Easter at the Episcopal Church has come down. Callas were in better repute then than now.
Mrs. Albert Sidney Johnson called her new home in California Fair Oaks, the name of her Virginian birthplace. Los Robles (The Oaks), was the home of Governor Stoneman.
Old timers will recall the estate of L. J. Rose, Sunny Slope, famous both for its wines and brandies and for its stables of fine horses. Major Truman in his book, Semi-tropic California, dating from 1874, speaks of this district as a “fruit belt, two miles wide and ten miles long,” and calls it the California Lombardy.
It was just next door to this region of wine and brandy that the temperance people from Indiana started their colony on a portion of the old San Pasqual grant, the ranch where Flint, Bixby & Co. had pastured their sheep after the desert crossing in 1854. This colony devoted itself to oranges, not so intoxicating as grapes, and gave the name of the chief industry to the fashionable avenue. After a time they began to call themselves Pasadena, an imported name, and after a little more time we in Los Angeles began to know about the new settlement which was getting big enough to maintain a modest daily stage to the city,—a spring wagon. The road followed much the same route as is used today, down across the unbridged Arroyo Seco and over the flowery field that later became Garvanza, a field filled in spring with great masses of wild blossoms, poppies, and lupine, larkspur, tidy-tips, and pink owl-clover,—pink tassels we chil
