, coyotes barked and
yapped when the moon rose. The mountains and hills brooded unchanged as
if the white man had never come.
In the center of it all Lake Elsinore sparkled in the sun, or reflected the silver
path of the moon, or flung its waters about in fury when strong winds blew
from the ocean or desert.
101
100
Austen, 17; Lake Elsinore was originally part of San Diego County. “History of Riverside,” City of
Riverside, California, From the Internet: http://www.riversideca.gov/visiting-aboutriv.asp; Richard R.
Esparza and H. Vincent Moses, “Westward To Canaan: African American Heritage in Riverside,
1890 to 1950,” Prepared for the Riverside Municipal Museum by Riverside Museum Associates,
1996, 1-2, 7-8; and “Our Families, Our Stories: From the African American Community, Riverside,
California, 1870-1960,” Prepared by the Riverside Municipal Museum, 1997, 3.
101
Hudson, 59.
59
The above description of the valley of the early 1920s, by Tom Hudson in his
book Lake Elsinore Valley: Its Story, 1776 – 1977, continued to be a more or less
representative view of the place to the 1970s. At a later date, Los Angeles Times
writer Dave Smith called the valley a “California Shangri-La.”
102
(See Figure 4.)
Although in the earlier decades of the 20
th
century Lake Elsinore Valley was
popular for its beauty- and health-giving attributes, and the adaptability of its soil for
agricultural production, the lake was “once described as ‘one of the most perverse,
unruly and unpredictable bodies of water in California.’” When full it was the
largest freshwater lake in Southern California, at about seven miles long, two miles
wide, and 40 feet at its deepest point; when it was dry, it could be a dust bowl.
Although the Colorado River aqueduct began delivering water to Southern California
in 1941, Lake Elsinore was not stabilized until 1964, with water flowing from the
Colorado River/Lakeview aqueducts, the San Jacinto River through Canyon Lake,
and local watershed runoff. Prior to this time the lake had regular cycles of wet and
dry years. Throughout the years the effect of natural incidence of low rainfall —
and, hence, no run off from the mountains — reduced the amount of water flow into
the lake. Later, manmade events, such as various dams installed on the San Jacinto
River, and huge amounts of water pumped from underground to develop the region’s
farms and cities, further adversely affected the lake’s water level.
103
102
Ibid., 59-60.
103
“Lakes of California: Lake Elsinore,” San Diego Historical Society; Zimmerman, 62-63;
“Celebrating 50 Years of Water History,” Prepared by Mary Brown for the Elsinore Valley Municipal
Water District, 2000; James J. Rawls and Walton Bean, California: An Interpretive History, (Boston:
McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 1968; reprint 2003), 319; and Hudson 24, 55, 154-158.
60
Figure 4. View of Lake Elsinore from Lakeshore Drive in Southern California, 1895. Lake Elsinore
Historical Society, Photo courtesy of Lilah Knight.
61
Even with the capriciousness of the water level, during its wet years Lake
Elsinore remained an attraction for Californians, and particularly fashionable
Angelenos who arrived by train and then by automobile. The community’s
economic development over the 20
th
century waxed and waned with the level of the
lake. In spite of this the town survived, the citizens of the region moved ahead,
sustained by faith in the future, and made tremendous strides to overcome
difficulties.
104
(See Map 2.)
The 1920s were a prime era for new real estate development in Lake Elsinore
Valley. New buildings were constructed for local businesses, social organizations
and country clubs, and tourist lodging and other facilities, including a golf course
and campgrounds. Residential structures, including palatial homes, were built in
different places around the lake. Improved transportation infrastructure was
installed, making it possible to drive on paved roads north to Corona, and south to
San Diego. The many attractions of the Valley and California were extensively
promoted in a variety of publications. People came from all over to visit the area,
buy property and spend their money. An assortment of boosters and promoters were
lured, just as the town’s founders had been, by visions of an opportunity they viewed
as reserved just for them; they continued their attempts to develop Lake Elsinore into
a “health and recreation center with the additional advantage of ideal home and
business districts.”
105
104
Hudson, 78, 116-117; and “Lakes of California: Lake Elsinore,” San Diego Historical Society.
105
Hudson, 61, 65, 68, 71, 73; and “Lake Elsinore Healthy Place,” Los Angeles Times, June 27, 1928,
ProQuest Historical Newspapers Los Angeles Times (1881-1987), A12.
62
Map 2. Lake Elsinore Hot Springs Brochure. Printed by Lake Elsinore Valley News and Elsinore
Leader-Press with a map from the Southern California Auto Club, date unknown. In addition to
directions and accommodations information and resort pictures, the brochure offered text about the
city’s civic and utility infrastructure, health and recreation features, industry and mineral waters under
the banner of “Pertinent Facts About the Southland’s Most Scenic Health and Recreational Resort.”
Seaver Center for Western History Research Collection, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles
County
63
Successful businessman Ernest Pickering, one of the developers of the Ocean
Park section of the city of Santa Monica, bought the entire block where the Lake
View Inn and the Crescent Bath House stood around Spring and Limited, along with
a substantial parcel of lakefront land nearby. Pickering also worked with the Abbot
Kinney Company, which developed the residential community and amusements of
Venice, California. Clevelin Realty became Elsinore’s biggest real estate promoter,
selling lots on the lake’s north and south shores, including at Country Club Heights
(also known as Clevelin Heights) on the north shore. The company also constructed
on the north shore what became known as the Aloha (Pleasure) Pier in 1926, and
Clevelin Country Club, near the edge of the town site.
106
In 1924 the Los Angeles Times noted that one of the largest real estate
syndicate operations in the state of California was being undertaken by the Elsinore
Land Trusts. The owners of this 9000-acre parcel of land, the Southern California
Athletic and Country Club, planned to build a clubhouse, golf links, polo grounds
and water sports facilities on their property on the south shore of Lake Elsinore.
Their development plans also included making available tracts for independent
subdivisions of country club estates; mountain cabin sites; and three, five and ten-
acre farms. By 1925, construction of the club house was completed, but it was never
used as intended, as the developers ran into financial difficulties.
107
106
“Lake Elsinore Healthy Place,” Los Angeles Times, June 27, 1928; and Hudson, 55-56, 71, 72, 76.
107
Hudson, 61-62, 68; and “Subdivisions and Subdividers,” Los Angeles Times, March 9, 1924,
ProQuest Historical Newspapers Los Angeles Times (1881-1987), D1.
64
African American Heritage
1920s
The Burgess Family and the Rieves Inn
By the 1920s there were also establishments catering to Negroes seeking
recreational opportunities in Lake Elsinore Valley. In 1887, when the town of Lake
Elsinore was first being settled, African Americans William Charles Burgess (1842-
1913) and his wife Hannah (1852-1947) came to work as servants for the household
of Franklin Heald, the “father of Lake Elsinore.” The Burgesses bought property in
Lake Elsinore off Pottery and Main, a location then at the outskirts of the town
center. They also bought property a little further out, off Pottery and Kellogg, where
they raised oranges and olives. Eventually, Pottery Street became the main
thoroughfare of the Negro vacation and year-round community at Lake Elsinore.
108
In a history of Lake Elsinore compiled by the town’s first librarian, Altha
Merrifield, using newspaper accounts, William Charles Burgess is noted for his civic
activities and employment situations. Accounts describe the senior Burgess as
having worked as a cook for various individuals, and on work details such as crews
constructing roads. Born into slavery, and a Civil War veteran who served in the
Union Army, he was at one time a color-bearer and treasurer of the Elsinore Grand
Army of the Republic Post with other Civil War veterans.
109
(See Figure 5.)
108
Sandy Stokes, “Elsinore lacked the look of hatred: Black family going north paused, then settled
down,” The Press Enterprise, February 13, 1996, B-2 and Lake Elsinore Cemetery Records.
109
Sandy Stokes, “Elsinore lacked the look of hatred: Black family going north paused, then settled
down,” The Press Enterprise, 13 February 1996, B-2; and History of Lake Elsinore compiled from
newspaper stories by Altha Merrifield Cauch, 1956, Lake Elsinore Historical Society Collection, 307.
65
Figure 5. Davie and Merrifield Building, Lake Elsinore, 1906. From left to right: standing, Peck,
Merrifield and William Charles Burgess. Mr. Burgess (1842-1913) and his wife Hannah (1852-1947)
came in 1887 to work as servants for the household of Franklin Heald, the “father of Lake Elsinore.”
The establishment housed a blacksmith shop, a construction business and it served as the first town
library from 1908-1909. The building burned down in 1909. The Burgesses brought property in Lake
Elsinore off Pottery and Main Streets, then at the outskirts of the town center. Eventually Pottery
became the main thoroughfare of the Negro community at Lake Elsinore. The Burgesses also brought
property a little further out off Pottery and Kellogg Streets, where they raised oranges and olives.
Mrs. Burgess and her son, William Lafayette Burgess (1875-1948), ran a hotel until 1927 called the
Rieves Inn that was built at the family farm near Pottery and Kellogg, and which catered to the Negro
leisure and health seekers. Their lodging facilities began in a private residence, and expanded to the
larger hotel facility. Lake Elsinore Public Library Collection.
66
Until 1927, Mrs. Burgess and her son, William Lafayette Burgess (1875-
1948), ran a hotel known as Rieves Inn, which was built at the family farm near
Pottery and Kellogg. Catering to the Negro leisure and health seekers, their lodging
facilities began in a private residence, and had expanded to a larger hotel structure
when they were sold to Mr. and Mrs. Kruse from San Diego. The Kruses had
previously worked as managers of the café at the Douglas Hotel, a hugely successful
Negro establishment located in downtown San Diego, which had been founded in
1924.
110
Other early African American families in the Lake Elsinore environs
survived in the local economy in agriculture, construction and other manual labor
jobs. A few worked in support jobs for the (Anglo and Negro) resort infrastructure
as masseurs, cooks, housekeepers, property caretakers and small lodging proprietors
serving both Negroes and Anglos.
A 1921 article in the California Eagle Newspaper, entitled “Elsinore Notes,”
speaks of the Rieves Inn as being a “popular resort for health and recreation.” The
article describes a scene of a successful party with guests dressed in their finery.
Hotel guests from Oakland, California are noted as being participants in the
merriment that went on past midnight on September 21 — a Wednesday evening no
less. Robert C. Owens, the prosperous Negro Angeleno real estate mogul and
descendent of Los Angeles pioneer Biddy Mason, is noted as being a guest at the
110
Ibid., 309-310; and Richard L. Carrico and Stacey Jordan, PhD, Centre City Development
Corporation Downtown San Diego African-American Heritage Study, Prepared by Mooney &
Associates, San Diego, California, June 2004, V/40-V/46.
67
party and as a good player of the Whist card game. The California Eagle featured
news particular to the Negro community, and the description of the soiree and the
well-to-do and socially prominent vacationers reads like others that would have
appeared in any city newspaper of the day; the Los Angeles Times often featured
articles discussing similar experiences of well-to-do and socially prominent Anglos
enjoying parties, and their vacations at popular resort hotels. (See Figure 6.)
A letter dated May 20, 1924, written on Rieves Inn stationery, from Miss
A’Lelia Walker (1885-1931) to a Mr. Ransom — along with the California Eagle
newspaper article, which notes visitors from Oakland — indicate that the Burgess’s
Lake Elsinore hotel was known to Negroes outside of Southern California. Miss
Walker’s letter to Mr. Ransom informs him she is feeling much better, and that she
has been following her doctor’s orders, for the most part. (See Figure 7.)
Miss Walker was the only daughter and heir to the cosmetics business and
fortune created by her mother, Madame C.J. Walker (1867–1919), the first self-made
American and Negro woman millionaire. Although Miss Walker owned property in
Los Angeles, she lived in New York. She inherited the lavish family estate, Villa
Lewaro, in Irvington-on-the-Hudson, New York, near the home of John D.
Rockefeller, and entertained Harlem Renaissance elites such as Langston Hughes,
Zora Neale Hurston and others in a fabulous Manhattan townhouse she called the
“Dark Tower.” She was a businesswoman, patron of the arts, and a muse who
68
Figure 6. California Eagle Newspaper, October 1, 1921. “Elsinore Notes” feature regarding the
“popular resort for heath and recreation” owned by Mrs. Hannah Burgess on Pottery and Kellogg.
The article notes The Hunters were visitors from Oakland participating in the merriment at the resort.
Robert C. Owens, the prosperous Negro Angeleno real estate mogul and descendent of Los Angeles
pioneer Biddy Mason, is noted as being a guest at the party and that night at the resort as a good
player of the Whist card game.
69
Figure 7. Rieves Inn stationery with a letter from A’Lelia Walker to Mr. Ransom, 1924. The text on
the letterhead about the resort reads: “The water of this famous Health Resort is unsurpassed for
Nervous Disorders of all kinds, Rheumatism, Liver, Kidney and Stomach Troubles. Temperature of
water 110 [degrees]. Altitude 1350 feet. Passengers from Los Angeles take Pickwick Auto stages at
Union Stage Depot, Fifth and Los Angeles Streets, or the Santa Fe Railroad.” Walker Collection of
A’Lelia Bundles.
70
inspired many singers, poets and sculptors. Langston Hughes called her the “joy
goddess of Harlem’s 1920s.”
111
(See Figure 8.)
The letterhead of the Rieves Inn stationery provides much information about
the establishment, and is reminiscent of an advertisement one might see in a
magazine or newspaper. Along with the name and location of the hotel, there is a
small line drawing of what the resort hotel and its setting might have looked like at
one time, a list of aliments the Lake Elsinore Hot Springs water “is unsurpassed” in
treating, transportation options to reach the resort, and the proprietor’s contact
information. Hotel rates are also mentioned as being “Popular Prices,” with food
served described as available on an “a la Carte” basis.
Some of the guests at the Burgess establishment may have also seen
entrepreneurial opportunities to provide accommodation for Negroes who sought a
rustic, health respite from the Southern California metropolitan areas of Los Angeles,
San Diego and Riverside. Several prominent Negro Angelenos purchased their own
vacation homes. A few entrepreneurs from the City of the Angels also invested in
resort and recreation spaces for their own and their Negro compatriots’ use at Lake
Elsinore. (See Map 3 & Key, and Figures 2, 3, 9 & 10.)
As in other parts of the United States, because they were barred in Southern
California from employment with better wages and in managerial positions in
111
“A’Lelia Walker, Harlem business woman,” The African American Registry, From the Internet:
http://www.aaregistry.com/african_american_history/923/ALelia_Walker_Harlem_businesswoman;
“A’Lelia McWilliams Walker,” ChickenBones: A Journal for Literary and Artistic African American
Themes, From the Internet: http://www.nathanielturner.com/aleliawalker.htm; and A’Lelia Bundles,
biographer and descendent of A’Lelia Walker, interview by author, Los Angeles, California, Via
telephone, April 8, 2007.
71
Figure 8. A’Lelia Walker (1885-1931). Miss Walker was the only daughter and heir to the cosmetics
business and fortune created by her mother, Madame C.J. Walker (1867 – 1919), the first self-made
American and Negro woman millionaire. By the letter on Rieves Inn stationery she is known to have
visited the resort in 1924. From the Internet: www.nathanielturner.com/aleliawalker.htm.
72
Map 3. Lake Elsinore African American Resort Community, selective sites. Key to map follows.
From the Internet: www.mapquest.com.
73
Map 3 Key. Selective sites in the Lake Elsinore African American Resort Community, 1920s-1960s.
Locations on the map were identified from interviews, census records, African American newspaper
ads, and travel and business directories.
Property Address
1 Rieves Inn, 1920
By 1930 the Rieves Inn would be called L.C.
Malanda’s Burgess Hotel and Health Resort
Pottery & Kellogg
2 Lake Shore Beach
1921-1940s
On Lakeshore Drive going towards the
northeastern corner of the lake about 1.6 miles
from Main Street in historic downtown Lake
Elsinore.
3 Mrs. Mildred Sterling
cottage rentals business, 1920s-1970s
311 N. Kellogg
4 Love Nest Inn
Strider & Sons, 1925
(faded sign may still be there at private
home)
N. Kellogg
Across from Lake Elsinore Inn
5 Lake Elsinore Inn, 1930s-1960s 416 N. Kellogg
6 George Moore Motel & Café (Chicken Inn)
In Los Angeles, he also owned a service
station & tire shop @ 46
th
Street & Central
Avenue
Pottery & Spring
7 Martinez Bathhouse Riley & Sumner, across from Hensley Court
8 Mundy’s Court NE corner of Pottery & Langstaff
9 Coleman DeLuxe Hotel, 1930 Pottery & Lowell
10 LaBonita Motel, 1930
First
owner: Jim and Inez Anderson
Later owner: Wyman & Rita Burney, also
had a lamp shop in the Hermitz Bldg. on
Graham. Extant as apartments, but modified.
Pottery & Riley
11 Brooks Health Baths and Spa and Café,
1930s, Al Brooks, proprietor
Pottery & Poe
12 Hensley Court
Horace C. Hensley, owner, 1940s
Tom Yarborough owned property before
Hensley. Extant as apartment.
