Imagining the Los Angeles of 1870 takes some mental gymnastics. The city then had a population of 5,728, and transportation consisted of horse-drawn vehicles operating on dirt roads. It was far from the sprawling metropolis it would become even 30 short years later, when its population topped 100,000.
Even with that in mind, I still found it surprising to find out that the Los Angeles & San Pedro Railroad, connecting the harbor in San Pedro to downtown L.A., became Southern California’s first railroad when it opened in 1869.
The Golden Spike was driven at Promontory Point in Utah that same year to complete the Union Pacific’s first transcontinental railroad, but its route bypassed Southern California completely, connecting instead to San Francisco.
When Wilmington-based shipping magnate Phineas Banning began building his business a decade earlier, he soon diagnosed his main supply chain issue: the difficulty and slowness of transporting goods by animal-drawn carts, especially lumber and building materials, from his wharves in Wilmington north to downtown Los Angeles.
As early as 1853, he had envisioned Wilmington as a potential site for the western terminus of the transcontinental railroad. As a first step, he pushed legislation calling for a new railroad linking Wilmington to Los Angeles, but a bill codifying Banning’s idea bogged down in Congress and never became law. Repeated attempts to pass similar laws during the 1860s also failed.
Banning himself tried again in 1866 as a member of the California State Senate. He faced opposition from farmers who raised grain to feed animals that pulled wagons carrying food to market, owners of the freight lines and those who thought the bill had been designed mainly to further line Banning’s pockets.
In 1867, he tried again. This time, he did his best to drum up support for the new railroad among local political leaders and prominent businessmen before introducing the bill. Under its provisions, Los Angeles…
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