More Research in Needed...

There is a street parallel to our street, Elm, about two miles east:

Temple Ave. This picture is a Google map street-view pic along 4th, with the Irish bar O'Reilly's on the left and possibly my favorite little commie book shop, Page Against the Machine, on the right in between the palm trunk and the building.

Anyway, I thought it was maybe named for a temple of some kind, but in all the years we lived there, I never really found anything worthy of the name.

Then I found out it was named for early land-owner, pioneer, and rancher Juan Temple.

And I thought...Juan...Temple. Cool. Then I saw a photo of Mr. Juan Temple:

Well...this didn't strike me as what I would have expected as "Juan Temple." I know many of these early dudes were from Spain, and they're lookin' white more than many American's would guess, but still.

But then I saw some details of this dude, Juan Temple, and I figured a good story about him should be done. Maybe a prestige show, like the Parker Saga, would be interesting. Check it out:

• Born in Reading, Massachusetts in 1796 as Jonathan Temple
• Worked as a merchant in Hawai'i before 30 years old (possibly arrived as a missionary, but it is murky); captained his own vessel (1823)
• Ran afoul of local Hawai'ian leadership (possibly for smuggling or running booze to natives), had his property seized.
• Things died down, but he knew he should probably leave; 1827 lands in the coastal Mexican city of San Diego. Converts to Catholicism, learns Spanish, changes name to Juan, moves to the puebla of LA by 1828, opens first general store in what would become DTLA
• Marries into the powerful local family, the Corta.
• Bought a large piece of land from his wife's family, Rancho Los Cerritos; puts tons of cattle on it. His ranchero adobe was a few miles from us in Long Beach, and he had cattle from his hacienda all the way to the ocean, at least 20,000 acres.
• During the Mexican-American War, the American troops used his adobe in LB as a headquarters, After pushing out the Mexican military, they were less cool to the relatively loyal locals, and Temple's wife, Rafaela Corta, led the insurgency with bullets from her husband's shop.
• What the American's knew is still murky, because after insurgency, they made Juan Temple essentially the mayor of Los Angeles.
• Enlarged fortune with beef sales to NorCal during the Gold Rush.
• 1850s-era economic downturn caused trouble; then floods one year and a drought the next, and eventually they had to sell the Rancho Los Cerritos land.
• Moved to San Francisco and died later, in 1866. Rafaela Corta moved back to her daughter's place in Paris, France,when she eventually passed as well. (Juan and Rafa had a daughter, Francesca, who married a Spanish merchant, who eventually moved back to Spain, and then onto Paris, a city in which everyone in their family found lovely and enticing.)

The Rancho Los Cerritos house is free to visit, and literally down the street, Long Beach Blvd, er, maybe up the street, just over five miles away.

We'll go check it out after we get back from Texas, which we leave for, like, day after tomorrow.

So many treatments to write up, right?