Riley & Sumner
13 Pottery Lunchett, 1930 415 Pottery
14 Smith’s Grocery Store, 1930
A. Smith, proprietor
419 Langstaff
15 Mr. Daniels’ Court cottages Riley
16 Hendrix’s Court, 1930s
William & Gussie Hendrix, proprietors
Served family style meals. She was the
mother of the Independence Church.
309 Lowell
74
17 Clarence Muse
Muse-O-Lot Ranch
Perris, CA
18 Henry’s, 1940s Pottery, b/t Langstaff & Poe
19 Miller’s Café, 1945-1980s
Andrew J. and Elizabeth Miller, proprietors
Rubin “Buddy” Brown’s family lived next door
on Pottery.
SE corner Pottery & Langstaff
20 Thomas and Kathryn Yarborough Residence,
1920s-1960s
21 Judge David Williams Residence Silver, south of Sumner
22 Paul R Williams Residence 16908 Grand Ave. @ Buena Vista Street -
across the lake from the historic town
center
23 Douglas and Mary Henderson Residence
In Los Angeles, he was a pharmacist @
Washington Blvd. & Central Central Ave.
His wife Mary Broyles worked at the soda
foundation in the Clark Hotel.
Poe b/t Pottery & Sumner
24 The (Leon & Ruth) Washington Family ranch –
30 acres
LA Sentinel Newspaper, owners
25 Dr. Curtis King’s Ranch Flint, off Chaney
26 H. Claude Hudson Family Residence
Also rented a house on Lowell before they built
on Lewis. Barbara Anderson owns the house
today.
304 N. Lewis Street
Lewis & Sumner
27 Dr. Elvin and Olive Neal Residence Scrivener & Pottery
28 Thomas and Portia Griffith, II Residence 214 Lewis Street
29 Thomas & Judy Rutherford Residence On Lewis Street
30 Paul Payne Family Residence On Lewis Street
31 The Oggs Residence Near M. Sterling on Kellogg
32 Rev. Hampton and Gertrude Hawes, Sr. Family
Residence, 1930s
Lowell & Scrivener
33 2
nd
Baptist Church of Los Angeles Retreat 1548 Lakeshore @ Elsinore City limits
34 Charlotta A. Bass Residence, 1950s-1960s 709 West Heald Ave.
b/t Kellogg & Lowell
35 Hill Top Club, 1950s-60s
36 Barbershop, 1940s
One owner: Sterling Jackson
Pottery
37 Beauty Salon, started in 1953
Miriam Hutchinson, owner
- came to LE in 1920s
Pottery & Lowell
38 Jones Fish & Tackle Repair Shop
Dollene Jones
Langstaff
75
39 Rev. and Mrs. Jones Lewis, b/t Pottery & Sumner
40 Dr. Wilbur and Desdemona Gordon Pottery, east of Main include parcels
across the highway
41 Independent Church (African American
congregation, begun 1920s-present)
Kellogg b/t Pottery & Sumner
76
Figure 9. African Americans at Lake Elsinore, circa 1921. Left to right: Eddie DeQuir, Pearl Rozier
DeQuir, Carolina Rozier-Harrison, Sarah Rozier-Bryant. Note the concession sign in this and the
photograph with the Miller sisters. Shades of L.A. Collection / Los Angeles Public Photo Database
Online.
77
Figure 10. California Eagle Newspaper, August 7, 1925. A realtor located in Watts offers
opportunities for purchase of property to Negroes at locations that include Lake Elsinore.
78
corporate America, “ambitious African Americans gravitated toward entrepreneurial
ventures, especially those that catered to the group population of [Negro]
Angelenos.” The “nationalist surge” of the early 1920s, when Pan Africanist Marcus
Garvey would speak at organized meetings in Los Angeles about promoting Negro
pride and political and economic self reliance, strengthened this entrepreneurial
trend. It was a theme that had carried over from earlier decades, with Negro
journalists, entrepreneurs, club women and ministers preaching race progress
through enterprise.
112
Lake Shore Beach
One such real estate venture was known as Lake Shore Beach, located on the
north shore of Lake Elsinore. In 1921 the Lake Shore Beach Company purchased a
little less than fifty acres of land in order to build a Black resort development at the
northeastern corner of Lake Elsinore, edging the town site just below the Clevelin
Heights area. The real estate investment was valued at $35,000, with each of the five
directors’ shares valued equally. This real estate investment group included several
leading Negro Angelenos. The original officers and members of the company’s
Board of Directors included Dr. Wilbur C. Gordon as president, Charles Darden as
vice president and attorney, Arthur L. Reese as secretary, A.C. Richardson as
treasurer and business manager (his wife, Sallie T. Richardson, replaced him as a
112
Douglas Flamming, Bound For Freedom: Black Los Angeles in Jim Crow America, (Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press, 2005), 227, 231-232; and Delores Nason McBroom, “Harvest of
Gold: African American Boosterism, Agriculture, and Investment In Allensworth and Little Liberia”
in Lawrence DeGraaf, Kevin Mulroy and Quintard Taylor, ed. Seeking El Dorado: African American
Experiences in California. Seattle and London: Autry Museum of Western Heritage and University of
Washington Press, 2001.
79
board member after his death in 1922), and Mrs. Anna Josephine Jones.
113
(See
Figure 11.)
The members of the Lake Shore Beach investment group were all people
civically active and highly regarded in the Negro Angeleno community. We can
infer they knew one another through their business, social and church affiliations.
These associates were part of the segment of the Negro population that had
prospered after the end of slavery, despite the obstacles and prejudice they faced.
During the segregation era, successful, affluent Negroes developed resorts like Lake
Shore Beach at Lake Elsinore all over the country, so they could relax away from
Anglos, and insulate themselves and their children from embarrassing or unpleasant
confrontation with Whites. The fact that several of these individuals and some of
their accomplishments are noted in Delilah Beasley’s ground-breaking 1918 book,
The Negro Trail Blazers of California, is noteworthy, as it informs us the author
viewed them as distinguished citizens of their day in the state of California.
114
(See
Figures 10 to 12.)
Born in 1880, Dr. Wilbur Clarence Gordon hailed from Ohio. He graduated
from Howard University Medical School in 1904, and had a successful practice in
his home state of Ohio until 1912, when he moved to California. From the beginning
of his tenure in Southern California, Gordon was a leader on matters of racial social
113
Lake Shore Beach Company, Board of Directors meeting notes, Arthur L. Reese Family Archives,
Los Angeles, California, Sept. 30, Nov. 1 and Dec. 13, 1921, July 2 and Oct. 16, 1922; Milton
Anderson, Los Angeles and Lake Elsinore, California resident, interview by author, Los Angeles,
California, via telephone, November 15, 2004; and Florence Keeney Robinson, Problems In Training
Adult Negroes In Los Angeles, (Masters Thesis, University of Southern California, 1929), 71-72.
114
Foster, 131, 135.
80
Figure 11. Board of Directors of the Lake Shore Beach Company. The company began its Lake
Elsinore resort that catered to Negroes in 1921. From left to right: Top, Dr. Wilbur Clarence Gordon,
president and Charles Darden, Esq., vice president; and Bottom, Mrs. Sallie Richardson, Treasurer
and Arthur L. Reese, Secretary. Negro Trail Blazers of California by Delilah Beasley and Courtesy of
Sonya Reese-Davis, Arthur L. Reese Family Archives.
81
Figure 12. Text on photo page reads: “At Lake Elsinore, April 1931, Mrs. Dorothy Stevenson, wife
of the famous movie star, ‘Step-‘n-Fetch-It.’” The actor’s birth name was Theodore Monroe Andrew
Perry (1902-1985). Stepin Fetchit is one of the most controversial movie actors in American history,
even today. A very talent physical comedian who achieved superstar status in the 1930s and also
became a millionaire. He was a pioneering Negro actor, but was ostracized for a time by the African
American community for his portrayal of the lazy, shiftless black character he created. Prior to that
he was so popular that he became the first African American star. He was tall and lanky and initially
had a shaved head, a whiny, slow-talking voice and a sad looking, perplexed demeanor. This was the
character that audiences loved, but the Negro community felt it an awkward stereotypical role.
115
LaVera White Collection/Arthur and Elizabeth Lewis Collection.
115
Stepin Fetchit biography, Great Character Actors website, From the Internet:
http://www.dougmacaulay.com/kingspud/sel_by_actor_index_2.php?actor_first=Stepin&actor_last=F
etchit.
82
progress, medical and dental professional associations, and Black business
development. He was instrumental in organizing the Doctors, Dentists and
Pharmacists Association for Southern California, and the Ohio State Social Society.
He was the chorister of Second Baptist Church, one of the oldest African American
churches in the city of Los Angeles. He was already familiar with Lake Elsinore at
the time the Lake Shore Beach Company was forming, as he and his wife,
Desdemona, had purchased a 130-acre ranch there in the latter part of the second
decade of the 1900s. After he moved to California from Ohio, his father and mother,
Calvin and Arabelle Gordon, operated the ranch for him. His mother was a Spanish
scholar and his father had been a mechanic.
116
(See Map 3.)
Later, in 1949, Dr. Gordon’s church home, Second Baptist, would purchase a
house at Lake Elsinore on Lake Shore Drive, not far from the Lake Shore Beach
establishment. Just at the Lake Elsinore city limits, the lakefront house was available
for church members, their friends and the general public for vacation at a nominal
fee. The house could accommodate 20 people, at a price of one dollar a person per
night. An article in the California Eagle announcing Second Baptist’s new resort
venture noted:
Buses stop in front of the door. If motoring, a sign saying “Elsinore City
Limit” is in front of the property. Second Baptist is not selfish…the beach
house… is open to the public at large.
117
(See Figure 13.)
116
Beasley, Delilah, Negro Trail Blazers of California, (Fairfield, CA: John Stevenson Publisher,
reprint 2004), 246-247; and 1920 United States Federal Census.
117
“Second Baptist Operates Own Beach House on Lake Elsinore,” The California Eagle newspaper,
August 11, 1949; and A Treasury of Tradition, Innovation and Hope: History of Second Baptist
Church, Los Angeles, California, 1975, publication created for the 90
th
Anniversary Celebration for
the institution, 16.
83
Figure 13. “Second Baptist Operates Own Beach House on Lake Elsinore,” California Eagle
Newspaper, Thursday, August 11, 1949. Located at 1548 Lakeshore Drive. This news feature
announced the operation of the first of two retreat properties that Second Baptist owned at Lake
Elsinore during the Ministry of Dr. J. Raymond Henderson and Mrs. Harriette Henderson.
84
Concerned about creating more businesses owned and controlled by Negro
Americans, Dr. Gordon was involved in a number of business and real estate
development enterprises, in addition to his medical practice and the Lake Shore
Beach Company. His base of operations in Los Angeles was located at Washington
Boulevard and Griffith Avenue, a block west of Central Avenue. Delilah Beasley
notes in her seminal tome about Negro pioneers in California that his property was
“a centrally-located double corner lot, upon which he erected a handsome residence
and suite of modern offices.” For many years the Lake Shore Beach Company was
also headquartered at Gordon’s offices, and held their board meetings there.
118
Dr. Gordon was also one of the founders of the Negro-owned Liberty Savings
and Loan Association (the Liberty), and its first president in 1924.
The Association was organized…to promise thrift among [Negroes] by
providing a safe and convenient method for people to save and invest money;
and…to provide for the sound and economical financing of homes.
119
The following year, Dr. Gordon was among the initial investors in the Golden
State Mutual Life Insurance Company (the Golden State), which sold life and health
insurance policies to Negroes throughout California, and later mortgage loans for
homes and businesses of varying sizes. At its height, the Golden State became one
of the largest African American-owned businesses in the United States.
120
118
Flamming, 239-242, 256; and Lake Shore Beach Company, Board of Directors meeting notes,
Sept. 30, 1921-1930s.
119
Negroes Who’s Who In California, 1948 Edition, 59; Los Angeles Negro Directory and Who’s
Who, 1930-1931, The California Eagle Publishing Company, 90-91; and Flamming, 240.
120
Flamming, 255-258.
85
Also, in 1925, with backing from the Liberty and the Anglo-owned
Commercial National Bank, Dr. Gordon and nine Negro realtors tried to create “a
high class [and] restricted Negro residential subdivision” called Gordon Manor, in
the city of Torrance, east of Manhattan Beach in the southwestern part of Los
Angeles County. Plans for this 213-acre under-developed land were intended to be
“posh,” and included luxury homes and a few more modest dwellings. A group of
very wealthy Anglos, who owned mansions and sizeable ranchettes (or estates)
several miles south of the Gordon Manor development in the hillsides of Palos
Verdes, convinced the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors in 1926 to
condemn the Gordon Manor land to build a park. Powerful Los Angeles lawyer
Henry O’Melveny (of the major law firm which continues to exist today, O’Melveny
and Meyers) and prominent landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., were
among those who fought to keep out the “invading” Negroes.
121
After protracted proceedings, the Gordon Manor interests received funds
from bonds issued by the county of Los Angeles in the range of $700,000 as
payment under the condemnation proceedings. The payment barely covered the
group’s expenses for the land and the infrastructure improvements they put into the
development. The land stayed vacant for many years after the proceedings. As part
of the settlement, the wealthy Anglos who had undermined the Gordon Manor
project were legally bound to a 10,000-acre assessment district and its tax liability.
In 1932, during the Depression, these rich Anglos asked the county supervisors for
121
Flamming, 239-242.
86
help, because they could not pay the taxes. Gordon Manor eventually became
Alondra Park, El Camino College, and a public golf course. One Negro observer
noted at the time that the creation of the park was “the most costly segregation
measure ever passed in the West.”
122
In order to stop another “Negro invasion,” the tactics of condemnation and
eminent domain procedures were also used by Anglos in the 1920s to close a very
successful African American beach recreation space in the South Bay, which had its
beginnings in 1912. Not far from the Gordon Manor development in Manhattan
Beach, owners Willa and Charles Bruce of the bath house and dining club Bruces’
Lodge (also known as Bruces’ Beach), along with other Negroes and Anglos with
vacation homes, were evicted in 1924 under the banner campaign that the land
between 25
th
and 26
th
Streets near the beach should be used for a public park.
123
Another significant investor in the Lake Elsinore enterprise was Attorney
Charles S. Darden, a noted land litigation specialist. He was from a large and
prominent family in Wilson, North Carolina. His father was the first undertaker of
the city of Wilson. Darden attended Wayland Seminar and went on to graduate in
law from Howard University at Washington, D.C. in 1904. After graduating from
122
Ibid., 242-243.
123
Ibid., 272-273; Robert Brigham, “Landownership and Occupancy By Negroes In Manhattan
Beach,” (Masters Thesis, Fresno State University, 1956), 58-59; Jan Dennis, A Walk Beside the Sea:
A History of Manhattan Beach, (Manhattan Beach, California: Janstan Studio, 1987), 109; and
Lawrence B. DeGraaf, “The City of Black Angels: Emergence of the Los Angeles Ghetto, 1890-
1930,” Pacific Historical Review, Pacific Historical Review, V. 39, No. 3 (August 1970): 348.
87
Howard University, and before he settled in Los Angeles, he made a grand tour of
the mainland United States, the Hawaiian Islands and Asia.
124
One of the early Negro lawyers admitted to the California bar, and the first of
his race to take a case before the Supreme Court of California, Darden was the first
African American lawyer to successfully challenge the legality of racially restrictive
real estate covenants that appeared on deeds of sale. This 1915 court decision, by a
local court in the city of Los Angeles, established a precedent, as it was the first
decision obtained upon this question in a Court of Justice in the United States.
Another important precedent-establishing decision Darden won in California was
that a married woman could sell community property without the consent of her
husband, especially when the title to the property was vested solely in her name.
Practicing law in California for many years, Darden, like other Negro lawyers,
worked on civil and criminal appeals before the California Superior and Supreme
Courts. It is said that Darden was a reserved man, but socially popular. He was
active with the Knights of Pythias, the Masons and the Elks.
125
Originally from Louisiana, Arthur L. Reese came to Los Angeles as a
Pullman porter in 1902, and decided to stay. Reese heard about Abbot Kinney and
the building of Venice-of-America, just south of Ocean Park. In 1904 he rode the
streetcar out to Venice to see what kind of economic opportunities might be available
for him with the Kinney operation. He started a shoe shine business, then a
124
Beasley, 197.
125
Ibid., 197-200; J. Clay Smith, Jr. Emancipation: The Making of the Black Lawyer, 1844-1944,
(Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 485-486.
88
maintenance service, which thrived. Reese acquired several parcels of Venice real
estate that his descendents continue to own today.
126
Reese eventually became the maintenance supervisor for the Kinney
properties. Later, he also won the contracts for the Kinney facilities decorations and
canal boat concession. He was also involved with other business ventures in Venice.
Under his supervision was a workforce of a few dozen people, many of them family
members he recruited and who moved to California to work with him. Members of
the Reese and Tabor families, and other families who worked for Arthur Reese or
Abbot Kinney’s enterprises, were some of the first African Americans to live in
Venice.
