Temple City

About Temple City.

Temple City, California: Walter Temple's 1923 oil funded townsite, the surviving founding corners on Las Tunas Drive, and a camellia tradition sixteen years older than the city itself.

The money came out of the ground in Montebello, and it built a town twelve miles away. Temple City is a city in the western San Gabriel Valley of Los Angeles County, California, founded on May 30, 1923 as the Town of Temple by Walter P. Temple, renamed by 1928, and incorporated on May 25, 1960. It is the valley’s purest child of the 1920s boom: a townsite drawn in a single spring, sold lot by lot to working families, and finished by the postwar wave that made it a city in fact as well as name.

A town built on oil and family ground

Walter P. Temple was the tenth child of F.P.F. Temple and Antonia Margarita Workman, born on Rancho La Merced near the mission’s original site. The family fortune died in the 1875 bank failure, when a rescue loan from Lucky Baldwin ended in forfeiture of the family lands. Oil brought it back: Temple’s son Thomas, still a boy, spotted the signs of it on the family’s Montebello property, and the wells that followed funded everything after. In the spring of 1923 Temple and three partners, business manager Milton Kauffman, attorney George H. Woodruff, and Alhambra rancher Sylvester Dupuy, formed the Temple Townsite Company and bought 285 acres of the old Rancho San Francisquito, ground his father and grandfather had once part owned. The town was announced that May.

The founding idea was plain: a town where people of medium income could own their homes. Fifty foot residential lots, half acre parcels at the edges, a short commercial spine, bonds floated for paving and electric light. Temple named the streets for family and friends, Workman, Kauffman, Rowland, Temple, Agnes, and pulled the Pacific Electric two miles east off the Alhambra line, with the Red Car depot landing at Las Tunas Drive and Kauffman Avenue beside the park. The rail stop did what rail stops did then. The town grew along it.

The twenties townsite that still shows

The founding corner still stands. The 1923 commercial buildings at Las Tunas Drive, then called Main Street, and Temple City Boulevard, then Sunset Avenue, survive at their corners today, remodeled but present, a fact the Temple family’s own Homestead Museum confirmed from its collection just last month. Around that spine sits a thin founding layer of 1920s houses inside a predominantly postwar city, because the townsite stayed lightly built until the boom after the war filled every block. The name changed along the way: mail kept landing in Tempe, Arizona, Postmaster General Harry Stewart New demanded a fix in 1926, and the renaming to Temple City was complete by fall 1928.

While his town rose, Temple was building for himself, and that building belongs to the same story. La Casa Nueva, the family’s Spanish Colonial Revival showpiece at the Workman Homestead in what is now City of Industry, took five years and a mortgage, and the note came due on October 29, 1929, the day of the crash. The boom that drew the townsite caught its founder overextended on the way down. The town kept the family name. I built homes for working families for twenty years, and I will say Temple’s founding idea, a town where ordinary people could own, is the most durable thing he ever built.

Camellias older than the city

Temple City’s civic identity arrived before the city did. In 1944 the Women’s Club held a contest for a town flower and slogan, and Mrs. Ralph Saunders won it with Temple City Home of Camellias. The first parade went down Las Tunas Drive in 1945, and the Camellia Festival still runs the last full weekend of every February, the 82nd this past winter. The festival predates incorporation by sixteen years. When the postwar population finally made it official on May 25, 1960, with jeweler Merrill Fitzjohn as first mayor, the town’s traditions were already a generation old.

Where Temple City sits in the valley story

Temple City is the twenties chapter of the valley’s Spanish story told in townsite form, and The Spanish Revival Wave carries that chapter in full. Its founder’s reach ran past his own borders: in 1922 Walter Temple donated the site of the Spanish Colonial Revival City Hall in San Gabriel, the mission city four miles west. The full map of the valley’s communities lives in the communities library, and Temple City stands in the comparisons of the valley cities cluster.

Sources and references.

• Early history of Temple City, Paul R. Spitzzeri posts, 2023 and 2026, the family museum's primary source record of the founding, the land, and the surviving corners, Homestead Museum (https://homesteadmuseum.blog/2023/09/30/one-of-the-cleanest-one-of-the-most-refreshing-and-one-of-the-happiest-communities-to-be-found-anywhere-commemorating-the-temple-city-centennial-1923-2023/)
• History, official record of the founding, the Pacific Electric, and the streets, City of Temple City (https://www.templecityca.gov/243/History)
• Temple City, entity identifier for the city, Wikidata (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q864144)
• History, family and oil discovery record, Historical Society of Temple City (https://www.historicalsocietyoftc.com/history.html)
• History of the Temple City Camellia Festival, the 1944 contest and festival record, Temple City Camellia Festival (https://www.camelliafestival.org/history.html)
• Temple City, incorporation record, Los Angeles Almanac (https://www.laalmanac.com/cities/ci81.php)