Mount Lowe Archaeological Project

In 1900, Mount Lowe Resort and Railway sat on the edge of a changing city – one that was quickly becoming reliant on immigrant labor to build the economic empire that was to become Los Angeles. As this metropolis grew, Mexican communities that laid their claim to the landscape as early as the late 1700s were removed and/or pushed further east into what is now known as East Los Angeles. The Pacific Electric Railway Corporation, the company that owned and operated Mount Lowe Resort and Railway by the late 1800s, played a significant role in the remapping and redistricting of Los Angeles by placing commercial desire – fueled by middle and upper class Anglo American immigrants migrating West from the Eastern and Midwestern United States – at the forefront of development interests. As one of the most popular tourist sites on the West Coast and recruiter and one of the largest employers of domestic and railroad laborers, Mount Lowe Resort and Railway’s history intersects with two important historical moments in the United States: the development of racialized tourism which focused on “seeing” nature and its “people” and the creation and naturalization of a Mexican American underclass that continues to serve Los Angeles’ upper class residents. The primary focus of this project’s research is to better comprehend how Pacific Electric Railway Corporation’s reform movements targeted at Mexican immigrants – such as the section housing built for Mount Lowe’s Mexican workers (see historic articles on section housing by clicking here) – influenced the historical trajectory and current status of Mexican Americans in Southern California as well as to examine how Mexican Americans responded to these “Americanization” programs through their use of material culture.

The struggles that took place between Mexican Americans and Anglo Americans at Mount Lowe Resort and Railway were reflective of larger debates concerning whether or not Mexicans should be deemed “white” and/or “American” in the census records that began surfacing when Mexico experienced a depression in the early 1900s and thousands of immigrants crossed the border into the United States. By the 1930s, the United States was also experience an economic depression that pitted Anglo Americans against immigrants from all over the world. As a result, the United States government proposed and implemented immigrant exclusion acts that sent Chinese, Eastern European, Mexican, and Japanese immigrants back to their homelands. The Mount Lowe Archaeology Project seeks to integrate archaeology into anthropological and political literature concerning the origins of illegality debates through the examination of the spatial layout and material culture of Mount Lowe Resort and Railway and its Mexican laborers.

Below, you can find further information on the resort’s history as well as archaeological research that has been completed to date to explore this interest.

A Brief History of Mount Lowe Resort and Railway

On July 4, 1893, Professor Thaddeus S. C. Lowe and David J. Macpherson opened Mount Lowe Resort and Railway in Southern California's San Gabriel Mountains. Lowe’s life prior to, during, and after the construction of his famous resort has been studied extensively by local historians and academics alike (Hoehling 1958; Robinson 1977; Seims 1976, 1983, 1992; Manning 2005). An inventor that gave himself the title “Professor,” he was the first man to use a gas air balloon to aerially spy on the South during the Civil War (Manning 2005). He also made a significant fortune by developing one of the first ice-making machines in the world, which allowed him to fund and begin construction on his great “White City,” Mount Lowe Resort and Railway. He also held numerous patents “related to the production and distribution of gas” (Seims 1992:12).

Macpherson was also a highly respected man; an experienced and Cornell University educated engineer, he developed the mountain’s world-renowned “Incline” railway. The Incline climbed to the top of Mount Lowe at a death defying average grade of 59 percent (Seims 1976) and “was the first mountain incline railway powered electricity” (Zack 2004:81). This was a mechanical feat of its time, and drew tourists from all over the world. Mount Lowe became an instant attraction nationally and locally, and, according to the National Register of Historic Places, "Mount Lowe was the most popular single tourist attraction in California at the turn of the century, and, after San Francisco and Los Angeles, probably the most recognizable geographic name in the state" (Seims 1992).

In the 43 years it was functional, over three million visitors were recorded as having toured the site. During the site’s years of operation, a zoo, bowling alley, post office, casino, miniature golf course, fox farm, and an observatory were built to entertain the resort’s middle- to upper-class tourists. Several famous individuals visited and/or played a part in the site’s construction. Among the workmen hired to build the site was Jason Brown, the son of Harper Ferry’s John Brown (Seims 1976; Robinson 1977). Brown later became the caretaker of Mount Lowe’s zoo.