127
Ernest Pickering, the successful Ocean Park and Venice amusements real
estate developer, who also worked with Abbot Kinney, invested in Lake Elsinore
property. His investment foray in the Valley, in the 1920s, was at the same time that
Reese and his partners were beginning to develop the Lake Shore Beach Negro
recreation area. It would be safe to speculate that it was encouraging for Reese to
know someone like Pickering, whom he almost certainly had contact with, as they
both worked with Kinney, and who was also investing in the Lake Elsinore resort
area. It is unlikely that Pickering’s Lake Elsinore project had any direct influence on
the Lake Shore Beach Negro investment group as there was already an established
126
Alexander, Carolyn Elayne. Abbot Kinney’s Venice-of-America, The Golden Years: 1905-1920,
Volume 1, (Los Angeles: Westside Genealogical Society, 1991), 215; Flamming, 74; and Sonya
Reese Davis, Arthur L. Reese Family Archives, interview by author, August 2006, Los Angeles,
California.
127
Alexander, 215.
89
tradition of Negroes owning property in the Valley by the 1920s. This is likely to
have been more of an inspiration for the Lake Shore Beach investors to buy real
estate in Lake Elsinore than Pickering’s interests in the area.
Reese had other notable achievements in his business career and civic life.
He was appointed to the Los Angeles County election board, and became a member
of the Venice Chamber of Commerce in 1920. It was not common in America at this
time for an African American businessman to be a member of an Anglo organization
of this type. Another of Reese’s civic accomplishments was as a founding member
of the Crescent Bay Lodge Number 19, a Negro Masons Lodge in the city of Santa
Monica, formed in 1910. He also served as the leader of this charitable and
benevolent activities organization in the 1940s. The Lodge continues to exist today
at a site on 18
th
Street and Broadway. Reese also sang in the choir at the first
African American church in Santa Monica, Phillips Chapel, while his wife provided
musical accompaniment on the piano. He was also active in leadership circles of the
Republican Party in Southern California.
128
Lake Shore Beach Company board member Sallie Taylor Richardson was a
business woman, and active in the civic life of Negro Los Angeles. Raised and
educated in Kentucky and Illinois, she moved to Los Angeles with her husband A.C.
Richardson after living for a while in Indianapolis, Indiana. In Los Angeles, she
studied to become a certified chiropodist (person who treats diseases of the feet and
hands), and appears to have had a very successful practice. Delilah Beasley notes in
128
Ibid., 1-5; and “Arthur L. Reese For Republican County Central Committee,” California Eagle,
Friday, August 15, 1930, V-43, No. 10, 8.
90
The Negro Trail Blazers of California that Richardson “practiced [chiropody]…until
she earned sufficient money to buy a large and valuable piece of property at
Wilmington, near Los Angeles, which property, since the shipbuilding industry of
the great World War [I], has greatly increased in value.”
129
Richardson was a club woman and an active worker for the Sojourner Truth
Club in Los Angeles. The Sojourner Truth Club was one of the early Negro
Angeleno women’s clubs, and an early affiliate of the California Association of
Colored Women’s Clubs (CWC), a branch of the National Association of Colored
Women (NACW) which was the most important organization for Negro women in
the state. CWC clubs provided social services to their local communities and
encouraged women to achieve economic independence. Completed in 1914, the
Sojourner Truth Industrial Home was the first major “institutional’ project
undertaken by local club women. Later known as the Eastside Settlement House, the
home provided living quarters, job training, lectures and other services to self-
supporting women and girls. The Colored women’s groups “wove together cultural
conservatism and women’s rights activism in ways that [were]…slightly disarming,
but which made perfect sense given their precarious position in society.”
130
The CWC/NACW structure offered women a source of power and an arena
for service that was unrivaled by mixed-gender organizations. They supported the
NAACP, and some club women became leaders in it. Richardson was a local
NAACP stalwart: she was a speaker at the 1928 convention hosted by the Los
129
Beasley, 243.
130
Ibid., 243; and Flamming, 135, 138-139, 141.
91
Angeles branch. Her convention session was on membership development and
retention. By many accounts, including that of founder W.E.B. DuBois, the Los
Angeles NAACP convention of 1928 was one of the finest the organization had
held.
131
Although Lake Shore Beach was open for business in the 1920s, some
resistance and hostility from the Lake Elsinore Anglo community to the company’s
plan for a Negro resort is mentioned in the Board of Directors’ meeting minutes
dated August 24, 1922. The minutes indicate that some local citizens had influenced
the Southern Sierra Light and Power Company to refuse to furnish electricity to the
site. The resort group was in the planning stages for a big Labor Day picnic that
September when they got this unfortunate news. The board minutes from one of the
meetings a few months before the Labor Day event indicate that the group had
earlier considered canceling the event, due to concerns about the greater
community’s lack of hospitality. However, the event was held, and after
successfully organizing this Labor Day affair, Lake Shore Beach eventually got their
power and light connection in December 1922.
132
Minutes from the Lake Shore Beach Company Board of Directors’ meetings
during the 1920s indicate that the group had serious intentions early on to create a
fine resort that would cater to the leisure needs of Negroes, and particularly those
from Los Angeles. Various meeting minutes, beginning with an entry on January 20,
1922, and continuing into 1924, 1925, 1926 and 1928, note that the board hired the
131
Ibid., 141, 281, 288-289.
132
Lake Shore Beach Company, Board of Directors meeting minutes, Jan.- Dec. 1922.
92
architect Paul R. Williams (1894-1980) to design plans for Lake Shore Beach,
including landscaping, dining and dancing pavilions, a bath house, cottages and a
fifty-room hotel. This was early in Williams’ career, but by the late 1920s he
became the most prominent African American architect in the United States, a status
which he retained throughout his lifetime and in the years after his death. Williams
became especially known for the luxury houses he designed for several Hollywood
film industry and wealthy patrons, and his office building designs.
133
Williams most likely obtained the Lake Shore Beach commission because the
Negro resort investors personally knew him and his early success as an architect. He
socialized with, or was involved with, civic and religious groups and activities in Los
Angeles that included the company board members. At the time of writing of this
thesis, Williams’ drawings for this Lake Elsinore development have not been found.
Although the design style of the Lake Shore Beach resort is not known, some
assumptions can be made about how it might have looked if it had been built.
134
It can be inferred from the buildings which are known that Williams designed
during the 1920s that the Lake Shore Beach resort would have been in one of the
popular Spanish Colonial, Moorish or English Tudor revival styles of the period. In
the Lake Shore Beach Company meeting minutes dated April 13, 1926, it is noted
that Williams’ hotel building design was discussed. The Board of Directors
appeared to be telling Williams they wanted additional space added to the hotel
133
Lake Shore Beach Company, Board of Directors meeting minutes, Sept. 30, 1921-1930s;
Bardolph, 191; and Karen E. Hudson, Paul R. Williams, Architect: A Legacy of Style, with forward by
David Gebhard, (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1993), 22.
134
Karen E. Hudson, 104-105.
93
design in the form of a porch placed on three sides, at least twelve feet wide, and
partially covered on its front sides so it could be used to extend the entry lobby and
as additional lounging area for hotel guests.
135
Just as Lake Elsinore had a building boom in the 1920s, so too did Los
Angeles. It was during this time that Williams established his reputation by often
managing the prejudices of potential Anglo clients with his talents, charm and
business acumen. Before and after opening his own office in 1922, Williams
acquired experience in residential, planning, landscape and commercial architecture,
working for and collaborating with prominent Southern California architects Irving J.
Gill, Reginald D. Johnson, Gordon B. Kaufmann, John C. Austin, Welton Beckett
and others.
136
Throughout his career, Williams built houses for mostly upper class and
wealthy clients — and a few middle class patrons — across the country, and in
Mexico, the Caribbean and Latin America. Lon Chaney, William “Bojangles”
Robinson, Tyrone Power, Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball, Frank Sinatra and Zsa Zsa
Gabor were a few of the entertainers he designed houses for in Southern California.
The architectural style that Williams is most remembered for is characterized by a
careful abstraction of Anglo Colonial or Georgian and regency styles, that appears
simultaneously traditional and modern.
137
135
Ibid., 21, 31-51.
136
Karen E. Hudson, 19-25.
137
Ibid., 19-25.
94
He applied the details of these styles in an elegant and correct manner that
was streamlined, horizontal and modern, but not archaeologically precise. The
usually dramatically curved staircase is an element that has been recognized as an
admired feature in many of Williams’ designs. Never abandoning traditional
concepts, many of the homes he designed in the later part of his career, including his
own home, featured a modernist interpretation. The design style of these Williams
buildings referenced the influence of the machine, with rectilinear forms and
extensive use of glass to connect the interior open floor plans to gardens.
138
The commercial buildings Williams designed were in both modernized
traditional or modernist styles. Some of his more recognized non-residential projects
in the Los Angeles environs include: the Music Corporation of America (1937) and
Saks Fifth Avenue Department Store interiors (1939; 1945-50) both in Beverly Hills;
Los Angeles County Hall of Administration and Courthouse, a collaboration (1955);
Franz Hall (1956) and Botany (1961) Buildings, University of California, Los
Angeles; and Theme Building, Los Angeles International Airport, a collaboration
(1960s). In the 1930s and 1940s, he was involved in the design of several public
housing projects, including Pueblo del Rio Defense Housing (1940), an important
federally funded project in Los Angeles.
Throughout his 60-year career as an architect, Williams designed only a
small number of mostly non-residential buildings in the African American
community. In Los Angeles, the Hostsetter Street Elementary School (1924) and the
138
Ibid., 22, 24, 26-27, 230-235.
95
28
th
Street Young Men’s Christian Association/YMCA (1925) were buildings he
designed that were used by African Americans. The Second Baptist Church (1924),
the Angelus Funeral Home, on West Jefferson Blvd. (1932), Golden State Mutual
Life Insurance (1948), First African American Episcopal/FAME Church (1963), and
the second Angelus Funeral Home, on Crenshaw Blvd. (1966), are better-known
buildings designed by Williams that were commissioned and used by Negro
Angelenos.
Los Angeles native Price Cobbs, a psychiatrist, management consultant,
author and long time San Francisco resident, remembers that Paul Williams drove a
Cord automobile up to Lake Elsinore one summer in the mid-1930s. A Cord was the
successor to the Duisenberg automobile, and was considered very stylish at the time.
In 1932, Williams built a house in Beverly Hills for E.L. Cord, the head of the
automobile manufacturing company that bore his name. Architectural historian
David Gebhard has described the Cord residence design as establishing Williams as
“an eminent society architect in Southern California.” For many summer vacations,
the Williams family rented a house at Lake Elsinore, and eventually bought a
vacation home there.
139
According to the Lake Shore Beach Company meeting minutes, while the
resort group worked on raising the money to build Williams’ plan for the site, a
series of interim structures were constructed from materials salvaged from other
structures and from Army surplus. The first structures at Lake Shore Beach included
139
Karen E. Hudson, 17, 23, 58-67; and Edith Hawes Howard, interview by author, March 2, 2007,
via telephone, Los Angeles California.
96
small wood-framed tent cabins, a dining pavilion, a dance platform, and temporary
toilets. Additional clapboard-sided and simple stucco-sided housing was also built
during the 1920s. (See Figures 14 to 16.)
As Lake Shore Beach struggled to raise the funds to construct its more grand
building plan by Williams, another Riverside County Negro resort opened in Corona
in 1928, the Park Ridge Country Club. A Negro investment group purchased from a
White group “a fine club building with quite luxurious appointments,” that was
intended to be an inter-racial recreation area. The 663-acre estate featured golf links,
shooting ranges, a swimming pool, and tennis courts. The club facilities were said to
be worth $1,000,000. Although the Negro group was able to purchase the site, as
visitors they faced the inconveniencies of traffic tickets and racial harassment from
the local Corona Police Department, intended to discourage their coming back.
After a few years, the Park Ridge Club closed due to lack of patronage; this is a sign
of what the Lake Shore Beach Company might have experienced if they had
completed the grand facilities the owners envisioned.
140
Milton Anderson, now in his early 90s, remembers the area owned by the
Lake Shore Beach group. In 1925 his father signed the lease to operate the
concession for the company for the summer season. “It was like a paradise to go out
to [the lake],” he recalls about his visits to Lake Elsinore during the middle decades
140
Verna Williams Interview, “Shades of L.A.” Oral History Project, Photo Friends of the Los
Angeles Public Library, 1996; DeGraaf, “The City of Black Angels…,” 348; Washington,
“Recreational Facilities for Negroes,” 280; Robinson, 71-72; and “Negroes Buy Country Club,” Los
Angeles Times, News of Southern Counties Section, April 21, 1928, ProQuest Historical Newspapers
Los Angeles Times (1881-1987), A10.
97
Figure 14. Lake Shore Beach, Lake Elsinore, circa 1930. Early concession structure at Lake Shore
Beach site. Courtesy of Sonya Reese-Davis, Arthur L. Reese Family Archives.
98
Figure 15. Lake Shore Beach Site, Lake Elsinore, circa 1930. Top: entry gate and site structure.
Bottom: view from Lake looking back to the dike, Lake Shore Beach site and Clevelin Heights in the
background. Courtesy of Sonya Reese-Davis, Arthur L. Reese Family Archives.
99
Figure 16. Lake Shore Beach, Lake Elsinore, circa 1930s. Top: dining and dancing Pavilion.
Bottom: cabin structure with multiple units that were available for rent. Courtesy of Sonya Reese-
Davis, Arthur L. Reese Family Archives.
100
of the 20
th
century. “Everyone would hang out at the lake for picnics, swimming and
some boating.”
141
(See Figure 17.)
The resort plan design by architect Paul Williams was never fully
implemented, due to the inability of the Lake Shore Beach Company to raise
sufficient funds for its execution. In examining the Board’s meeting minutes, the
Lake Shore Beach owners from the 1920s into the 1940s continued to renew and
upgrade improvements to the site to accommodate the crowds that came out, and
because of flood water damage from the lake to the property. The periods around the
Independence Day and September Labor Day holidays were especially busy for the
city of Lake Elsinore, as well as the Lake Shore Beach resort, with overnight rental
visitors and day trippers. To encourage visitors who did not want to drive or did not
have a car to make the journey, the various groups sponsoring affairs at Lake Shore
Beach offered Hupmobile (a type of bus in the 1920s) transportation to bring visitors
from Los Angeles to the Lake Elsinore recreation area.
142
(See Figures 18 to 20.)
Barbara Anderson, a retired librarian of African American lineage, grew up
in San Diego. She reminisced in a 2004 interview that as a girl she thought it was
quite an adventure to go to Lake Elsinore with her family, because it was a four-hour
drive through winding roads around the mountains. Her family camped in a tent and
a camper at Lake Shore Beach, or at the free public beach, for several weeks each
summer for many years. She and her two siblings helped their mother pick and can
141
Lake Shore Beach Company, Board of Directors meeting minutes, April 28, 1925; and Milton
Anderson, Los Angeles and Lake Elsinore, California resident, interview by author, November 15,
2004, Los Angeles, California, via telephone.
142
Lake Shore Beach Company, Board of Directors meeting minutes, 1920s-1940s.
101
Figure 17. California Eagle Newspaper, May through June 1925 advertisement. In reviewing the
Lake Shore Beach Company Board of Directors meeting minutes for the 1920s, Mr. and Mrs. C.C.
Anderson were one of several management teams which operated the Lake Shore Beach resort for its
owners.
102
Figure 18. California Eagle Newspaper, June 24, 1922. The Iroquois Friday Morning Club
sponsored an outing at Lake Elsinore and offered transportation to those who needed a ride to the
event.
103
Figure 19. Memorial Day, Lake Elsinore, May 30, 1927. Standing, left to right: LaVera White,
Edith Kaiser, Joe Allen and Anita Monroe. Seated, left to right: Pearlita Johnson and Lillian
Middleton. LaVera White Collection/Arthur and Elizabeth Lewis Collection.
104
Figure 20. California Eagle Newspaper, Friday, May 29, 1925. Celebrated on various days in
different parts of the United States, Decoration Day was established to honor soldiers who served in
the Civil War. In 1882, Decoration Day was changed to Memorial Day. In 1971, Memorial Day was
officially declared a federal holiday. Memorial Day, on the last Monday in May, now honors all those
who have died and served in wars in which American soldiers participated.
105
apricots as one of their summer activities. Like most fathers at the time who could
afford a vacation for their family, her father stayed home at his job (with the city
road crew) during the week, and joined the family on the weekends at their
respective vacation locations. While at the lake, Anderson’s father and uncle would
catch a lot of fish and take them back to San Diego to sell. (See Figure 21.)
“There was a group of people who would come to the lake just after school
let out for the summer,” said Anderson. She remembers how friendly the people
were at Lake Shore: “You would walk by people on the sand and they would say
hello.” Anderson now has a retirement home at Lake Elsinore that was formally
owned by leading Negro Angeleno H. Claude Hudson (1887-1989). Originally from
Louisiana, Hudson was a dentist, lawyer, civil rights activist, long time president of
the NAACP Los Angeles Branch, and a founder of Broadway Federal Savings and
Loan.
