Going to the Chapel--to Vote : Senate election: In the past, residents of remote Follows Camp cast ballots by mail. But they thought it was important that they have their own polling place, so they got one--a tiny, red church.

For years, residents in the remote San Gabriel Mountains canyon community of Follows Camp voted by mail.

But on Tuesday voters along the East Fork of the San Gabriel River cast their ballots in person at one of the most unusual and perhaps the prettiest of the county’s 6,500 precinct sites: the Little Chapel in the Canyon.

Starting at 7 a.m., with the sun peeking over snow-capped mountains, voters made their way under a canopy of oaks to a tiny, wooden, red church used for everything from Sunday school to weddings, funerals and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.

The community is a collection of mobile homes, trailers, ragtag mountain houses and apartments. They are set hard between a canyon wall and a rushing, blue-green river at the site of a 19th-Century gold mining settlement, about seven miles north of San Dimas. It’s flannel shirt, blue jeans and work boots country, where everybody knows everybody else and the jukebox at the Fort cafe plays country music.

Follows Camp has about 200 year-round residents and neighboring Camp Williams has about 80. They are both private campgrounds in a pocket of unincorporated Los Angeles County surrounded by Angeles National Forest.

Many of the residents first came here to fish or camp and fell in love with the clean air and relative absence of urban ills. Some even say they escaped here to leave behind former wives, husbands or lovers, in search of a fresh start.

Canyon residents said that more important than Tuesday’s election--a special state Senate race in a district that will be outdated by 1994 because of redistricting--is the principle that Follows Camp and smaller neighboring communities deserve their own polling place.

“It’s not just for the novelty . . . but so the rest of Los Angeles County will know this community is up here and that we count,” said Brownie, an unemployed 48-year-old ironworker and Follows Camp resident who--like many a canyon resident--goes solely by his citizens band radio handle.

“Everybody needs their say so the system will work,” Brownie said.

One of the poll workers, Mary Veronica Ann Rickert Chapman Zachary, Miss Vicki for short, agreed with Brownie, saying canyon residents want more of a say in political issues that affect them.

Last year, she said, local residents were upset about proposals to cut funding for the Sheriff’s Department medical helicopters that are seen as a lifeline to the area, which until the mid-1980s had neither television nor telephone service. The people who live “down the hill” feel that “nobody’s up here,” said Miss Vicki, a nurse in Alhambra.

Across the river by the green footbridge, Follows Camp manager and owner Joe Davison, a 57-year-old former Beverly Hills policeman and Rolls-Royce salesman in Newport Beach, was hustling potential voters. “You vote yet?” he asked a collection of people at a dirt crossroads. They were going soon, they promised.

“I have no faith in the mail-in ballots,” said Louise Flores, 52, who works in a Kmart in Monrovia, after casting her ballot.

Last week in her trailer she discovered the misplaced absentee ballots that she and her boyfriend, mechanic Bill Marks, thought they had mailed with a stack of letters in time for November’s presidential election.

When county voting officials were considering whether to establish the new polling place, the resort fell just short of the 100 registered voters required. But officials were swayed by the persistence of the community’s leaders.

A door-to-door registration campaign boosted the rolls over the top, to 163--half the population of the canyon.

Time and again, Los Angeles County registrar-recorder field representative Robert Huff, sent by the county to oversee the election, said he has been impressed with the community’s enthusiasm. Last week all four volunteer precinct officials dodged rockslides to make the one-hour trip to Pasadena to attend a ballot training session, even though only one had been required to go.

John Ramos, a 41-year-old parts supply supervisor at Longo Toyota in El Monte and head volunteer among the precinct officials, said: “Maybe we will be the mouse that roared.”