Ledger Accounts for Lost Years

The long-forgotten ledger’s spine is broken and some of its yellowed pages are falling out, but for local school officials and history buffs it is a gem.

More than 50 years after it was plucked from atop a Placerita Canyon rubbish pile, the Sulphur Springs School District’s original board of trustees record book has made its way home. A Ventura County woman who read a recent newspaper account of the district’s 125th anniversary celebration suddenly realized she had something special to contribute.

The deteriorating ledger, which documents much of the district’s business between 1879 and 1904, contains roughly 50 pages of notes, election tallies and financial records. Each page is neatly presented in the formal cursive of school clerks.

The emergence of the book, which offers a glimpse of some of the issues facing the Santa Clarita Valley’s educational pioneers, was a welcome surprise for Sulphur Springs officials who said it will help fill in missing pieces of the district’s history.

“Oh, my goodness, there’s my grandmother, my mother’s mother,” said George Starbuck, pointing out the name Hortense Reynier on a 1892 list of expenditures. “She worked as the janitor and they paid her $4 a month.”

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The 61-year-old Starbuck, a retired electrical engineer and amateur historian, can trace his family roots in the area back to 1861. As he worked his way through the ledger, the names of other area families emerged from the pages, stoking memories and convincing him of the book’s authenticity.

“There’s no question it’s the real thing,” he said, gingerly turning a frayed page. “I’m just having a ball looking at this. It’s bringing all this history back to life.”

Until two weeks ago, the book had been in the possession of the Mosher family since the late 1930s. Eloise Mosher, a longtime Valley resident who now lives in Bell Canyon, said that’s when her future husband, Walter, retrieved it from a junk heap while helping a friend move to Placerita Canyon.

“They were just cleaning out the attic of this old house, throwing stuff out of a window onto a big pile, and my husband saw the book,” said Mosher, a retired computer programmer. “He said, ‘You can’t throw that out; it’s history,’ and so he kept it.”

Mosher said she and her husband, who died in 1976, always intended to return the book but never got around to it. After reading about Sulphur Springs’ anniversary celebration in The Times on April 25, however, Mosher decided to act.

“I said ‘OK, this is it, I’m finally going to see if they want it back,’ ” she said. “And of course they did.”

Did they ever.

“I think it is an amazing thing that it turned up. It’s quite a piece of history,” said Nick Teeter, assistant superintendent of the Sulphur Springs School District. “It’s nice that it fell into the hands of someone who recognized its importance.”

Named for the foul-smelling sulfurous wells that bubbled in the area, the original Sulphur Springs School was established in 1872. It was founded by Col. Thomas Mitchell, who moved to the area after serving with the Texas Mounted Volunteers in the Mexican-American War, and John Lang, a prosperous local dairy farmer.

Although the book dates to 1879, seven years after the school was founded, school officials say it likely contains the first records of district business. It corresponds with the date when Mitchell donated land for a permanent school site and the first trustees were elected, officials said. Before 1879, classes were held at the Mitchell and Lang homes.

The small school district, which now totals almost 5,000 students at seven elementary campuses in Canyon Country, was the second school district established in Los Angeles County and is the oldest still in operation.

The Willow School in El Monte was founded in 1852 but was closed several years later after being damaged in a flood, said Sandra Smith, the principal of Sulphur Springs School.

“What this does is help us close the gap. We have some records that began in 1906, but nothing before that,” Smith said. “It’s really fascinating to read it and see what they had to deal with and how they spent their money.”

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Among the expenditures for the 1879-1880 school year was $75 per month for a teacher named Mr. J.E. Wright. Other expenses included $28 for four cords of wood and $6.18 for charts, weights, chalk, ink and a map.

The ledger also showed that a female teacher, Miss Grace Johnson, hired after Wright, was paid $65 per month. When another male teacher was hired later on, the rate was $70.

Although the board generally met just once per year, special meetings were occasionally called to resolve pressing matters. That happened Sept. 25, 1902, when the trustees convened to decide the issue of corporal punishment.

“After duly considering the matter,” the clerk wrote, “it was decided unanimously to forbid all corporal punishment without the consent of the parents, or secondly by consent of the Board of Trustees.”

Although that decision seemed to place the district ahead of its time on disciplinary matters, Starbuck, who attended Sulphur Springs in the 1940s, said that was not necessarily the case.

“Well, they must have changed that back,” he said. “We certainly got whacked once in a while.”