When the resort first opened in 1893, two hotels offered lodging for visitors: Hotel Rubio in Rubio Canyon and the Chalet on Echo Mountain. Echo Mountain had several nicknames, including “The White City,” “City on the Mount,” or the “City Above the Clouds” (Will Thrall Papers). An elaborate celebration marked the hotel’s opening, including the “lighting of a giant searchlight Professor Lowe purchased after it had done duty at Chicago’s Columbia Exposition of 1893” (Zack 2004:86). The hotels were ravishingly decorated and offered some of the most exquisite food in all of Southern California. The Echo Mountain House hotel was open for service in 1894, a year after the grand opening of the resort. Within a brief 6 years, it burnt to the ground due to a kitchen fire and was never rebuilt. Echo Mountain House was a three-story hotel that contained 70 guest rooms and was designed by architect T. J. Parkes of Los Angeles. The Chalet, a three-story building with a dozen guest rooms on Echo Mountain, also met a similar fate when it was destroyed by a storm in December of 1905.

Hotel Rubio was the first hotel stop on the way up to Echo Mountain and featured a “ticket office, picnic tables, snack stand,” dining hall, an open-air ballroom, and a hydroelectric plant that the railroad depended upon (Zack 2004:83). It was “a wooden structure having two stories above and two stories below platform level,” provided accommodation for over 60 guests (Seims 1992:7), and was the last to go when a landslide leveled it in 1909.

None of the original three hotels were rebuilt. The hotels lost Lowe’s attention by 1895, as he was already knee deep in constructing yet another hotel and railway to add to Mount Lowe Resort and Railway’s fame. Though close to bankruptcy, he began and completed an extension of the railway, which led further back into the San Gabriel Mountains to Mount Lowe. At the end of this railway, Lowe built the “Ye Alpine Tavern,” a Swiss-inspired hotel that made the other three hotels pale in comparison with its large lodging facilities, miniature golf course, and elaborate tent cabins. This movement further back into the San Gabriel Mountains may have been a reaction against the rapid pace of urbanization that was occurring in Altadena and Pasadena. Boosters promoting California’s fruitful landscape, idyllic climate, and “healthy” air in Eastern and Midwestern newspapers in the 1870s no doubt contributed to this process. In examining Sanborn Fire Insurance maps and historic photographs dating from 1890 to 1900, it also becomes clear that the extension of the construction of the railway leading from Mount Lowe to downtown Los Angeles, Long Beach, and other urbanizing cities in Southern California, also influenced the exponential growth of Pasadena and Altadena.

Kwiat Kowski, a well-known Los Angeles architect, designed the tavern in a craftsman style of architecture nearly a decade before this type of décor became popular in the region below (Seims 1992:8). Ye Alpine Tavern featured an all-service hotel as well as both housekeeping cottages (maintained by tourists) and full-service cottages.

Between 1900 and 1905, fires and storms destroyed the hotels on Echo Mountain. Due to financial issues, Lowe, the sole financial investor in the site, relinquished control of the railway in 1899. The property was sold to an individual, Valentine Peyton, for $190,000. Peyton later sold the resort to Pacific Electric Railway Company in 1902. It was at this time that the railway investors, including the well-known businessman Henry Huntington, decided to continue to update and maintain what was left of Mount Lowe Resort and Railway. Echo Mountain was consequently transformed into a railway transfer station for visitors continuing on to Ye Alpine Tavern. Considering the fact that Mount Lowe Resort and Railway operated at a loss the entire time Pacific Electric Railway owned it (Pacific Electric Magazine 1916), it remains unknown just exactly why Pacific Electric Railway Corporation made these renovations and kept the hotel open for business.

Between 1900 and 1926, cabins and workers’ housing were built on Echo Mountain. These structures were placed on the Eastern and Western sides of Echo Mountain, conveniently out of view from tourists arriving at the transfer point. The section house, located on the Western site of Echo Mountain, was built by Pacific Electric Railway Corporation in 1905 and housed Mexican immigrants between 1906 and 1936. Pacific Electric Railway Corporation began their Americanization program at Mount Lowe Resort and Railway with the construction of the section house. They hired teachers to teach Mexican American women and children “proper” domestic practices while Mexican American men and boys were given instruction on trade skills. As the Great Depression began in the late 1920s, Pacific Electric Railway Corporation, as a favor to the United States government, paid for railway trips to send Mexican immigrants living in Southern California back to Mexico and abandoned their Americanization programs. Ironically, Pacific Electric Railway Corporation scouts were the first employers to actively recruit Mexicans in the early 1890s by going to rural and urban areas in Mexico and offering Mexicans free railway tickets and jobs across the border.