143
At the same time African Americans were enjoying their segregated
recreational and social activities at Lake Elsinore, Anglo community celebrities and
notables such as Carole Lombard, Clark Gable, Andy Devine, Bela Lugosi, Will
Rodgers, Harold Lloyd, Sir Guy Standing, Eddie Foy, James Jeffries and United
States President Grover Cleveland were also gathering there. The Catalina Island
143
Los Angeles Negro Directory and Who’s Who, 1930-1931, The California Eagle Publishing
Company, 91; Flamming, 213-214, 273-275, 277-284, 281, 303, 373; “H. Claude Hudson, A Los
Angeles Icon!,” The African American Registry, From the Internet:
http://www.aaregistry.com/african_american_history/2622/H_Claude_Hudson_A_Los_Angeles_Icon;
“Historical Notes on the Los Angeles NAACP,” From the Internet: http://www.naacp-
losangeles.org/history.htm; and “The History of Broadway Federal Bank,” From the Internet:
http://www.broadwayfederalbank.com/81513.html.
106
Figure 21. View looking southwest over the Lake Elsinore Valley from the roof of Barbara
Anderson’s home, 2006. Her house formally was the H. Claude Hudson family vacation retreat from
the 1930s-1970s. In the foreground on the right behind the telephone pole, we see the former vacation
homes of the Payne family (with the swimming pool) and Judge Thomas L. Griffith, Jr. family. The
Griffith vacation residence is now occupied year-round by his grandson and his family. Photography
by Alison R. Jefferson.
107
Wrigleys, along with their baseball teams, the Los Angeles Angels and Chicago
Cubs, came for the winter to the Elsinore Valley. Aimee Semple McPherson, one of
the most popular evangelists of the period, conducted services at Lake Elsinore, and
built a palatial home she called “Aimee’s Castle” in Clevelin Heights, which still
stands today looking over the Valley. At the same time, the lake became a
destination for record-setting boat races and Olympic swim team training.
144
(See
Figures 22 & 23.)
Other Negro Enterprises
Beyond Lake Shore Beach and the Rieves Inn, elsewhere in Lake Elsinore
other Negro entrepreneurs offered visitor accommodations, and individual families
bought vacation homes. The California Eagle newspaper featured an advertisement
in 1925 for the Love Nest Inn, owned by Strider and Sons, which stated that the
establishment rented rooms, served meals at all hours, and had dancing. Mildred
Jackson Sterling (1890-1989) and her husband Aaron Joseph “A.J.” Sterling (d.
1935) first visited Lake Elsinore in 1919, and began their accommodations venture
sometimes in the early 1920s.
145
(See Map 3 and Figures 2 & 3.)
The Sterlings owned a pool hall near 21
st
Street and Hooper Avenue in Los
Angeles, and other real estate. A musician who sang and played guitar, Mrs. Sterling
worked as a soloist for the Angelus Funeral Home, which was founded in 1922.
They built a house and tried their hand at the restaurant business in the lake
144
Tom Hudson, 73-74; and Jeanie Corral, “Old Elsinore boasted the gracious days of hostelry and
cultured elite,” Lake Elsinore News, June 10, 1992, 4.
145
Halvor Miller, Esq., Los Angeles, California resident, interview by author, March 12, 2007, Los
Angeles, California; and Lake Elsinore advertisement, The California Eagle, July-August 1925.
108
Figure 22. Aimee’s Castle, Aimee Semple McPherson’s home modeled after a Middle Eastern castle,
Lake Elsinore, California, ca. 1930s. Los Angeles Public Library On Line Collection.
109
Figure 23. Boat Races on Lake Elsinore, 1937. Spectators park their cars Lake Shore Drive and
beach to get a spot for the day’s activities and festivities. Lake Elsinore Public Library Collection.
110
community. On Kellogg, near Pottery, and down the street from the Rieves Inn, they
constructed a few cabins they rented to Negroes vacationers. Their extended family
also stayed at the Sterling establishment on their trips, to visit and relax.
146
(See
Figures 24 & 25.)
The extended family of Mildred Jackson Sterling, who lodged at her Lake
Elsinore operation, included some noteworthy Negro citizens of Los Angeles. One
of her relatives, activist Loren Miller, Esq. (1904-1967), worked on the legal team
from Los Angeles that in 1948 won the United States Supreme Court case, Shelly v.
Kramer, which declared race-based restrictive covenants on property deeds
unconstitutional. Miller was also a journalist and editor for the California Eagle and
the Los Angeles Sentinel, the longest surviving African American newspapers in Los
Angeles. He also wrote for other publications, including the NAACP’s Crisis
magazine, and the Nation magazine.
147
Miller was a regional counsel and national vice president of the NAACP, and
was active with numerous other civil rights organizations. Following in the footsteps
of his editor, Charlotta Bass, “a crusading journalist and extraordinary activist,” he
became publisher of the California Eagle in 1952. He sold this venerable newspaper
146
Nancy Griffith, Los Angeles, California resident, interview by author, July 19, 2006, Los Angeles,
California; Halvor Miller, Esq., interview by author, March 12, 2007; Jane Miller Cerina, Orlando,
Florida resident, interview by author, August 21, 2006, Los Angeles, California, via telephone; and
still open in 2007, Angelus Funeral Home is one of the oldest operating African American owned
businesses in Los Angeles and continues to be managed by a descendent of its founders.
147
Jane Cerina interview, August 21, 2006; Flamming 302-303, 369; and Smith, 487, 489.
111
Figure 24. Sisters Mable and Ida Miller, circa 1922 at a Lake Elsinore beach area open to Negroes.
Note the concession sign in this and the photograph with the DeQuir family. These are extended
family members of Mildred Sterling, an early proprietress of accommodations for Negroes in the Lake
Elsinore Valley. Halvor Thomas Miller, Jr. Collection.
112
Figure 25. Lake Elsinore, 1948. Friends Kerry Jackson, Kev Jackson and Halvor Miller playing in
the medicinal mud. Halvor Thomas Miller, Jr. Collection.
113
— which had begun publication in 1879 — when he was appointed as a Los Angeles
Municipal Court judge in 1964 by Gov. Edmund G. Brown, Sr.
148
(See Figure 26.)
Mrs. Sterling’s other nephew who would come to visit was Leon “Wash”
Washington, Jr., publisher of the Los Angeles Sentinel. He and his wife, Ruth,
eventually owned their own property and had a pleasure boat at Lake Elsinore. The
Sentinel, founded in 1933, “promised a ‘Fearless — Independent — Free’ newspaper
and initially used the ‘Don’t Spend Where You Can’t Work” slogan as its rallying
cry.’” In the Sentinel’s early years it was heavy with real news and was “the most
sophisticated Race paper ever offered to the community.” In 2007, the Sentinel
remains the oldest, best-known and largest of the African American newspapers in
Los Angeles.
149
1930s
Jane Miller Cerina, Mrs. Sterling’s grand niece, remembers from her
childhood visits in the 1930s and 1940s that there were goats across the street from
her aunt’s property. According to Cerina, Mrs. Sterling took great pride in her
vegetable and fruit garden, which included a grape arbor and watermelons. She and
her brother, Halvor Miller, Esq., remember that there were always people from
LosAngeles stopping by to visit the family during their summer stays at Lake
148
“L.A. Attorney Loren Miller Named Judge,” Los Angeles Times, May 13, 1964, ProQuest
Historical Newspapers Los Angeles Times (1881-1987), 22; “Rights Pending for Municipal Judge
Miller,” Los Angeles Times, July 16, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Los Angeles Times
(1881-1987), G6; “Charlotta Bass and the California Eagle,” From the Internet:
http://www.socallib.org/bass/story/index.html; and Negroes Who’s Who In California 1948 Edition,
46.
149
Jane Cerina interview, August 21, 2006; Flamming, 302-303.
114
Figure 26. Charlotta Bass, second from right, and a group of her friends in a back yard, circa 1960s.
The photograph could have been taken at Bass' home in Elsinore, California. Bass moved to Lake
Elsinore in 1960 after living in Los Angeles for more than 40 years. California Eagle Photograph
Collection, Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research.
115
Elsinore. Along with relaxation, many social patterns (organized and informal)
which took place in Los Angeles also occurred at the lake, including family parties,
picnics and barbeques, card games with the guys or women’s sewing circles,
discussions about the issues of the day, musical performances and religious services.
More personal social interactions, like developing new friendships, courting and
marriage celebrations, and learning how to swim, hunt or cook also took place.
Cerina recalls the Wednesday night game of Penuche that her Uncle “Wash”
and Uncle Loren would have every week, whether in the city or at Lake Elsinore.
When he lived in Southern California, the poet Langston Hughes was a friend of
Loren Miller’s, and regularly joined the Penuche group. In 1932, Miller and Hughes
were part of the much-publicized and criticized group of young leftists of the New
Negro Renaissance, who went to the Soviet Union to see Soviet life first-hand. At
the time both men were active in the democratic socialist movement in Los Angeles.
Though Miller eventually evolved into a “mainstream liberal democrat,” his early
radicalism probably prevented him from getting a federal judgeship.
150
The 1930 United States Census count included fewer than 3000 Lake
Elsinore residents, and fewer than 60 (or 2%) were Negroes. At the same time, the
city of Los Angeles had a population of 1,238,048, and the Negro Angeleno
population was 38,894, or around 3%. In Riverside County there were almost
81,000 people, of which 1,303 (less than 2%) were Negroes.
151
150
Flamming, 302, 369; and Jane Cerina interview, August 21, 2006.
151
1930 United States Census.
116
The seasonal visitor count is not calculated in the United States Census, but it
can be surmised that thousands of people visited the area, especially from the
population centers of the region, by examining some of the advertisements for Lake
Elsinore from Los Angeles. From the late 19
th
century to the early decades of the
20
th
century, ads and stories about the beauty, resorts and natural (exploitable)
resources of Lake Elsinore were regularly featured in the Los Angeles Times and
other newspapers, including the Negro newspapers and their special publications.
Booster and travel materials, from the Lake Elsinore and Riverside County
Chambers of Commerce, the Automobile Club, the Santa Fe railroad and resort
businesses, and other regional entities which had a stake in economic development,
were distributed all over the United States.
Even during the Depression, beginning in 1929, visitors continued to come to
Lake Elsinore Valley in record numbers from the regional metropolitan areas.
Through the 1930s there was a lot more rain than dryness, mining and agriculture
flourished, the lake was stocked with fish, speedboats set racing records which
regularly garnered national attention, and the mineral baths remained popular. Paid
vacations became institutionalized for most of the American industrial labor force.
In the 1930s and 1940s, the Negro community of year-round and vacation residents
grew in Lake Elsinore along Pottery, west of downtown at the edge of town near the
Rieves Inn (which became known as the Burgess Hotel in the early 1930s after the
Burgess family sold their interests in the property). During this time, some small
hotels and court cottages sprang up that Negroes mostly from Los Angeles and San
117
Diego would rent for vacations. Lake Elsinore Negro residents would also rent
space in their homes to visitors.
152
(See Map 3 and Figure 27.)
In the 1930 United States Census Enumeration Sheets, the live-in manager of
the Burgess Hotel is listed as Cuban-born Fredrick E. Malandro, age 27 years old.
Other Negroes were listed in the 1930 Census as Lake Elsinore business owners.
Because of the nature of their establishments it can be assumed that their clients were
predominantly Negroes.
Leon Daniels is listed in the same 1930 Census as a restaurant keeper and the
owner of a multiple-unit dwelling on Riley. Gussie Hendrix is listed as the manager
of a bungalow court on Scrivener. Gussie and husband William opened Hendrix’s
Motel, with a dining room serving family-style meals, on Lowell. Also in the 1930s,
the Coleman Deluxe Hotel offered room and board at $12 per week, and Al Brooks
owned a health bath and spa with a café at the intersection of Poe and Pottery.
153
(See Map 3 and Figures 27 to 29.)
During this time the health resort’s sulphur water also attracted a large,
mostly working class, Jewish and European immigrant population. This community
created several synagogues and temples, along with the Jewish Culture Club of Lake
152
Hudson, 78, 85, 91, 96; “Lakes of California: Lake Elsinore,” San Diego Historical Society;
George Brown, Lake Elsinore Valley and Alberhill resident and retired City of Riverside employee,
interview by author, October 30, 2004, Alberhill, California; William Beverly, Eighth and Wall,
interview by author, October 2004, Los Angeles, California, via telephone; Milton Anderson
interview, November 15, 2004; Thomas Rutherford, Marina del Rey resident and retired
mechanical/electrical engineer, interview by author, August 18, 2006, Los Angeles, California, via
telephone; Aron, 238.
153
“Highlights of Black History of Lake Elsinore, 1982,” Prepared by Hilltop Community Center
Program Bulletin, Lake Elsinore Historical Society Collection, 8; 1930 United States Census; and
Lake Elsinore advertisement, The California Eagle, April-June 1930.
118
Figure 27. An advertisement which ran in several issues in 1930 for Lake Elsinore (also known as
Elsinore) establishments which catered to Negroes. From the African American owned and oriented
California Eagle Newspaper.
119
Figure 28. Members of the Independent Church of Elsinore. Several of the people in this photograph
taken circa 1940s-1952 were business proprietors who provided accommodations to Negro
vacationers who visited Lake Elsinore. From left to right: Horace C. Hensley (Hensley Court on
Riley & Sumner); Dan Wheeler; George Moore, Sr. (George Moore’s Chicken Inn on Pottery &
Spring, and the 1949 edition of the Negro Traveler’s Green Book suggested George Moore’s place on
Scrivener for accommodations); Pastor Arthur A. Webb; John Craig; William Hendrix (Hendrix
Motel on Lowell); George Moore, Jr.; Ms. Jennings; Gussie Hendrix, wife of William Hendrix; Viola
Craig; Estella Hensley, wife of Horace C. Hensley; and Mildred Sterling (vacation guest cottage
proprietress and owner of a bar in Los Angeles on 21
st
Street and Hooper Avenue). Independent
Church of Elsinore Collection.
120
Figure 29. Members of the Independent Church of Elsinore, 1940s-1952. 1) George Moore, Jr.;
2) Horace C. Hensley; 3) Camille Arnacker; 4) Brother Brown; 5) Bessie Moore; 6) I.G. Watson;
7) Lettie James; 8) Mother Hendrix; 9) Minnie Brown; 10) Brother Hendrix; 11) Vennie Hudson;
12) Brother January; 13) Mother Jennings; 14) Sister West; 15) Sister Southard; 16) Sister January;
17) Sister Madie Washington; 18) Sister Betty Moore; 19) Sister Elzada Washington;
20) Sister Catherine Briggs; 21) Sister Webb; 22) Brother Hudson; 23) Estella Hensley;
24) Allison January; 25) Rev. Arthur A. Webb; 26) Harold Briggs; 27) Thomas R. Yarborough,
standing far right in front with his arms behind his back; 28) Sister McLucas; 29) Moore boys;
30) Rev. Webb’s grandchildren; 31) Moore boy; 32) Maria Brown (?). Independent Church of
Elsinore Collection.
121
Elsinore, for their religious and social needs. Jews also enjoyed other health resorts
in Riverside County. Highland Springs in Beaumont was popular among the more
affluent set. Gilman Hot Springs in San Jacinto, and a few places in Hemet and
Murrieta, also accepted the patronage of Jews.
154
(See Figure 30.)
Prior to the building of the freeway system, starting in the 1950s, for
motorists or those riding the bus looking for a resort within easy driving distance of
Los Angeles or San Diego, Lake Elsinore was considered to be delightful, but a bit
far and somewhat “off the beaten path,” due to its location at the extreme western
and southern part of Riverside County. One had to drive the streets to get there, and
it could take four to five hours to drive to the lake from various population centers
around the Southland. Most people who visited the Valley, Anglos, Jews or
Negroes, planned to stay overnight. The distance of Lake Elsinore gave the place an
air of exclusivity, especially among Negro Angelenos; no matter that it was one of
the few resorts and recreational areas that allowed them to partake in its offerings
without continuous unpleasant, overt incidences of harassment and/or discrimination.
(See Map 2.)
Negro doctors, lawyers, government workers, ministers, teachers, newspaper
editors and others with less social status from Los Angeles — but still prosperous
enough — are known to have regularly visited Lake Elsinore, and to have bought
154
Sandy Stokes, “Elsinore Lacked that look of hatred: Black family going north, paused, then settled
down,” The Press Enterprise, February 18, 1996, B1-B2; Steve Lech, Resorts of Riverside County,
(San Francisco, CA: Arcadia Publishing, 9005), 52-57,74-83; August Muymudes, Los Angeles
resident and retired pharmacist, interview by author, July 26, 2006, Los Angeles, California; and
Jewish Cultural Club File, Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research. Los Angeles,
California.
122
Figure 30. Top: Letterhead of the Jewish Cultural Club of Elsinore. Bottom: Entry door to the
Jewish Cultural and Social Center which was owned by the club. Jewish people began to visit Lake
Elsinore for the sulphur waters in the 1930s. Like African Americans they were excluded from many
Anglo resorts before the Civic Rights era of the 1960s. After World War II a Jewish retirement
community evolved, and the club was born to plan cultural and intellectual events. The organization
flourished until the 1970s, providing activities for all citizens of Lake Elsinore.
155
Today the Jewish
Center houses the organization, Familia del Nuevo Nacimiento. Jewish Cultural Club Lake Elsinore
File, August Muymudes Collection, Southern California for Social Studies and Research.
