Why you should experience Whittier-Puente Hills in Los Angeles, California.
Whittier-Puente Hills is a rugged enclave where eastern Los Angeles County's inland character meets steep ridgelines, oak-filled canyons and a long green barrier separating the San Gabriel Valley from the coastal plain.
Positioned between Hacienda Heights, Rowland Heights, and Whittier, the area occupies an elongated hill system extending through Turnbull Canyon Road, Colima Road and Hacienda Boulevard between the San Gabriel River lowlands and the La Habra Valley. Narrow canyons cut deeply between rounded ridges covered by coastal sage scrub, chaparral and pockets of woodland, creating abrupt changes in elevation across an otherwise heavily urbanized section of the county. Movement through Whittier-Puente Hills follows winding roads and ridge routes that repeatedly open toward the San Gabriel Mountains, Los Angeles Basin and neighboring valleys before dropping into sheltered canyon interiors. Residential districts climb portions of the lower slopes, yet broad sections of the higher terrain remain open, leaving the hill chain visually continuous across several communities. The result is a greater area whose ridges, canyon systems, native vegetation and commanding position preserve a substantial interior landscape between two of metropolitan Los Angeles's major developed basins.
What you should know about Whittier-Puente Hills.
Whittier-Puente Hills is best known for occupying the southern edge of Rancho La Puente, the immense Mexican-era property developed by John Rowland and William Workman after their arrival from New Mexico in November 1841. Preliminary title followed in January 1842, and a subsequent grant placed 48,790 acres under their ownership across much of the eastern San Gabriel Valley and adjoining hills. Rowland and Workman established adobe residences near San Jose Creek and built a diversified agricultural enterprise around cattle, sheep, wheat, grapes, wine and brandy. The partners divided their holdings in 1851, leaving Rowland with 29,000 acres in the east and Workman with 20,000 acres in the west. Drought devastated cattle herds during the 1860s, accelerating a shift toward crops suited to a changing regional economy. Rowland retained his property until his death in 1873, but Workman pledged nearly his entire holding as collateral after entering banking with his son-in-law Francisco Temple. Their bank collapsed during the financial crisis of 1875, and creditor Elias J. Baldwin acquired Workman's former acreage after advancing funds to the failing institution. Subsequent subdivision carried ranch properties into new ownership, yet the hills remained substantially less developed than the fertile valley floor, preserving the geographic divide between agricultural settlements on either side.
Petroleum gave the hills a separate economic life as prospectors began exploiting the folded geology beneath their western ridges during the closing nineteenth century. Central Oil Company struck oil in the Whittier area in 1891, beginning an industry that became important to the city's early growth. Drilling spread eastward through the Puente Hills, and petroleum extraction remained a defining activity there from 1897 into the 1940s. Derricks appeared across ridge and canyon properties whose steep ground had previously limited intensive farming, giving land unsuitable for orchards a new commercial value. North Whittier Heights developed simultaneously along the northern base after Edwin G. Hart and Jed Torrance acquired 1,826 acres from Anita Baldwin in 1912 and divided the property for agricultural settlement. Citrus, walnuts and avocados prospered on the flatter ground below the hills, and growers established the North Whittier Heights Citrus Association packing plant in 1919. Postwar residential construction subsequently replaced extensive agricultural acreage as orchards declined during the 1940s and 1950s. The hills themselves retained larger stretches of open terrain, leaving petroleum sites, former ranch ground and undeveloped canyon slopes embedded within a metropolitan region whose surrounding lowlands had undergone far more complete suburban conversion.
How to fold Whittier-Puente Hills into your trip.
Whittier-Puente Hills works as the anchor for a daytime outing connecting a museum devoted to the Greater Whittier area, a native-plant institution created by a pioneering California horticulturist and the birthplace of the only California-born president to reach the White House.
Begin at Whittier Museum, created through the Whittier Historical Society after the organization formed in 1970 with establishing a local museum among its immediate goals. The society purchased a former Pacific Telephone Company building and opened its permanent museum there in 1983, creating a home for objects associated with Whittier's first century and subsequent development. Permanent and rotating exhibitions trace subjects extending from the city's nineteenth-century beginnings through local petroleum, prominent residents and later community life. Dennis McGonagle added another historical work to the building beginning in November 2006, covering two exterior walls with a 1,200-square-foot mural depicting figures including Pío Pico, Jonathan and Rebecca Bailey and agricultural pioneer Harriet Russell Strong. Continue to California Botanic Garden, founded by Susanna Bixby Bryant in 1927 after she reserved 200 acres of her family's Santa Ana Canyon Ranch for California native plants in memory of her father, John William Bixby. Bryant consulted Harvard botanist Charles Sprague Sargent and employed botanists John Thomas Howell and Carl Brandt Wolf as the collection expanded. Fire devastated the Orange County property in 1943, followed by destructive rains and erosion the next winter. After Bryant's death in 1946, director Philip Munz pursued a more secure setting associated with higher education, and plants and seeds moved to Indian Hill Mesa in Claremont in 1951. The new site retained centuries-old coast live oaks and native sycamores as the institution expanded its botanical work across the eastern valley. Conclude at Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, occupying the nine-acre Yorba Linda property where Frank Nixon built a one-and-a-half-story farmhouse in 1912. Richard Milhous Nixon was born there on January 9, 1913 and spent his earliest years on the family citrus ranch. The ranch failed, prompting the family to move to Whittier in 1922, where Frank opened a combined grocery store and gasoline station and his sons worked in the family business. The original house survived successive owners, became associated with a neighboring school property during the middle twentieth century and entered the presidential library complex when the private Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace opened in 1990. The progression moves from Greater Whittier's historical collection through Bryant's institution devoted to California flora and culminates at the surviving farmhouse that connects a modest citrus property with a consequential twentieth-century political career.
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