Between these dates of occupation, debates regarding the “Mexican problem” began to surface, and by the late 1920s and early 1930s, politicians believed they had solved it by deporting thousands of Mexican Americans – many of whom had resided in Los Angeles since birth – back to Mexico (Hoffman 1974; Guerin-Gonzales 1994). My research focuses on this section house to examine how changing notions regarding Mexican Americans and their relationship to American citizenship materialized on the landscape and in the material culture they were initially given by Pacific Electric Railway Corporation’s Americanization representatives. Excavating and mapping this site will allow me to examine not only how Mexican Americans were imagined as consuming citizens of the United States by the Pacific Electric Railway Corporation, but also how Mexican Americans envisioned themselves as consuming citizens when reform movements were dropped by the corporation in the late 1920s.

Throughout the early 1900s, severe storms and fires ravaged the structures on Echo Mountain and Ye Alpine Tavern. By 1940, every structure had either burnt to the ground or been torn apart by torrential winds and rain. After its demise, much talk in region circled around the idea of rebuilding the resort. In a letter written on December 8th, 1936, James K. Reid and Will Thrall, both mountain enthusiasts and editors of the popular and nationally distributed magazine Trails, they asked Mr. E. C. Thomas of Pacific Electric Railway to resume railroad service on Mount Lowe; they asserted that “we believe that the immediate future will show a great increase in the demand for such service in the Angeles Forest and hope that your company will decide to rebuild even better before” (Will Thrall Papers). Even in recent years, investors have inquired about putting a new railway and resort back on top of Echo Mountain and Mount Lowe.

What was left of Ye Alpine Tavern – burnt concrete walls and foundations – was used as temporary housing by transients and hikers in the 1940s and 1950s. For legal and insurance reasons, the Forest Service dynamited what was left of the Tavern in 1959 and did the same in 1962 to the still-standing Echo Mountain powerhouse that fueled the railway (Robinson 1977). Between 1984 and 1986, Charles Seims, the leading historian on Mount Lowe Resort and Railway history, opened the Mount Lowe Museum. The museum was housed in the historic Pacific Electric Railway substation in Altadena where tourists once boarded the Mount Lowe Railway. On January 6, 1993, Seims placed the site on the National Register of Historic Places.

The following is a timeline of activity on Echo Mountain and Mount Lowe based on historical research and oral history:

1893: The Chalet on the Eastern side of Echo Mountain opens. Made entirely of wood, it is three stories with 12 guest rooms. < br>1894: The Mount Lowe Observatory on Echo Mountain opens.
1894/1900*: The Casino on the Western side of Echo Mountain opens. It has been discussed by Seims (1976) as a “barn-like structure” that contained a dormitory for railway employees on its upper floor.
1894: Stables are placed on the Eastern side of Echo Mountain.
1894/1906*: The Astronomer’s Cottage on a trail leading up to The Mount Lowe Observatory is built.
1894: The Zoo is built on the Western side of Echo Mountain.
1894: The Echo Mountain House, a hotel, is built on Echo Mountain. It is a much larger structure than The Chalet.
1895: Ye Alpine Tavern is built on Mount Lowe.
1900: The Echo Mountain House is destroyed by fire in February.
1900: Stables on Eastern side of Echo Mountain replaced by 2 tennis courts.
1905: The Chalet is destroyed in December by a storm. The Zoo is also destroyed.
1906: Section House on Western side of Echo Mountain is built.
1906: Tennis Courts became storage/work area on Eastern side of Echo Mountain. Cabins and houses start appearing in this space.
1906: Cottage appears in place of old gas tank foundation on Western side of Echo Mountain.
Post 1905: Observatory still present. “Echo Mountain became transfer point rather than a destination it had been. The mountain was given over to maintenance facilities and housing for the railway employees. There was an inspection pit for the streetcars, numerous storage buildings, and several cottages (including the ‘double house’ for the photographer and repair foreman).
1924/1926*: Railway Caretaker’s house on Eastern side of Echo Mountain built.
1928: The Mount Lowe Observatory is destroyed by a windstorm.
1936: Ye Alpine Tavern burns to the ground.
1940: Railway Caretaker’s house burns.
1940: Section House burns.