155
Gedanken: Memories of the Jewish Cultural Club of Elsinore, Living Legacies and the Jewish
Cultural Club of Elsinore, publishers, 1989, 3-4.
123
vacation homes in the Valley. Some of these people were leaders in their respective
white and blue collar professions and in their community in Los Angeles. Many
were middle class in values, lifestyle and aspirations, more than in wealth. Although
economic racism blunted their financial ambitions, Negro Angelenos had faith in the
promise of upward mobility, and they embraced the Anglo booster rhetoric of
American West freedom and egalitarianism. Taking an extended vacation, and
buying property like a second home, were certainly big components of American
West idealism that middle class, Negro Angeleno boosters promoted.
156
(See Map 3
and Figures 10 & 31.)
Wallace Decuir recounted to me how he would ride out to Lake Elsinore in
the Model T Ford of his friend Ballinger Kemp’s grandmother, who had a vacation
home at Lake Elsinore. “She called her car ‘Henry.’ Ballinger and I would have to
get out of the car just before it got to a hill [to take some of the weight out of the car]
and walk up so that the car could make it up the hill,” said Decuir.
Decuir recalls that when he and Ballinger were playing by the lakeshore, they
would sometimes collect mud at the request of old ladies sitting on the beach, for
them to spread on their bodies for health treatments. “We didn’t mind them
interrupting our playing because they would give up 5 to 10 cents for the chore. We
would have a little extra money to spend for cokes and candy,” he laughingly shared
with me.
156
Flamming, 5, 8, 58.
124
Figure 31. California Eagle Newspaper, Summer 1925. Detail of advertisements in Figure 2.
Gordon began his Los Angeles real estate business in 1923, after a series of other fruitful business
ventures and jobs, including the Gordon Day Work Company in Santa Monica, a cleaning company,
and a stint as a letter carrier with the U.S. Postal Service.
157
157
Who’s Who In Colored Los Angeles, California, 1930-1931, Published by the California Eagle
Publishing Company, 77.
125
1940s
Lake Elsinore Hotel
The Lake Elsinore Hotel was the biggest of the Negro hotels in Lake
Elsinore. Mrs. Mary Baker and her daughter, Hula Reeves, operated this Negro
establishment on Kellogg between Pottery and Flint, which they acquired in 1931.
In addition to its main building, the Lake Elsinore Hotel had several cottages and
camping spaces available for summer rental, an area to play croquet, and a tennis
court.
158
The Lake Elsinore Hotel had a clientele of Anglos who patronized the dining
room, along with Negroes who were overnight guests at the establishment, and
otherwise visiting Lake Elsinore. One of the Anglo patrons was the local Sheriff,
who regularly came by for lunch (that he paid for), and to visit with the owners and
others he might know who were dining there at the time. Two full meals a day were
served, family-style, and snacks were set out on a sideboard table all day. When
required, Ms. Reeves’ brother, Ted, would pick up visitors that needed a ride to the
hotel from the nearby bus or train stations. During the winter months, Reeves closed
the hotel and went to Palm Springs to work during the desert resort’s high season.
158
The Green Book, 1959, 8; Edith Hawes Howard, Talare, California resident and retired chief,
interview by author, March 2 & 5, 2007, via telephone, Los Angeles, California; and George Brown,
Lake Elsinore Valley and Alberhill resident and retired City of Riverside employee, interview by
author, October 30, 2004, Alberhill, California.
126
One year, while she was working in the Coachella Valley, she met her long-time
boyfriend Connell Butler, whose specialty was preparing pastry.
159
Betty Lucas Howard remembers that on her family’s trips from Los Angeles
to Lake Elsinore they would rent space behind Mrs. Baker’s Negro establishment for
the family trailer for the month of August during the 1930s and 1940s. Her father
worked for the U.S. Post Office as a letter carrier, and her mother was a homemaker.
Rupert and Beatrice Lucas bought land in Lake Elsinore in 1928, eventually building
a home on it and retiring there in 1958. When it came time for Betty and her
husband, Nathan Howard, to retire from their jobs as a hospital administrator and
with Los Angeles County Facilities Security Department, respectively, they too
decided to move to Lake Elsinore.
160
(See Map 3 and Figure 32.)
Lucas Howard has fond memories of childhood summers there, and relished
the freedom and independence her parents allowed her at Lake Elsinore, that she did
not have in the city. Her father would come on the weekends and Betty would
sometimes go swimming, fishing and hunting for doves and rabbits with him. She
remembers the Lake Elsinore Inn as being a big brick house, and that both
proprietresses were good cooks and hostesses. On Sundays the lady innkeepers
would make homemade ice cream and peach cobbler, and for the adults there was
159
Edith Hawes Howard, interview by author, March 2 & 5, 2007; and George Brown, interview,
October 30, 2004.
160
Betty Lucas Howard, Lake Elsinore resident, interview by author, March 16, 2006, Lake Elsinore,
California.
127
Figure 32. The Lucas Family rented space for their trailer during August in the 1940s at the Lake
Elsinore Hotel, which provided various price level accommodations for Negro vacationers. Top,
1940s: Betty Lucas Howard’s mother, Beatrice, seated in the doorway of the family trailer with dog.
Bottom, August 1951: the family car and trailer. Betty’s parents retired to Lake Elsinore 1958. Her
father, Rupert was a U.S. Post Office letter carrier and her mother was a homemaker who loved to
sew. Betty relished the childhood freedom and independence she was allowed at the Lake that she did
not get at home in Los Angeles. Betty and Nathan Howard Collection.
128
evening dancing in the parlor or on the dance platform, with music provided by a
jukebox, especially on Sundays.
161
Actress Hattie McDaniels (1895-1952), who won an Academy Award for her
performance in the movie Gone with the Wind, vacationed at the Lake Elsinore Hotel
one summer in the 1940s. As a teenager, Edith Hawes Howard worked for the hotel
establishment that summer, and for Ms. McDaniels. At the Lake Elsinore Hotel she
learned about working in the hospitality business, where she would later be
employed most of her adult life. A retired chef, Hawes Howard worked several
summers at the Lake Elsinore Hotel during her teenage years so she could have extra
money for items she needed for school.
Vacation Home Dwellers, Year-Round Residents
and More Entrepreneurial Ventures
The patriarch of the Hawes family was Rev. Hampton Hawes, Sr., the first
minister installed at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Los Angeles, in 1904. The
church, located near Jefferson Boulevard and Vermont Avenue, was the first African
American church of the Presbyterian denomination in the city of Los Angeles.
Hawes Howard’s younger brother was jazz pianist Hampton Hawes (1928-1977),
who was an important artist in the emerging “west coast” school of jazz, and
recorded with Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday, Dexter Gordon, Art Pepper, Charlie
161
Ibid.
129
Mingus and others. His own band recordings in the mid-1950s established him as a
major figure in jazz.
162
Although one rarely hears of Hampton Hawes today he was a significant
presence on the jazz scene in the mid-50s then again from the mid-60s on
until his death in 1977…A direct descendant of bebop who had been
variously classified as “West Coast” and “funk-jazz” or “rhythm school,”
Hawes transcended all these categories. He was famous for his prodigious
right hand, his deep groove, his very personal playing, his profound blues
conceptions, and his versatility within a mainstream context. He remained
anchored in chord-change based jazz with chord changes his whole career.
163
In the early years of the Hawes family’s summer visits to Lake Elsinore they
camped on the dike at Lake Shore Beach in carport and umbrella tents. Hawes
Howard remembers big barbeques where people lined up to purchase their food at
the concession area, and the adults danced at the pavilion. She has memories of lots
of love and fun, going out on boat rides and watching the speedboat races on the
lake.
164
Later in the 1930s, the family built a house on Scrivener, a few blocks from
the Lake Elsinore Hotel on Kellogg and Flint. Hawes Howard describes the house as
being log cabin-like, with a big screened-in porch. She remembers that the house
had a beautiful dining table, with benches instead of chairs, and that the dining
furniture ensemble was held together by wood joinery instead of nails. The backyard
of the Hawes residence faced that of Hendrix’s Court on Lowell. (See Map 3.)
162
Ibid.; and “Hampton Hawes, Jazz Pianist Icon of the 1950’s!,” The African American Registry,
From the Internet:
http://www.aaregistry.com/african_american_history/2091/Hampton_Hawes_jazz_pianist_icon_of_th
e_1950s.
163
“Who Was Hampton Hawes?,” Hampton Hawes at All About Jazz, From the Internet:
http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/musician.php?id=7497.
164
Edith Hawes Howard, interview by author, March 2 & 5, 2007, via telephone.
130
During her summer vacations Hawes Howard enjoyed going hunting with her
father for jack and cottontail rabbits. She would sell part of their catch from her
wagon to various neighbors: jack rabbits sold for 50 cents a piece and cottontails for
35 cents a piece. With adult neighbors looking in on him, her brother, Wesley —
who got relief from his asthma during his stays in the Lake Elsinore Valley — went
to the local high school. The congenial weather conditions allowed him to thrive as
a good academic student and a high school track athlete.
165
For the Negro year-round and vacation communities, a happening place to go
eat and hang out was Miller’s Café and Pool Hall, which opened in 1945 at Langstaff
and Pottery. The fact that Miller’s had a big street light in front helped to entice
night-time visitors for inside activities and street-front gossip gatherings. Other
businesses that catered to Negroes in the late 1940s included a motel owned by the
Hensleys, on Riley near Sumner. The LaBonita Motel was a fixture on Pottery near
Riley for many years, and Mr. Leon Daniels also had court cottages he rented to
vacationers, and also provided meal service.
166
(See Map 3 and Figures 27 & 33.)
The 1949 edition of the Negro Traveler’s Green Book suggested George
Moore’s hotel on Scrivener for accommodations. Before this establishment, Moore
had a motel and café, George Moore’s Chicken Inn, on Pottery and Spring. The
legendary entertainer Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong (1901-1971) was a visitor at this
165
Ibid.
166
George Brown, interview by author, October 30, 2004; Rubin “Buddy” Brown, Lake Elsinore
Valley and Perris resident, interview by author, March 3, 2006, Perris, California; Hilltop Community
Center Program Bulletin, Lake Elsinore Historical Society Collection, 9; 1930 United State Census;
and Prince Cobbs, Las Vegas resident and retired law enforcement officer, interview by author,
October 27, 2004, via telephone.
131
Figure 33. Miller’s Café at Pottery and Langstaff, Lake Elsinore, circa 1950s. Standing, Arthur
Durdin of Los Angeles. This café and pool hall offered barbecue, other food, a full bar, and dancing
to locals and visitors, particularly if they were African American. Some times, especially in the
summer time at night outside in front of Miller’s, evening gatherings of people occurred to catch up
on gossip and to tell tall tales. On Pottery, Miller’s was the only spot with a bright light for many
years. Rubin “Buddy” Brown Collection.
132
earlier establishment. Before Moore bought the Pottery and Spring location, it was
owned by the Carriers and McLucas families. Prior to that, Earl Dancy, who was at
one time married to Oscar-nominated blues singer and actress Ethel Waters (1896-
1977), first leased the site and created the Chicken Inn that Moore took over. Moore
also had a service station and tire shop in Los Angeles at 46
th
Street and Central
Avenue.
167
Long time Lake Elsinore and Perris resident Rubin “Buddy” Brown
remembers as a boy that, in 1938, boxer Archie Moore (1913-1998) visited Lake
Elsinore. According to Brown, Moore was acting as chauffeur of a Lincoln Zephyr
for his passenger, a Negro lady from San Diego. When he was not working, Moore
sometimes played ball out in the streets with the kids. Around this time he became a
professional fighter, and boxed almost all of his bouts in San Diego, his adopted
home. He became a light heavyweight world boxing champion, and set a record for
knockouts during his career.
168
The thespian, stage producer, songwriter, screenwriter and activist Clarence
Muse, Esq. (1889-1979) owned a ranch in the hills of Perris, a short distance away
from Lake Elsinore, which he called “Muse-A-While.” Muse’s ranch and the Lake
167
George Brown, interview by author, October 30, 2004; Rubin “Buddy” Brown, Lake Elsinore
Valley and Perris resident, interview by author, March 3, 2006, Perris, California; and Hilltop
Community Center Program Bulletin, Lake Elsinore Historical Society Collection, 9.
168
Rubin “Buddy” Brown, Interview by author, March 3, 2006; Hilltop Community Center Program
Bulletin, Lake Elsinore Historical Society Collection, 9; “Archie Moore biography,” From the
Internet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archie_Moore; “Archie Moore’s 1998 Death,” From the
Internet: http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0771452.html; and “Archie Moore was a colorful boxer,”
The African American Registry, From the Internet:
http://www.aaregistry.com/african_american_history/1327/Archie_Moore_was_a_colorful_boxing_gr
eat.
133
Elsinore Hotel were both listed as leisure destinations in the 1959 edition of the
Negro Traveler’s Green Book. Mildred Sterling was a friend of Muse and his wife,
Ena. Sterling’s nephew, Halvor Miller, recalls that his great aunt and Muse would
help each other out when big parties visited their establishments. Some people who
had lodgings in Lake Elsinore went to Muse’s place to see him, or to go horseback
riding, hiking and hunting.
169
(See Map 3 and Figure 34.)
Muse was the first African American to star in a film. He appeared in more
than 200 films, including Huckleberry Finn (1931), Porgy and Bess (1959), Buck
and the Preacher (1972) and Car Wash (1976). He was an advocate for better and
more equitable treatment for African American performers. Muse was a steadfast
supporter of the controversial television series Amos N’ Andy, because he thought
that, even with the caricatured leading characters, the show permitted Negro actors to
play doctors, bankers, judges, professors and other parts that they could not in
general get to play in Anglo series.
170
Thomas R. Yarborough (1895-1969) and his wife, Kathryn, became year-
round residents at Lake Elsinore in 1929, after living in Los Angeles for 10 years.
At the South Riverside County resort he saw business and civic engagement
opportunities, and he found relief from his asthma. Yarborough was born in
169
Halvor Miller, Esq., Interview by author, March 12, 2007.
170
“Biography for Clarence Muse, Versatile Performer, Producer and Songwriter, Dies at 90,” Los
Angeles Times, October 16, 1979, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Los Angeles Times (1881-1987),
C3; “Clarence Muse, a pioneer film actor,” The African American Registry, From the Internet:
http://www.aaregistry.com/african_american_history/1194/Clarence_Muse_a_pioneer_film_actor;
and “Clarence Muse,” Biography, From the Internet: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0615617/bio.
and “Clarence Muse,” Filmography as an Actor, From the Internet:
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0615617/
134
Figure 34. Left, actor Clarence Muse, his wife Ena; right, Mildred Saunders and unidentified man on
her screened in porch sharing a meal at Lake Elsinore, circa 1937-1938. For many years both Mrs.
Sterling and the Muses provided accommodations to Negro visitors to Lake Elsinore. Halvor Thomas
Miller, Jr. Collection.
135
Arkansas, but he grew up in Greenville, Mississippi. He went to Strait University, a
Negro college in New Orleans, from 1911 to 1912. His wife was a graduate of
Oberlin College in Ohio.
171
(See Map 3 and Figures 29 & 35.)
Yarborough became a successful “real estate operator” in the Lake Elsinore
Valley. Before creating his own property management enterprise in Riverside
County, Yarborough worked as a chauffeur, with building contractors, and in
furniture making. He was a caretaker for the Lake Elsinore estate of the evangelist
Aimee Semple McPherson when he arrived to take up residency in the Valley. His
successful real estate strategy included buying property at tax sales in Riverside
County for inexpensive prices, to sell later at better prices, or to develop for year-
round and vacation rentals.
172
As a civic leader Yarborough served as a member of the Elsinore Planning
Commission, on the Board of Directors of the Elsinore Chamber of Commerce, and
as a member of the Executive Board of the Property Owners Association. Traveling
to Los Angeles for their meetings, he was an active supporter of the NAACP. He
was also a founder of the Elsinore Progressive League’s Hilltop Community Center,
which was a hub for social gatherings and charity work.
173
171
Negroes Who’s Who In California 1948 Edition, 66; and Ken Overaker, “Elsinore Negro Mayor
Retiring: Hopes to Work on Racial Peace,” Los Angeles Times, March 31, 1968, ProQuest Historical
Newspapers Los Angeles Times (1881-1987), G1.
172
Overaker, Los Angeles Times, March 31, 1968; Negroes Who’s Who In California 1948 Edition,
66; and Elbert Hudson, Esq., Los Angeles resident, interview by author, July 26, 2006, Los Angeles,
California, via Telephone.
173
Negroes Who’s Who In California 1948 Edition, 66; and Stokes, The Press Enterprise, February
18, 1996; and Lake Elsinore did not get a chapter of the NAACP until 1977. Hilltop Community
Center Program Bulletin, Lake Elsinore Historical Society Collection, 14.
