My wife Connie was from Jimtown.
L.A. Then and Now /Cecilia Rasmussen
latimes
It owes its name to a saloonkeeper and never has offered its residents a whole lot more than hard work and a hard time. But the tiny tract called Jimtown in the Whittier area is not only one of Los Angeles County's oldest continuously inhabited communities, but also the most enduring legacy of California's last Mexican governor, Pio Pico.
It began in the mid-19th century as a primitive labor camp for Native Americans on the banks of the San Gabriel River, where a scattering of thatched huts, playing children and drying fish created a postcard scene of life in Old California.
In the 1860s, the site became part of the former governor's 9,000-acre spread, formally known as Rancho Paso de Bartolo Viejo and informally as El Ranchito or Picoville. Soon the Native Americans were joined by poor Mexican immigrants, and the camp was on its way to becoming a rough-and-tumble town of mud and wood hovels for those at the bottom of the farm labor pool.
Pico built a chapel north of his mansion, and soon an adobe saloon went up not far away. The patron fed, sheltered and gave work to the willing, while questionable characters hid out in the dense growth of vines and cottonwoods along the riverbank. It was a lively place where horse races, cockfights and dances were the usual entertainment. Fights were frequent, and the community soon attracted the attention of the new American authorities in nearby Los Angeles.
In those days, the city's Anglo elite forced its will on minorities through the Monte Boys, Texas and Tennessee squatters from the "island" of El Monte, who were allowed to deliver vigilante "justice" to the region's Indians, Chinese and Mexican Americans.
Meting out their punishment at the end of a rope, the Monte Boys hung a shoe thief from a tree near the riverbank in Picoville.
In September 1883, Ranulfo, one of Pico's two sons by his mistress, Felicia Romero, was shot and killed over a young girl at a dance in the saloon.
Less than a decade later, Pico became a victim of a real estate scam and lost his storied ranch. A local political heavyweight named Jim Harvey stepped in and bought a 22-acre slice of the property bounded by the San Gabriel River, Whittier and Beverly boulevards and a natural cliff formation to the east near Whittier.
Harvey was a constant source of scandal to the strait-laced Quakers who had settled next door in Whittier. But, by the turn of the century, he had subdivided his land as more Mexican families trekked north in hopes of nurturing their version of the American dream.
