Compromise Line Road

I do hope my dozen or so regular readers will pardon me if I write about someplace other than Covina for a change. ;-)

Although I was born and raised here, I lived the first five years of my life on East Foothill Boulevard in Glendora, and because of that, even if I haven't made a serious in-depth study of the history of our neighbor to the north, I consider the subject to lie well within the boundaries of my personal intellectual interest.

And it's not out of bounds geographically, either, as both Covina and Glendora share partial origins in a historical Mexican land grant called Rancho San José Adición (aka Rancho Addition to San Jose) which just happens to be the broader subject of this article. Besides, most of Covina's Charter Oak neighborhood is enclosed within RSJA's borders, so I'm not really straying too far afield here after all.

Anyway, even as a child, I developed a keen interest in roads. (You've probably noticed this already.) This really took off when I first discovered my dad's Renie Atlas around age 12 (same time as my interest in Covina history, hmmm!). And although I don't have a specific memory of discovering it, the name of one street in particular from my Glendora years aroused my curiosity: "Compromise Line Road." Always wondered what that meant. Somewhere in my early readings of local history, I did learn that it involved a dispute over a northern boundary of RSJA, but I never found out much more than that.

Compromise Line Road in Glendora. Source: Renie Atlas of Los Angeles City and County, 1965 edition.

Fast forward about 60 years, and last night, out of the blue, I decided to try and finally figure out what the compromise was. Obvious first stop reference-wise was Pflueger (1951), but unfortunately his mention of Compromise Line Road was so nonspecific as to be no help at all. Then I searched the newspaper archive, but that was a similar dead-end.

But really, what better source for explaining a line on a map than a map itself? And what's the best source for historical local maps? The Huntington Digital Library, of course (for free ones, anyway). So a quick search there, and immediately I got a relevant hit: one entitled, "MAP showing the County Road along the Compromise line of the Rancho Addition to San Jose, and Roads contiguous there-to; Los Angeles County, Calif. Surveyed by Harry T. Stafford, County Surveyor, March 1891." Sounds like exactly what I was looking for!

The Stafford Map of Compromise Line Road, 1891.
Source: The Huntington Digital Library, San Marino, CA. Click on the image above to view an enlargement. Link to full-res image.

And it was! The map doesn't have an explanatory legend, but the story of the line is plain enough to discern simply by looking at the cartographic details.

Let's start with the boundaries of RSJA. Historical rancho boundaries were often defined by physical features of the land: trees, boulders, hills, mounds, promontories, what have you. These markers were called "stations," which literally meant something observable that would remain stationary over time such that a landowner could point to it and get another landowner to acknowledge and agree to it as a boundary marker. Then, you'd both visualize a straight line between there two stations, and voilà, there's your border.

In the case of RSJA, its beginning Station #1 was an ancient tree known locally as "El Encino del Tenaja,"¹ or the "Jar Oak" in English. This tree was actually the point of intersection of three land grants: Rancho La Puente, Rancho San José, and San José Adición. But I digress. Thence following RSJA's patented (legally-established) boundary clockwise, we eventually come to its northernmost Station #4. And, as this map makes clear, here we can see the precise point of dispute.

Source: The Huntington Digital Library, San Marino, CA. Link to full-res image.

Note in this detail that there are two points on the map labeled “Sta. 4 Rancho Add. San Jose”s, and both of them have reverse question marks before the “Sta. 4.” This indicates there was disagreement about which of those natural features was the “real” Station 4. Was it the "Black Oak" (which defined the patented boundary line), or the "Mound" to the south of that? Although we don't know for certain who (or what) insisted the Mound was the real Station 4, it was obviously enough of a point of contention that a cartographic compromise had to be devised.

And here we see the compromise itself. The surveyor simply drew a line connecting the two contested Station 4s, determined that distance to be 9.5 chains in length, and then established a point 4.75 chains precisely equidistant from each.

Source: The Huntington Digital Library, San Marino, CA. Link to full-res image.

Then, from that compromise midpoint, the surveyor drew a straight line to RSJA's Station #5, a tree known as the Botello Oak.

Source: The Huntington Digital Library, San Marino, CA. Link to full-res image.

So, now that we know the true and correct cartographic basis for the compromise, what was it really all about? Was it about drawing a new northern boundary for RSJA? I tend to think not, because when you see cadastral maps from later decades, the original northern boundary of RSJA remains in its patented location, some distance to the north of Compromise Line Road.

Therefore I'm inclined to believe that the compromise line was actually created by the county to determine exactly where to place the road itself. If the adjacent landowners disagreed about the location of Station 4, however, a road built along either line connecting the respective Stations 4 to Station 5 would severely encroach onto one or the other's land. In that case, the only really fair thing to do would be to build the road halfway between the two disputed points such that each adjacent landowner would be made to suffer a precisely equal encroachment onto their claimed lands.

Although that makes sense to me, the wording of the map's title also seems to suggest that the line already existed before the road did. So, I really can't say for certain one way or another which came first, or what the actual legal cause for the line's creation might have been. But at least now I believe the exact basis for the cartographic compromise itself has been satisfactorily demonstrated.

My discovery of the Stafford map was by no means my most important find on the Huntington Library website that night, however. I found a document only minutes later that, if it is what I suspect it is, will probably require almost the entirety of Covina's Hollenbeck-era of history to be rewritten. Stay tuned, because this could be a real earth-shaking historical blockbuster!

References:

¹ "Map of the exterior boundaries & official locations of Ranchos San Jose, Addition to San Jose & Azusa." Compiled by G. H. Thompson, C.E. & Surveyor, April, 1877.
² "Map showing the County Road along the Compromise line of the Rancho Addition to San Jose, and Roads contiguous there-to; Los Angeles County, Calif." Harry T. Stafford, County Surveyor, March 1891.