136
Figure 35. On the boat at Lake Elsinore circa 1946, a popular African American resort which began
in the 1920s. From left to right: standing Thomas R. Yarborough, Lake Elsinore real estate
entrepreneur, civic activist, and town city council member and from 1966-1968, mayor; seated, third
from left is Dr. Herbert Fairs; third from right is Mrs. Towles. Her husband, Dr. H. H. Towles, is
second from right. Dr. Towles loaned the use an office in his building at 14
th
and Central Avenue to
William Nickerson in 1924 for the founding of the Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Company and
he was an early member of the company’s board of directors. Standing, second from right is Floritta
Ware. To the right of her is Leon Washington, owner and publisher of the Los Angeles Sentinel
newspaper, who also owned property at Lake Elsinore. To his right is Kermit Brown, a retired Los
Angeles Police Juvenile Division officer. Walter L. Gordon, Jr. Collection, William Beverly, Jr.
Collection, University of Southern California Special Collection.
137
When the voters of Lake Elsinore elected Yarborough to the City Council in
1948, he was the first Negro to be elected to that office in California. He served his
first term until 1952, but was defeated when he ran again in 1956. Yarborough was
then appointed to fill a vacancy on the Council in 1959, and was reelected in 1960
and 1964. In both of the later contests he received the highest vote count of all the
candidates. His fellow City Council members selected him as mayor in 1966,
making him one of the three Negro mayors of California cities at the time. When he
retired from public service in 1968, the citizens of Lake Elsinore named a city park
in his honor, to recognize his contributions to their community. Today, the Thomas
R. Yarborough Park remains at its original site, off Poe between Pottery and Flint, on
the property where the Elsinore Progressive League’s Hilltop Community Center
used to stand.
174
(See Map 3 and Figure 36.)
The Yarborough home, like that of his former employer, evangelist Aimee
Semple McPherson, was situated on top of a hill, though not as high as the one
where the house of McPherson sat in Clevelin Heights. From the Yarboroughs’ hill
property on Pottery and Lewis, at the then edge of town and approaching Clevelin
Heights, is a beautiful and inspiring panoramic view of Lake Elsinore to the west,
and Quail Valley to the east. Despite the capriciousness of the lake level, the agency
and hospitality of the various Negro proprietors at Lake Elsinore — entrepreneurs
like the Burgesses and Yarborough — were in all likelihood the biggest factors in the
174
Overaker, Los Angeles Times, March 31, 1968; and Stokes, The Press Enterprise, February 18,
1996.
138
Figure 36. The Neal Family Reunion, Yarborough Park, Lake Elsinore, CA. Sat., August 13, 2005.
Photography by Alison R. Jefferson.
139
ongoing inspiration to Negro Angelenos, and others throughout the Southern
California region and from outside the locale, to visit the Valley.
175
Dr. Curtis King developed King’s Ranch, and a rest home, in Lake Elsinore,
just down the hill from the Yarboroughs place at Davis and Chaney, going toward
Quail Valley. Before coming to Los Angeles in 1929, Dr. King did his internship at
Tuskegee Institute Hospital and practiced medicine in Georgia. This 1924 Meharry
Medical School graduate was a distinguished medical professional, with a
specialization in the prevention and cure of venereal diseases. He founded Rose
Netta Hospital in Los Angeles at Vernon and Hooper Avenues. In 1942, King’s
Rose Netta was the first hospital where the Red Cross set up an interracial blood
bank. When not assisting his patients, he pursued his hobbies of photography and
raising palomino horses at his ranch.
176
(See Map 3.)
Up the hill from King’s Ranch, to the south, the Lake Elsinore vacation home
that dentist Dr. Elvin Neal and his wife Olive built continues to stand on Scrivener
near Pottery. The Neals moved to Los Angeles in 1924, just after Dr. Neal finished
dental school at Meharry. Raised and educated in Texas, Dr. Neal’s extended family
also bought property in Lake Elsinore. Some of the descendents of the elder Neals
175
Site visit by author, accompanied by George Brown, Lake Elsinore Valley and Alberhill resident
(as tour guide), Spring 2006.
176
Negroes Who’s Who In California 1948 Edition, 32; and Los Angeles Classified Buyers’ Guide,
1942-1943, 11; Meharry Medical School is located in Nashville, Tennessee. Founded in 1876, it has
remained the largest private historically African American institution in the United States dedicated to
educating healthcare professionals and scientists. Before it got its independent charter in 1915,
Meharry was originally part of Central Tennessee College/Walden University, which was initially
established by the Methodist Episcopal Church North; John Neal, Moreno Valley resident, interview
by author, February 10, 2006, via telephone and in Lake Elsinore; and George Brown, interview by
author, February 10, 2006, Lake Elsinore.
140
have retired to the Valley, and every summer other relatives return for a huge family
reunion. In 2006, the reunion event was held under the shade trees at Yarborough
Park.
177
(See Map 3 and Figure 36.)
Judge David W. Williams (1910-2000), the first African American federal
judge west of the Mississippi, also had a vacation home in Lake Elsinore, on Silver
Street, a short distance down the hill from the Yarborough home. Born in Atlanta,
Georgia, Judge Williams grew up on 109
th
Street near Central Avenue in the Watts
community of Los Angeles. He worked his way through Los Angeles Junior
College, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the law school at University
of Southern California. Being a founding member of the John M. Langston Bar
Association — a black lawyer’s group that was established because Negro lawyers
were not allowed to join the Los Angeles County Bar Association — was one of his
many professional and civic activities and accomplishments.
178
In the 1940s, Williams was one of the Negro lawyers from Los Angeles who,
along with Loren Miller and Willis O. Tyler, worked on the legal cases with
Thurgood Marshall, Esq., then the head of NAACP Legal Defense Funds efforts, to
fight the restrictive covenants that barred minorities from living in many
neighborhoods in the City of Angels. Negroes and other minorities continued to face
177
Negroes Who’s Who In California 1948 Edition, 48; John Neal, interview by author, February 10,
2006; George Brown, interview by author, February 10, 2006; and Charles Neal, Lake Elsinore
resident, interview by author, June 15, 2005 and Fall 2005, via telephone and in Lake Elsinore.
178
Negroes Who’s Who In California 1948 Edition, 50; Williams, a life long Republican, was
appointed to the Federal Bench by President Richard Nixon in 1969. Elaine Woo, “David Williams
Dies; Was First Black Federal Judge in West,” Los Angeles Times, May 10, 2000, Proquest
Newspapers, B-1; Hilltop Community Center Program Bulletin, 11; Eric V. Copage, “David
Williams, 90, Pioneering black Judge;” [Obituary (Obit)], New York Times, May 12, 2000, Proquest
Newspapers, B-15.; and Thomas Rutherford, interview by author, August 18, 2006.
141
great difficulty buying property in Anglo neighborhoods, even after the covenants
were declared illegal by the United States Supreme Court in 1948. In the mid-1950s,
pretending to live out of town, then Municipal Court Judge Williams outwitted those
who might discriminate against him when he brokered the sale of a vacant lot next
door to the exclusive Bel-Air Country Club for $20,000, through telephone calls. He
ignored the neighbors who were outraged that a Negro had purchased the land, built
a house for his family, and continued to live in it and the exclusive neighborhood
until he died.
179
(See Map 3.)
During the years of World War II, the crowds who visited Lake Elsinore
began a pattern of decline that would continue into future decades. The people that
did come to the lake spent less money. There were many vacant houses in the
community, which became home to the families of the men serving at Camp Haan, a
few miles away in Perris, across the highway from March Army Air Field. During
the war the lake and the surrounding area were used for army maneuvers, and new
equipment was tested before it was sent overseas to be used by American soldiers.
180
Even with the changing fortunes of Lake Elsinore, pivotal moments of life
took place alongside relaxation. Ivan Houston, former head of Golden State Life
Insurance Company, and son of the company’s co-founder Norman O. Houston,
179
Williams was appointed to the Los Angeles County Municipal Court in 1956 by Gov. Goodwin J.
Knight. He gained an appointment to the Superior Court in 1962 from Gov. Edmund G. Brown, Sr.
Williams was a life long Republican and was elevated by President Richard Nixon to the federal
bench in 1969. After the Watts Revolt of 1965, he volunteered to handle the 4,000 criminal cases that
resulted from the uprising. Woo, Los Angeles Times, May 10, 2000, B-1; Copage, New York Times,
May 12, 2000, B-15; and Betty Pleasant, “Legal Community Gathers to Mourn Judge David
Williams,” Los Angeles Sentinel, May 24, 2000, Proquest Newspapers, V. 66, Iss. 8, A-1.
180
Hudson, 91-92; and “Historic California Posts – Camp Haan,” The California State Military
Museum, From the Internet: www.militarymuseum.org/ephaan.html.
142
remembers his mother and father telling him they spent their honeymoon at Lake
Elsinore. Jan Miller Cerina recalls that in the mid-1940s, when she was an early
adolescent, Negro soldiers came to the north shore of Lake Elsinore one summer day
on a big transport truck to watch singer Lena Horne perform. Cerina remembers the
soldiers and others who came to hear the free show sitting on the beach at the
lakeshore and standing around, while Ms. Horne entertained from a makeshift stage
provided by a truck transport bed. “She [Horne] was a very pretty, unassuming
woman who also brought her children for vacation with her at the lake,” recalls
Cerina.
Los Angeles native Price Cobbs remembers on one of his family’s summer
visits to the lake in the late 1930s, when he was about ten years old, seeing Dexter
Gordon (1923-1990), who was about 17 at the time, driving his 1935 Ford
Convertible around the lake. Gordon later became a renowned jazz musician, and
was the first to translate the language of bebop to the tenor saxophone. “I remember
thinking how cool Dexter must be,” said Cobbs. He would go for summer stays at
Lake Shore Beach and at Mrs. Sterling’s place with his parents, Dr. Peter Price and
Rosa Cobbs, and his siblings Prince and Marcelyn. The elder Dr. Cobbs graduated
in 1919 from Howard University Medical School, and his wife was a graduate of
Miles College in Alabama.
181
181
Price M. Cobbs, MD, (the younger) San Francisco resident, psychiatrist management consultant,
and author, interview by author, October 30, 2004, Los Angeles, California; and Negroes Who’s Who
In California 1948 Edition, 35. Miles College is a historically African American liberal arts college
founded in 1905, near Birmingham, Alabama.
143
In 1925, Peter and Rosa Cobbs drove a new Dodge to Los Angeles from
Montgomery, Alabama, where Dr. Cobbs had a successful medical practice. Like so
many others before and after them, the young couple moved to Los Angeles to
escape the discrimination of the South, to make a better place for themselves and
their children, and for the California dream of freedom and opportunity. The
medical office of Dr. Cobbs was on Central Avenue in Los Angeles, above Harris
Pharmacy, and around the corner from the 28
th
Street YMCA. He also opened a
sanitarium on North Hazard Street in the Boyle Heights section of Los Angeles.
Several people I interviewed fondly remember Dr. Cobbs providing someone in their
family with emergency care when they had situations which required a physician’s
assistance while at Lake Elsinore.
182
(See Figure 37.)
In the 1940s, Lake Elsinore began a slow death, due to the economy, and the
impact of nature and humans on the source of its water. There was little rainfall for
several years. Two dams were put into service upstream on the San Jacinto River,
and there was escalating drainage of the underground water supply that would have
fed into the river and eventually supplied the lake for use in the communities of San
Jacinto, Perris and Lake Elsinore. In 1948, the combination of low water and over-
population of fish caused there to be insufficient oxygen in the lake. Fish began to
abruptly die in large numbers and washed up on the north shore due to the winds.
Despite these events, the town population continued to grow. In 1950, Lake Elsinore
182
Price M. Cobbs, MD, San Francisco resident, author and management consultant, interview by
author, October 30, 2004, Los Angeles, California; Negroes Who’s Who In California 1948 Edition,
35; and Cobbs, 4.
144
Figure 37. A grand family outing after the water refurbishment of Lake Elsinore, 1964. Three
generations of family, from left to right: seated Veronica Chen Cobbs; children standing Alison Rose
Jefferson, Albert Jefferson, Jr., Renata Cobbs, Price P. Cobbs; seated on white car in back Price M.
Cobbs, MD and Evadne Priester Cobbs; and standing next to them Marcelyn Cobbs Jefferson and
matriarch Rosa M. Cobbs. Dr. Peter P. Cobbs and Rosa Mashaw Cobbs drove their new Dodge to
Los Angeles in 1925 from Montgomery, Alabama. The elder Dr. Cobbs gave up a thriving medical
practice in Montgomery to trek west with his wife for new opportunities and their version of the
‘California Dream.’ When the Cobbs children were growing up, the family would spend summer
vacations at Lake Elsinore in the 1930s. Photographer: Prince R. Cobbs. Cobbs Jefferson Family
Collection.
145
had a population of just over 2,000 people, and there were probably as many people
living outside the city limits. At this time serious discussion also began with regard
to bringing the lake under public ownership and creating a public entity which could
have the power to deal with the lake’s problems, but it would not be until the first
half of the 1960s that the some of the major management issues of Lake Elsinore
would be resolved.
183
The problems and the optimism for future development of the community of
Lake Elsinore in the 1940s continued into the 1950s. By 1955 the lake bed was dry
and dust storms were a regular occurrence. Although many people left or did not
visit the area because of these conditions, some stayed, a few visitors still came, and
some even continued to buy property in the Valley. A few, like the Paynes and
Rutherfords, who were related by marriage and who both owned homes on Lewis
down the hill from the Yarboroughs, built swimming pools when the lake no longer
provided its rehabilitating waters in the 1950s. Judge Thomas L. and Mrs. Portia
Broyles Griffith, Jr., began building a weekend/vacation home for their family at
Lake Elsinore in 1953, the same year he was appointed by Gov. Earl Warren to the
Los Angeles Municipal Court.
184
(See Map 3 and Figures 38 to 40.)
183
Hudson, 102-103; and 1950 United States Census.
184
Hudson, 123; Thomas Rutherford, interview by author, August 18, 2006; Liza Griffith Scruggs,
Los Angeles resident and Assistant Superintendent-Secondary Instruction, Los Angeles Unified
School District, Interview by author, August 8, 2006, via telephone, and October 7, 2006, Los
Angeles, California; Nancy Scruggs Griffith, Los Angeles, California resident, interview by author,
July 19, 2006, Los Angeles, California; Halvor Miller, Esq., interview by author, March 12, 2007; and
Griffith was California’s second Negro judge. “A New Judge in the Largest court in the World:
Griffith Becomes 8
th
Negro Judge in U.S.,” Sepia USA Magazine, August 1953, Liza Griffith Scruggs
Collection.
146
Figure 38. West end of Lake Elsinore and Riverside Drive from the Ortega Highway circa 1950s.
Today most of the area shown in this photograph has been converted from agricultural land to planned
community subdivisions. The town center is in the background on the edge of the Lake towards the
right. Lake Elsinore Public Library Collection.
147
Figure 39. Sepia USA Magazine, August 1952. On the cover one of the story titles features reads:
“Negro Becomes Judge: In Largest Court in the World.” Inside the story title about the appointment
of Thomas L. Griffith, Jr., Esq. reads, “Griffith Becomes 8
th
Negro Judge in U.S.” Before being
appointed by Governor Earl Warren as California’s second Negro judge, Griffith had practiced law
for 22 years and served as the president of the NAACP Los Angeles branch for 15 years. In the
picture above, Judge Griffith and wife Portia are reviewing plans for their new vacation home at Lake
Elsinore, which still stands today and has been occupied for 13 years by his grandson, Thomas L.
Griffith, IV and his family. Liza Griffith Scruggs and Gordon Scruggs Collection.
148
Figure 40. At the backyard pool of the Rutherford home at Lake Elsinore on Lewis Street, circa
1950s. The Rutherfords knew many people who owned vacations homes in the Valley. Thomas
Rutherford’s brother-in-law, Paul Payne introduced him, his wife Judy and children to the area. The
vacation homes of both were in the same vicinity on Lewis Street, with a few other families who came
out from Los Angeles, like the (Judge Thomas L.) Griffiths, the (H. Claude) Hudsons and the (Judge
David) Williams. Mr. Rutherford in a 2006 interview proudly recalled that Lake Elsinore resident,
businessman and civic activist, Thomas R. Yarborough who lived up the street from his weekend
home was “running the place” (meaning Lake Elsinore). From left to right: Liza Griffith (Scruggs),
her mother Portia, school mate from Los Angeles Sandra Watson and Penny Rutherford. Liza Griffith
Scruggs and Gordon Scruggs Collection.
149
Griffith was the first Negro admitted to the Los Angeles Bar Association, and
the first to be named to the California Bar’s Legislation Committee; Mrs. Griffith
was an elementary school teacher. He served as president of the NAACP Los
Angeles Branch for 15 years. In 1925, during the ministry of his parents, Rev.
Thomas L. Griffith, Sr., and Mrs. Carrie L. Griffith, architect Paul R. Williams was
hired to design the elegant Second Baptist Church, at 24
th
Street and Griffith Avenue
in Los Angeles, a block west of Central Avenue. Today, Judge Griffith’s grandson
and his family reside year-round in the house he built for his family’s leisure. The
judge’s daughter, Liza Griffith Scruggs, said in a recent interview, “I have many
wonderful childhood memories of swimming in the Rutherfords’ pool whose house
was next door to ours, lots of barbeques and of the many people who stopped by to
visit when we were at Lake Elsinore for the weekend.”
185
(See Figures 41 & 42.)