*Historians have cited different dates for these activities.

Research Goals: 2005 and 2006

The Mount Lowe Archaeology Project is a collaborative effort between Stanford University and Angeles National Forest to examine the life of Mexican American immigrants employed by Pacific Electric Railway Corporation while living at Mount Lowe Resort and Railway. Little is known about those who worked in the service industry in the San Gabriel Mountains during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first phase (August 2005) of the Mount Lowe Archaeology Project was structured around locating historic structures, archival documents, and archaeological deposits relating to the resort’s working population. During August of 2005, we systematically surveyed and conducted test excavations in two “Zones” on Echo Mountain. Each Zone contains what we believe to be possible material signatures relating to the workforce at Mount Lowe.

With the help of local historians Brian Marcroft and John Harrigan, we located the remains of the section house (Zone 1) on the Western slope of Echo Mountain and a labor camp (Zone 2) on the Eastern slope of Echo Mountain as discussed in the previous section. Shovel testing in Zone 2 produced limited archaeological resources. Shovel testing, auger coring, and test excavation units performed in Zone 1, however, produced archaeological materials relating to the time period in which Mexican Americans inhabited the section house. A cement-lined cesspool and two incinerators related to the section house were also discovered through surface survey and the study of historic maps. Maps detailing the extent of the surface survey of the section house, the placement of excavation units, auger cores, and shovel tests, and the architectural remains of the section house can be found by clicking here.

This summer we will use the information we obtained through surface survey, mapping, and test excavations to explore how Mount Lowe’s Mexican American population responded to the discrimination and racialization they faced in early 20th century California. Following methodologies outlined by historians and scholars of critical race theory, my research looks at how certain practices that have come to be associated with Mexican American culture – such as the use of outdoor space and alteration of limiting architecture – developed at Mount Lowe Resort and Railway. Built by Pacific Electric Railway Corporation, which employed and imported thousands of Mexicans to Southern California, Mount Lowe Resort and Railway’s section house is the perfect place to examine how Mexican Americans negotiated company pressures and racialization by the tourism industry through material practices. To address this topic, we will focus our attention on excavating the section house. In addition, Zones 2 (the “labor camp”) and 4 (the architectural remains of Echo Mountain House Hotel) will be surveyed and depending on time constraints, excavated to determine the availability of goods at Mount Lowe Resort and Railway.

Works Cited

Guerin-Gonzales, Camille
1994 Mexican Workers and American Dreams: Immigration, Repatriation, and California Farm Labor, 1900-1939. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

Hoehling, Mary
1958 Thaddeus Lowe, America’s One-Man Corps. New York: Julian Messner, Inc.

Hoffman, Abraham
1974 Unwanted Mexican Americans in the Great Depression: Repatriation Pressures, 1929-1939. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Manning, Mike
2005 Intrepid: An Account of Professor T. S. C. Lowe, Civil War Aeronaut and Hero. Self published.

Pacific Electric Magazine
1916 Why a Department Outside Operations? July 10, 1916. Pacific Electric Magazine, 1(2). Los Angeles: Pacific Electric Publishing Company.

Robinson, John W.
1977 The San Gabriels: Southern California Mountain Country. San Marino: Golden West Books.

Seims, Charles
1976 Mount Lowe: The Railway in the Clouds. San Marino: Golden West Books. 1983 Trolley Days in Pasadena. San Marino: Golden West Books.
1992 National Register of Historic Places Registration Form. Property Name: Mount Lowe Railway, Angeles National Forest. Gresham: United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service.

Will H. Thrall Papers
1888-1960 Collection of the Huntington Library. San Marino: Huntington Library.

Zack, Michelle
2004 Altadena: Between Wilderness and City. Altadena: Altadena Historical Society.

Additional Notes

A special thanks to the local historians – particulary Paul Ayers, Deirdre del Re, John Harrigan, Mike Manning, Brian Marcroft, Michael Patris, and Paul Rippens - who have helped me come to a better understanding of Mount Lowe’s history. They have shared countless historic photographs, articles, and stories with me regarding Mount Lowe.