Aged Pages : Five Ancient Trunks Are Treasure Troves of Old L.A.

On a hot, dusty day, Ellen Gibbon Bergman of La Jolla led historian Bill Deverell to a Palm Springs warehouse where she had stored five ancient trunks.

They belonged to her grandfather, Thomas E. Gibbon, a key player on the Los Angeles business, legal and publishing scene around the turn of the century.

When Deverell rolled open the warehouse door, he discovered “a historian’s jackpot,” a treasure trove of memorabilia, writings and letters full of insights into the wheeling and dealing that shaped early Los Angeles.

Among other things, the papers tell the story of a drawn-out political fight over whether Los Angeles should locate its harbor in Santa Monica or San Pedro, a decision that influenced the style and commercial outlook of modern day Los Angeles County.

The documents also shed new light on the real-life dealings fictionalized in the 1974 movie “Chinatown”--details of how business leaders, lawyers, real estate wheeler-dealers and newspaper publishers orchestrated the growth of Southern California, as they piped in water to make the semi-desert landscape flourish and themselves rich in the process.

“It’s the ‘Chinatown’ story,” said Deverell, 28, who was educated at Princeton and Stanford and this fall, upon leaving a Caltech position, joined the UC San Diego history faculty. “It’s not going to set the general world on fire. But historically the papers are a significant find.”

An expert on California’s history from 1880 to 1920, Deverell said that three years ago he became intrigued that there seemed to be so few documents on Gibbon, a Los Angeles attorney and railroad owner as well as publisher of the Los Angeles Herald. So, the historian began laboriously tracking Gibbon descendants through society registers.

Today, two years after Bergman led him to the trunks, Deverell is still piecing together the historical mosaic the papers may reveal. Likewise, other California historians are making their way to study the papers, which Bergman has donated to San Marino’s Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, where Deverell was a postdoctoral fellow at the time of the discovery.

Today at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, Deverell and Bergman are scheduled to discuss the documents with the annual gathering of the First Century Families, an elite group of descendants of early Los Angeles residents.

The Gibbon papers are important, Huntington rare books curator Alan Jutzi said, because “they can tell you about the underlying (elements) of how Los Angeles was built and what really happened, below the surface of newspaper accounts and the public’s knowledge.”

Gibbon, a progressive Democrat and advocate of political reform, was not the sort of person who had streets or buildings named after him, Deverell said. But, as with many high-stakes deal makers of today, he played an important role.

The documents deal with what Deverell said was perhaps Gibbon’s most vital local involvement: as a newspaper publisher and editor and as a part-owner and attorney of a railroad company. He was a leader in the successful campaign in the 1890s to locate the Los Angeles harbor in San Pedro rather than Santa Monica.

Gibbon knew that his railway line, the Los Angeles Terminal Railway (whose title spawned the name for Terminal Island), would benefit from a San Pedro location. The correspondence makes it clear that Gibbon “made tons of money on the harbor deal,” Deverell said.

“You cannot truly understand the harbor fight without looking at these papers,” Deverell said. “The harbor fight was of crucial importance . . . (and) has been explained by historians as ‘the good people of Los Angeles’ versus ‘the big, bad railroad company,’ Southern Pacific.”

But Deverell said the papers make clear that the fight actually was between two railway companies--Southern Pacific, which owned beachfront property in Santa Monica and wanted the harbor there, and Gibbon’s Terminal Railway.

The documents also give details about the business dealings of two Gibbon associates: Harrison Gray Otis, publisher of the Los Angeles Times from 1882-1917, and Otis’ son-in-law, Harry Chandler, The Times’ publisher until 1944, who served as one of Gibbon’s six pallbearers in 1921.

“It’s quite a find,” said Craig St. Clair, historian for The Times and its parent firm, Times Mirror Co. “Gibbon knew all the players that were important and was corresponding with them.”

“In contemporary terms, (Gibbon) was a Harry Chandler wanna-be,” Deverell said. “The fact that he was not as involved as Chandler and Otis doesn’t make him a small fry. Gibbon had his finger in all kinds of pies.”

For example, Gibbon functioned as a go-between in negotiations with Otis, Chandler and muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens. Gibbon set up a crucial meeting of Otis and Chandler with Steffens, who had come to town to cover the trial of two brothers, union radicals John and James McNamara, charged with a 1910 bombing that killed 20 people at The Times. Steffens met with Otis and Chandler in an unusual attempt to work out a political compromise on the plea of the brothers, who eventually were imprisoned for their role in the bombing.

Gibbon also was a business partner and attorney in many deals with Otis and Chandler, including huge land transactions in Mexico, Kern County and the San Fernando Valley.

“Gibbon was right in the thick of it,” Deverell said. “L.A. in this period is a wide-open field for investment and these guys know it. They know the Pacific Rim is important. . . . They realize L.A. is in the ‘wrong’ place and that it needs water and transportation.”

As publisher of the Herald, Deverell said, Democrat Gibbon was in many ways a puppet of Republican Otis. Otis--initially unbeknown to the newspaper-reading public--owned the competing Herald for a time. Deverell said the correspondence shows that Otis and Gibbon, to guard against wayward eyes, referred to the Herald by the code words of “farming lands.”

If for no other reason, Deverell and other California historians said, the papers are significant because of Gibbon’s relationship with Otis and Chandler, about whom, the experts say, there is not an abundance of publicly available original documents and letters.