The historic Lake Elsinore Negro resort community had much in common
with other sites around the nation where successful American Africans were able to
insulate themselves and their children from rude treatment and repeated affronts to
their dignity from Whites, and to enjoy leisure in their own country. These
particularly determined Negroes with disposable income eagerly pursued the finer
things and enjoyment in life, in a similar manner to their affluent Anglo counterparts.
Vacationing together at selected resorts also provided Negro families with the
185
“…Griffith Becomes 8
th
Negro Judge in U.S.,” Sepia USA Magazine, August 1953, Liza Griffith
Scruggs Collection; Liza Griffith Scruggs, Interview by author, August 8, 2006; and Negroes Who’s
Who In California 1948 Edition, 45.
150
Figure 41. Griffith family children and friend on a play date at Lake Elsinore, circa early 1960s.
Liza Griffith Scruggs and Gordon Scruggs Collection.
151
Figure 42. Lake Elsinore circa 1950s/early 1960s. Top: Sisters Robin Chester and Portia Griffith.
Bottom: Lloyd C. Griffith, Esq., the brother of Judge Thomas Griffith, and his wife Laura Harwell
Griffith. Liza Griffith Scruggs and Gordon Scruggs Collection.
152
opportunity to reinforce their relationships, to make new acquaintances, and renew
old ones.
186
As was the case with Negro resort areas near eastern, mid-western and
southern cities with relatively large African American populations that sprouted up
in the early 20
th
century, the Lake Elsinore Valley race-specific leisure space grew
because there were Negro entrepreneurs and residents in the Valley who offered
services and accommodations to Negro visitors. Relatively remote from the larger
Southern California metropolitan areas, the city of Lake Elsinore included Negroes
as part of the early American settlement in the late 1880s. This was a decisive factor
in why an African American leisure community emerged in this area, and in many
others around the United States.
187
Although the Lake Elsinore resort was popular, it was not as coveted by
Anglos as other Southern California resort areas, particularly those near the beach.
The Negro (and Jewish) leisure retreat co-existed around the margins of the Anglo
resort community, with few documented unpleasant confrontations between Negroes
and Anglos.
In 1922, Santa Monica city council refused to allow construction of a
proposed Negro bathhouse and amusement center, and the same year forced the
closure of Caldwell’s, a very successful African American-owned dancehall in the
Ocean Park section of the city. Bruce’s Beach (also known as Bruce’s Lodge),
which had provided oceanside recreation space for Negro Angelenos in the South
186
Foster, 131, 136, 143; and Gatewood, 202.
187
Foster, 136-137.
153
Bay region of Los Angeles County beginning in 1912, was forced to close. In 1924,
the Bruces, and other Negroes and Anglos with vacation homes and unimproved land
in this north Manhattan Beach section, were evicted under the banner of a campaign
that their land should be used for a public park. One of the uglier incidents intended
to keep Negroes from enjoying the beach was the 1926 destruction of the nearly
completed Pacific Beach Club, in Huntington Beach. Arsonists burned the beautiful
new facility to the ground shortly before it was to open.
188
With the onset of the Depression, World War II, federal legislation which
made segregation illegal, and public places more or less open to all, many Negro
vacation resorts began to suffer waning attendance and economic hardship, and the
Lake Elsinore Negro retreat was no different in this regard. As Southern California
Negroes were presented with a broader array of vacation options, they began to go to
newly-accessible places, and stopped going to Lake Elsinore. African American
vacation retreats that have faded, and those that continue to survive today, drew and
still draw people because of their legacy of achievement, strong sense of place, and
memories.
189
Changing historical, sociological and cultural significance does not diminish
the importance of Lake Elsinore and other Negro vacation retreats. On the contrary,
188
Ibid., 136-137, 140; Flamming 272-272; “Settlement of Negroes Is Opposed: Santa Monica and
Ocean Park Block Plans for Colony of Colored Folks,” Los Angeles Times, July 30, 1922, ProQuest
Newspapers; “The Color Line At Santa Monica,” California Eagle Newspaper, April 1, 1922, 1;
DeGraaf, “City of Angels…,” 348; Brigham, 31-34, 47, 84; and Dan Cady, “’Southern’ California:
White Southern Migrants in Greater Los Angeles, 1920-1930,” (PhD diss., Claremont University,
Claremont, California 2005), 194-198, 226-227.
189
Haizlip, 21.
154
the societal changes only make these sites more intriguing, because of the “brave
pioneers who persisted in pursuing the finer things in life in public, despite repeated
rejection, hostile environments and even physical danger.” African American
leadership has been associated with martyrdom, toil and sacrifice, and also with
advancing obvious racial causes and civil rights. This recognition is appropriate.
But determined African Americans with disposable income, who demonstrated by
their own example that all people have the right to enjoy the fruits of their labor,
when and where they choose, also advanced the universal search for human
dignity.
190
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
By the 1960s, healing water resorts became less popular, and in Lake
Elsinore the sulphur water baths became a relatively minor part of the local
economy. Resort and leisure areas seem to have a certain lifespan, determined by
cycles, moods, public fancy, transportation options and weather. If not for the
Depression of the 1930s, and the unpredictability of the lake that enticed successive
visionaries and boosters, Lake Elsinore would probably have grown into a sizable
city surrounding the big pond. Even so, Elsinore Valley began to feel less rural, due
to new residential community developments, which brought population centers
nearer, and to the expansion of the influence of the three nearby metropolitan areas,
190
Ibid., 21; and Foster, 146.
155
due to the enlarged regional freeway system that came to envelop it.
191
(See Figure
38.)
The community of Lake Elsinore has gone through many transitions since the
middle decades of the 20
th
century. Final public acquisition of the lakebed lands in
the Lake Elsinore Valley came in 1957. It is no longer the vacation site it once was,
for any American. It is now a small, suburban, family community, a mix of the old
town site, rural areas, and new master-planned communities of homes built on
parcels of land that were once part of the lake, used for farming, or open land.
Residents are for the most part retired, or commute to work locations around the
southland in Riverside, San Bernardino, Orange, San Diego and Los Angeles
counties. Today, the websites of the city of Lake Elsinore and its Chamber of
Commerce promote the natural scenic and recreational attributes of the area, extreme
sports venues, and advertise that the city has over 1100-acres of freeway frontage
available for new commercial and industrial park development, lower housing and
land costs, close proximity to skilled labor and universities, and a strategic location
within the Southern California market. (See Figures 43 & 44.)
Nowadays, people can camp at the lake, but not currently at Lake Shore
Beach. The city of Lake Elsinore maintains some public parks along the shoreline
and throughout the city. Lake Elsinore water quality, wildlife habitats and
improvements are managed today by the Lake Elsinore and San Jacinto Watersheds
191
Hudson, 61, 136, 141; and Sutton, 293.
156
Figure 43. Robbie and Colonel Harvey at their home in the Sedco Hills area of Lake Elsinore, 1980.
Their retirement property included two houses, two acres of orange, lime and grapefruit groves,
mulberries, apricots and row crops. Colonel Harvey managed the farm and Mrs. Harvey had a beauty
salon on their property. Her son, William Slaton, his wife Nelle and their children visited the Lake
from the 1950s until they sold the property in the early 1990s after his mother and Harvey both died.
The whole family enjoyed the outdoors and offerings of the Lake Elsinore setting. Bill and his
mother came to Los Angeles from Texas during World War II in 1944, and lived on the Eastside, off
Central Avenue. His wife, Nellie Becker (her maiden name) grew up in New York City; Nellie’s
mother was a journalist and a school teacher, and her father was a lawyer and a postal worker. During
her childhood, after her father died, Nelle and brothers Adolph and Leslie would accompany their
mother to Martha’s Vineyard for many of their summer vacations. While the children played, the
elder Becker covered the social scene for various Negro news outlets for her summer income. When
Nellie first moved to California she lived with Charlotta Bass, activist and editor of the California
Eagle Newspaper, who also retired to Lake Elsinore in the late 1950s. William and Nellie Slaton
Collection.
157
Figure 44. Lake Elsinore, 2006. Thomas “Tommy” L. Griffith, IV (on the right), his wife, Evelyn
and his younger brother, Miles Griffith at the barbecue grill in the backyard of their year-round home,
built by Tommy’s grandfather in the 1950s for his family’s leisure. Tommy sells automobiles in the
Inland Empire and Evelyn takes care of the children and works part-time at the Lake Elsinore School
District in Transportation. Nancy Scruggs Griffith Collection.
158
Authority. Lake Elsinore itself is maintained at 3000 acres, or 2.5 miles long and 1.5
miles wide, with 10 miles of shoreline. This is less than half its size in the years of
abundant water flow early in the 20
th
century. A private company is contracted to
manage the lake area campgrounds, boat launch and marina, day use areas,
concessions, and other services.
192
None of the Lake Elsinore hotels that served Anglo or African American
visitors during the first half of the 20
th
century are open now. Many of the vacation
homes and court cottages that were built during this period have been torn down, or
dramatically altered for year-round use by residents. Descendents of some of the
African American families who came to live in Lake Elsinore in the early part of the
20
th
century continue to live in the Valley environs. A few Negro Angeleno
descendents who vacationed at the lake when the place was popular as a healing
water resort have taken over the second homes their ancestors occupied for their
year-round residences. (See Figure 44.)
In the early part of the 21
st
century, many recreational visitors to the Valley
come for skydiving, hang-gliding and other aerial sports, as well as water sports of
wakeboarding and windsurfing — not for the therapeutic waters. Pottery Street is no
longer the hub for African Americans at Lake Elsinore, nor is any other street. The
city of Lake Elsinore has grown in land mass, and from a majority Anglo population
192
Hudson, 120-121, 128, 154; “Lake Elsinore 2003 State of the City Report”; Lake Elsinore Valley
Chamber of Commerce, From the Internet: http://www.lakeelsinorechamber.com/; Lake Elsinore
Campground, From the Internet: http://www.rockymountainrec.com/camp/elsinore.htm; Lake
Elsinore Valley Chamber of Commerce Community Map. San Diego, CA: Map Masters, 2003; and
Lake Elsinore & San Jacinto Watershed Authority, From the Internet:
http://www.mywatersheds.com/home.htm.
159
of about 3,000 people in 1930, to a population of 33,900 today. Hispanics make up
the largest percentage (38%) of the residents, while African Americans make up only
about 5%. Following many changes, the Lake Elsinore Valley continues to be a
charming and beautiful place to visit and live, but with very different cultural
nuances.
193
(See Figure 21.)
193
Hudson, 77; and Lake Elsinore, California data, 2004. From the internet:
www.city-data.com/city/Lake-Elsinore-California.html; Lake Elsinore Valley Chamber of Commerce
Community Map. San Diego, CA: Map Masters, 2003; Lake Elsinore Visitors Bureau, From the
Internet: http://www.visitlakeelsinore.com/; and “Population and Housing Background Report,” Lake
Elsinore General Plan Update, 8-6.
160
Chapter 3
Commemoration of Cultural Significance Resources
When Integrity is Challenged
Commemoration of the African American resort community at Lake Elsinore
presents difficult challenges and opportunities to preservation professionals.
Although there is documentation of the resort community, the majority of the resort
facilities have been demolished. Today, more than the buildings which stood at Lake
Elsinore, oral histories, stories and advertisements from mostly African American
newspapers, photographs, pieces of ephemera, and a few architectural ruins, link us
to the sentiments, tradition, and memory of the experiences that document this
group’s resort area presence and cultural significance. Their story speaks not only to
African American history, but also the shared experiences of Lake Elsinore’s
development as a community.
Available for purchase at various locations, and review at Southern California
libraries, the most comprehensive (and most referenced) published history, Lake
Elsinore Valley: Its Story, 1776 – 1977, by Tom Hudson, does not mention the
African American (or Jewish) communities with regard to recreation spaces or
otherwise. The majority of the documentation for the study at hand was gathered
from people in the African American community of Los Angeles with some
connection to Lake Elsinore as visitors and/or vacation property owners during the
Jim Crow era. Documentation of this community also came from long-time African
161
American residents of the Lake Elsinore area whose families arrived there in the
1920s.
Historic and cultural preservation efforts in the United States emphasize the
tangible aspects of culture. The documentary value of a historic property is the
primary factor in the reasoning to support its preservation. Properties or places are
most often saved because of their historical associations or architectural significance.
Local history recordation and monument designation at federal, state and/or local
level recognize and celebrate the accomplishments of individuals in their
communities, and their contributions to the history and heritage of their region and
the nation. As a collective heritage, places also describe our identity as a society,
and can provide emotional anchors to a community as a whole. It has been found
that historic preservation touches more Americans than any other public history
endeavor.
194
The City of Lake Elsinore does not currently have an ordinance to preserve
and interpret historic structures throughout the city, although it does have a ‘Historic
Downtown Overlay District’ with design guidelines. Centered on Main Street
downtown, and the older residential area, the district contains 148 historic
194
Cultural Conservation: The Protection of Cultural Heritage in the United States, Coordinated by
Ormond H. Loomis for the American Folklife Center, Library of Congress and the National Park
Service, Department of Interior, 1983, 13, 17; “Listing a Property in the National Register of Historic
Places.” From the Internet: http://www.cr.nps.gov/nr/listing.htm; Dirk H.R. Spennemann, “The Day
The Mouse Could Roar: Considering the Role of the Silent Majority in Historic Preservation,” Paper
presented at the International Luncheon, 30
th
Annual California Preservation Conference, Riverside,
California, May 13, 2005, 6-7; Ned Kaufman, “Moving Forward: Futures for a Preservation
Movement,” in Giving Preservation a History: Histories of Historic Preservation in the United States,
ed. Max Page and Randall Mason, (New York, NY: Routledge, 2004), 314-315; and Max Page and
Randall Mason, “Rethinking the Roots of the Historic Preservation Movement,” Giving Preservation
a History…, 6.
162
commercial and residential buildings, which were identified and documented in a
1981 cultural resource survey conducted as a part of the Riverside County
Comprehensive General Plan recommendations.
195
(See Appendix A.)
A 2005 records search in the state of California database by the Eastern
Information Center of the California Historical Resources Information System at the
University of California, Riverside, found that cultural resources studies had
previously been conducted, and cultural resources (buildings, structures, objects, and
archaeological sites) had been recorded, in the Lake Elsinore Valley. During the
period of research for this study, however, this author found no documentation of
Lake Elsinore properties currently listed or found to be eligible for listing as
significant historic resources in the National Register of Historic Places, the
California Points of Historic Interests, or the Riverside County General Plan, in
association with the African American experience in this community.
196
Recognition of heritage in America through the landmark process, even in the
always culturally-diverse Southern California region, has traditionally favored sites
associated with city-leader narratives of Anglo upper class male landholders,
bankers, business and political leaders, and their architects. The stories of many
other groups associated with places that have played important roles in the history of
195
“Cultural, Historical and Paleontological Resources Background Report,” City of Lake Elsinore
General Plan Background Reports, Prepared by Mooney Jones & Stokes, January 2006, From the
Internet: http://www.lake-elsinore.org/gp/docs.asp, Ch. 7/3, 7/21-7/22; and “City of Lake Elsinore
Civic Center Session Study,” February 22, 2007, From the Internet: http://www.lake-
elsinore.org/pdf/Civic%20Center%20Report.pdf, 32-38.
196
“Cultural, Historical and Paleontological Resources Background Report,” City of Lake Elsinore
General Plan Background Reports, Prepared by Mooney Jones & Stokes, January 2006, From the
Internet: http://www.lake-elsinore.org/gp/docs.asp, 7/3-7/5; and See Appendix A for a list of Lake
Elsinore Built Cultural Resources.
163
the United States, and this region, have been benignly overlooked, or purposefully
ignored. At the dawning of the 21
st
century, a gradual shift has begun across the
United States, as history professionals try to include more expansive views of local
histories than the biographies of the male Anglo establishment.
197
Such expansive views may be more inclusive of everyday women, working
people, and people of color with various origins. Although the numbers are still
small, more landmarks are being developed to recognize these dispossessed groups.
As more diverse groups are acknowledged as actors in the ongoing reevaluation of
American heritage, more places are being recognized for cultural and social history
significance — and not just architectural aesthetics. New generations of scholars,
preservationists, civic leaders and ordinary citizens are connecting cultural history to
spatial history in preserving and interpreting American places. Slowly, the memory
of previously-unacknowledged groups’ unique experiences — alongside larger
themes associated with the citizenry in general, like migration experience,
recreational interests, employment, family organization, or the search for a new
sense of identity — are being infused into the collective memory of local and
national public culture.
198
Private and public agencies in communities all over the country are being
challenged by their diverse citizens, who are taxpayers and potential audiences, to
197
Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History, (Cambridge, MA:
The MIT Press, 1995), 85-86, 88.
198
Max Page and Randall Mason, “Rethinking the Roots of the Historic Preservation Movement,”
Giving Preservation a History…, 14; Hayden, 8; and Arnold R. Alanen and Robert Z. Melnick, ed.,
with forward by Dolores Hayden, Preserving Cultural Landscapes in America, (Baltimore, MD: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), vii.
164
come up with varied cultural programming, from exhibits or publications, to the
preservation of historic buildings and landscapes, and the creation of public art
projects that reflect their heritage. Heritage projects can strike a responsive chord
with audiences, and straddle several worlds: academic urban and public history,
urban planning, public art, preservation and urban design. Fostering a more
inclusive cultural citizenship, sense of cultural being, cultural heritage and civic
pride among diverse groups can lead to other kinds of community organization,
around economic development, sustainability and environmental protection,
affordable housing, and other community enhancement programs.
199
How can a cultural landscape be memorialized under current preservation
policy, when the significant built artifacts are not extant to commemorate a heritage
area, as is the case at Lake Elsinore with the sites of the African American resort
community? Beyond preservation in a museum, of a building as an object of art, or
through the adaptive reuse of real estate, architectural traces of the past will become
progressively more important in the future for preservationists looking at ways of
working with physical and social history. The increasing complexity of the layers of
heritage we are identifying in the cultural landscape of communities will require this
evolution in thought by preservationists.
200
199
Hayden, 7-9, 49, 61, 237; Dolores Hayden, “The Power of Place Project: Claiming Women’s
History in the Urban Landscape,” in Restoring Women’s History through Historic Preservation, ed.
Gail Lee Dubrow and Jennifer B. Goodman, (Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2003), 212-213; and Page; Mason, 3, 14-15.
200
Hayden, 53, 59-61.
165
An innovative way to recognize the historic African American resort
community at Lake Elsinore would be to develop a heritage trail to connect historic
sites. A trail would preserve, interpret the stories of, and promote the diverse history
of this area. The “African American Heritage Trail of Lake Elsinore” would
document the people and places that played noteworthy roles in the growth of the
African American resort community, whether or not architecturally significant
buildings survive which can be designated as official landmarks of the history of
African Americans, or the city of Lake Elsinore.
Black Angeleno visitors who owned Lake Elsinore vacation property, and
who in many cases were influential civic and professional leaders in Los Angeles,
constitute another theme which might be included on this trail. Local themes
common to the year-round residents’ experience, such as religion, education,
employment, and sports, could also be incorporated into the sites on the trail.
Although many of the sites that could be included on the African American Heritage
Trail are demolished, their stories remain, even if physical traces do not.
201
There exist several examples of heritage trails in the United States which
were established to identify sites, buildings and other points of interest in the history
of African American communities for the purpose of preservation and promotion as
201
The Lake Elsinore African American Heritage Trail for another theme could link with the African
American heritage of the Cleveland National Forest. Stationed at the Cleveland National Forest (and
later at Camp F-164 in Lake Elsinore) in the 1930s, was Civilian Conservation Corp Company 2923-
C, one of four all African American units within the Los Angeles District. This all-Negro unit
constructed many structures, trails and highways, campground developments and other improvements
which are still in use today in Cleveland National Forest; they also had a distinguished firefighting
record. History of the Cleveland National Forest - Recreation Development: The Civilian
Conservation Corp on the Cleveland National Forest and Local African-American History, From the
Internet: http://www.fs.fed.us/r5/cleveland/about/ccchistory2.shtml.
166
tourist attractions. Highlighted below are a few African American heritage trails the
citizens of Lake Elsinore might take inspiration from in the planning of their own
trail. (See Appendix B.)
Already mentioned in this thesis is the Florida Black Heritage Trail, which
was established in 1992. This trail was an outgrowth of the Florida legislature and
citizens’ desire to increase public awareness of African American history and
contribution to the state. The trail is considered to feature a representative sample of
the African American landmarks and legacies from locations throughout the state. A
trail publication has been produced, which provides information about Florida’s
African American heritage and historic sites. The state of Florida has also created
trails which recognize the heritage of women, and the Cuban and Jewish
communities.
202
The African American Heritage Trail of Martha’s Vineyard (Massachusetts)
was begun in 1989. To date, 16 sites are included on the trail, which is “dedicated to
formerly unrecognized contributions made by people of African decent to the history
of the island.” Featured local history includes information about sites associated
with the African American vacation community at the Vineyard, discussed earlier in
this thesis. Each site features a descriptive plaque. The African American Heritage
Trail History Project, the non-profit organization which manages the trail, sees it “as
a source of participative community education and celebration.” The organization’s
202
See page 47 of this thesis for the early reference to the Florida Black Heritage Trail and American
Beach; Florida Black Heritage Trail, Published by Florida Department of State, Division of Historical
Resources, 2002, 2; and Highlights from the Florida Black Heritage Trail, From the Internet:
www.flheritage.com/services/trails/bht/.
167
mission is to continue to research and make public previously undocumented history,
and to involve the island’s community in the identification and commemoration of
contributions made by people of color to Martha’s Vineyard. Students from
Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School are a major source of energy, research
assistance, tour guides, site maintenance and website management for the trail. An
African American Heritage of Martha’s Vineyard Trail book and website present
information about the trail and its programming, including guided tours.
203
The city of Rockville, in the state of Maryland, has developed an African
American heritage walking tour, which documents and celebrates the people and
places around the town center that were important to the general development of the
city and its shared growth as a community. The city of Rockville website features a
narrative and map about 18 sites that have been demolished, and ones that are still
extant. The tour explores themes common to the African American experience, such
as slavery, emancipation, religion, education, commerce, and civil rights.
204
The African American Heritage Trail of Lake Elsinore could also be a part of
a larger trail network that capitalizes on unique historic and natural assets. Segments
of the trail network could offer a variety of ways to experience cultural, historical
and natural attractions, and scenic views whether one chooses to travel by foot, bike,
car or boat. A number of sites within the Lake Elsinore Valley could intersect on
203
African American Heritage Trail of Martha’s Vineyard, From the Internet:
www.mvheritagetrail.org; and Elaine Cawley Weintraub, Lighting the Trail: The African American
Heritage Trail of Martha’s Vineyard, (Martha’s Vineyard, MA: African American Heritage Trail
History Project, 2005) viv.
204
Historic Rockville African American Heritage Walking Tour, From the Internet:
http://www.rockvillemd.gov/historic/aahwalkingtour.html.
168
more than one trail. Visitors could follow one trail at a time, visiting all locations, or
jump from trail to trail to tour sites that are located close together or that are related
to their specific interests. A series of wayside and other interpretative programs
could be developed, including sign posts, displays, public education programs, maps,
brochures and exhibits. Ongoing programming could organize commemorative
events to promote the trail network.
The African American Heritage Trail of Lake Elsinore could be a pathway
that celebrates the shared heritage of the Valley. Sites of people and places that
shaped the Lake Elsinore Valley, other than those related to its African American
heritage, could include the early resort hotels and hot springs, stagecoach and train
stops, places where explorers and adventurers slept, homes of the early settlers and
town founders, Jewish heritage sites, and Native American village and other
locations.
Another trail segment theme could be the historic downtown Lake Elsinore
corridor. Nature trail segments could be created. The Lake Elsinore Back Basin
Wetlands, with its earth and levy system, could be included as a pathway under this
trail segment theme. A trail at the edge of the lake has already been suggested in the
Lake Elsinore General Plan Update; this pathway could feature sites with
overlapping natural, cultural and historic themes, and could intersect with other
segments of the Lake Elsinore trail network.
The African American Heritage Trail of Lake Elsinore could be a part of the
city’s revitalization plan, and be integrated into local and regional tourism and
169
recreational promotion efforts. The city might use the African American pathway
and a general trail system in portraying the historic character of Lake Elsinore, and to
encourage preservation and interpretation of historic buildings within the larger
context of the development of the city of Lake Elsinore. A public and private
partnership, and the engagement of volunteers to create and maintain the trail
network, could be developed to celebrate the physical movement through the cultural
and natural landscapes, to preserve stories, and to provide experiences unlike other
land and landmark designation programs.
A collaborative effort to develop a Lake Elsinore African American pathway
and trail network could include such organizations as: public entities at the local,
state and federal levels; education institutions, from elementary school to college
programs; historical societies and historical preservation organizations; nature
conservation organizations; outdoor equipment vendors and other recreation-related
businesses; real estate development companies and other businesses; local and
regional tourism development entities; the local Chamber of Commerce; and other
interested groups. (See Appendix B.)
The Redwood Coast Heritage Trails, five self-guided tours of historical and
cultural sites throughout the Redwood Coast region of California, is a program the
city of Lake Elsinore might look to for ideas about a trail network system. Visitors
to the Redwood Coast Heritage Trails can follow one trail in order, or jump from
trail to trail to tour sites that particularly interest them. Several of the locations can
170
be found on more than one of the trails, which revolve around the area’s Native
American, Pioneer, Timber, Rail, Maritime and Architectural heritage.
205
Founded in 1997, the Anacostia Trails Heritage Area (ATHA), in the state of
Maryland near Washington, D.C., is another trail system from which the city of Lake
Elsinore and its neighboring municipalities might find inspiration. ATHA is a
partnership between a wide range of public, private and non-profit organizations,
which “encourage and promote heritage tourism to grow local economies, while
preserving, developing, and promoting the area’s natural, historical, and cultural
resources.” Themes of the diverse history of the area are showcased in the various
sites and attractions, including African American heritage and architecture. The 84-
mile area includes 14 municipalities and unincorporated portions of Prince George’s
County. Visitors can obtain information about the heritage of the area, sites and
attractions in ATHA-produced maps and brochures, and a website.
206
A thoughtfully-planned, successfully-developed and well-maintained trail
network, which offers opportunities for visitors and residents alike to connect to
local history, nature and recreation, can provide multiple social and economic
benefits. A trail system would create new reasons for people to enjoy visiting and
living in Lake Elsinore. According to the Travel Industry Association of America,
visits to historic sites rank in the top five activities chosen by travelers. The National
205
Redwood Coast Heritage Trails. Humboldt County Convention and Visitor’s Bureau, From the
Internet: http://www.redwoodvisitor.org/printrecord.asp?id=2432.
Statewide Trails Program and Planning. California State Parks. From the Internet:
http://www.parks.ca.gov/default.asp?page_id=1324.
206
Anacostia Heritage Trail Area, From the Internet: http://www.anacostiatrails.org/site/.
171
Trust for Historic Preservation indicates that visiting historic sites and museums is
the third most popular vacation activity for travelers in the U.S., behind shopping
and outdoor activities. The disappearance of open space in urban environments has
increased public awareness of close-by places, such as Lake Elsinore, which allow
them to quickly connect with nature and recreational opportunities. Studies have
shown that a nature trail near a residential community contributes positively to
property values. Further, active lifestyle sports, and unstructured recreational
activities such as walking and biking, are some of the fastest growing sectors of
recreation.
207
Most importantly, a trail system which embraced its African American
legacy, and other layers of the city’s heritage, would help to create a more inclusive
collective memory and history of Lake Elsinore, and to renew the community’s sense
of pride and identity.
208
207
“Trail Towns: Capturing Trail Based Tourism, A Guide for Communities in Pennsylvania.”
Prepared by Allegheny Trail Alliance, 2005. From the Internet:
http://www.atatrail.org/pdf/1TTManual.pdf, 3, 9, 28; “Cultural Heritage Visitor Profile,” From the
Internet: http://www.culturalheritagetourism.org/resources/visitorProfile.htm; and Bell, Roger,
“Cinderella Comes of Age: Trails In Private Developments,” From the Internet:
http://www.americantrails.org/resources/benefits/BellDevel07.html.
208
“Trail Towns: Capturing Trail Based Tourism, A Guide for Communities in Pennsylvania.”
Prepared by Allegheny Trail Alliance, 2005.
172
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Appendix A
Lake Elsinore Built Cultural Resources
From “Cultural, Historical and Paleontological Resources Background Report,” City
of Lake Elsinore General Plan Background Reports, Prepared by Mooney Jones &
Stokes, January 2006. Retrieved from the Internet: http://www.lake-
elsinore.org/gp/docs.asp; 7/3-7/5, 2005 records search by the Eastern Information
Center of the California Historical Resources Information System at the University
of California, Riverside.
Currently listed in the National Register of Historic Places:
Crescent Bath House/Chimes Building (P33-6998)
Grand Army of the Republic Armory Hall (RIV-070)
Currently listed in the California Points of Historical Interest:
Grand Army of the Republic Armory Hall (RIV-070)
Elsinore Women’s Club (RIV-071)
Elsinore’s Hottest Sulphur Springs (RIV-023)
Currently listed in the Riverside County General Plan as a significant historical
resource:
Lake Elsinore Downtown Historic District (P33-7142)
In the 1980s, the Riverside County Historical Commission designated a local
historic district, Historic Downtown Elsinore, which encompasses areas of
early residential and commercial development within the City of Lake
Elsinore. The majority of the district is focused in the areas around Main
Street, Heald Avenue, and Graham Avenue, where some of the earliest
development occurred. The city is working with the County of Riverside to
protect its local cultural heritage and structures of merit, and the historic
district has been officially recognized by the County of Riverside and the
City of Lake Elsinore.
o Includes:
Masonic Lodge (P33-6982)
Train Depot (P33-6997)
First Presbyterian Church (P33-7040)
Pioneer Lumber Company, 127 West Graham Avenue (P33-
6996)
Lake Theatre, 310 West Graham Avenue (P33-7001)
190
Unofficially recognized significant historical resources:
According to the 1990 General Plan, the community unofficially recognizes several
sites and structures as significant historical resources. Locally recognized historic
resources in the Lake Elsinore area include:
Delaney Estate, north of Lake Elsinore
Aimee’s Castle, Skyline Drive
The Adobe Machado House and Butterfield Stage Stop, Riverside Drive,
northwest of the lake
Alberhill School, Lake Street
Warm Springs Ranch, Walker Canyon Road
The Cannery, Spring Street
Elsinore Naval Military Academy, Grand Avenue
Additional Lake Elsinore Historic Homes of Interest:
(Information provided by the Lake Elsinore Historical Society, December 2005)
16919 Bell Street, 1930
219 Riley Street, 1920
29610 Hague Street, 1928
29444 Kalina Street
29431 Kalina Street
17912 Hamlet Circle, 1929, Bredlau Castle
17747 Skyline Drive, 1930, Village La Shell
16921 Holborow Avenue, Journeys End
17541 Barkshatt Drive
16685 McPhearson Circle, 1926
17271 Lakeview Avenue, 1929
226 East Franklin Street, 1924, Scotty’s Castle
228 Spring Street, 1912, Gardner Home
257 Hill Street
191
Appendix B
Selected Heritage Trail Resources
African American Heritage Trail: Cambridge, Massachusetts. Prepared by the
Cambridge African American Heritage Trail Advisory Committee and the
Cambridge Historical Commission, City of Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2000.
The African American Heritage Trail of Martha’s Vineyard. From the Internet:
http://www.mvheritagetrail.org/.
American Byways, National Scenic Byways Program. From the Internet:
http://www.byways.org/.
American Hiking Society. From the Internet: http://www.americanhiking.org/.
American Trails. From the Internet: http://americantrails.org/.
Anacostia Heritage Trail Area. From the Internet:
http://www.anacostiatrails.org/site/.
Black Heritage Trail. Museum of African American History: Boston and Nantucket,
MA. From the Internet: http://www.afroammuseum.org/trail.htm.
Boston Main Streets: Building Vibrant Commercial Districts. From the Internet:
http://www.cityofboston.gov/mainstreets/default.asp
Boston Women’s Heritage Trail. From the Internet: http://www.bwht.org/.
Boston Women’s Heritage Trail: Seven Self-guided Walks Through Four Centuries
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Abstract (if available)
Abstract
As soon as African Americans could afford leisure experiences after the end of American slavery, they joined Euro-Americans at resorts and in travel to other places domestically and overseas. Being able to take a vacation or an overnight trip for pleasure became a critical marker and entitlement of middle class status.
Linked assets
University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
Conceptually similar
PDF
The Los Angeles African American heritage area: a proposal for development
Asset Metadata
Creator
Jefferson, Alison Rose
(author)
Core Title
Lake Elsinore: a southern California African American resort area during the Jim Crow era, 1920s-1960s, and the challenges of historic preservation commemoration
School
School of Architecture
Degree
Master of Historic Preservation
Degree Program
Historic Preservation
Publication Date
08/29/2007
Defense Date
08/01/2007
Publisher
University of Southern California
(original),
University of Southern California. Libraries
(digital)
Tag
African American historic sites,Black studies,Historic Preservation,historic sites in California,OAI-PMH Harvest
Place Name
California
(states),
Lake Elsinore
(city or populated place),
Riverside
(counties),
USA
(countries)
Language
English
Advisor
Breisch, Kenneth A. (
committee chair
), Jordan, Stacey C. (
committee member
), Starr, Kevin (
committee member
)
Creator Email
jalisonj@aol.com
Permanent Link (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m798
Unique identifier
UC1178690
Identifier
etd-Jefferson-20070829 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-545403 (legacy record id),usctheses-m798 (legacy record id)
Legacy Identifier
etd-Jefferson-20070829.pdf
Dmrecord
545403
Document Type
Thesis
Rights
Jefferson, Alison Rose
Type
texts
Source
University of Southern California
(contributing entity),
University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
(collection)
Repository Name
Libraries, University of Southern California
Repository Location
Los Angeles, California
Repository Email
cisadmin@lib.usc.edu
Tags
African American historic sites
Black studies
historic sites in California