Alonzo Horton
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Alonzo Erastus Horton (October 24, 1813 - 1910) could be considered the second founder of the city of San Diego. The Horton Plaza mall in downtown San Diego is named for him.
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[edit] Early life
Alonzo E. Horton was born 1813 in Union, Connecticut, the scion of an old New England family, and grew up in Onondaga County, New York. By his 20s he had developed a keen entrepreneurial spirit, and in 1834, when he was 21, he began transporting grain by boat from the Lake Ontario port of Oswego, New York, to Canada. He also taught school there, and in 1834 ran for constable on the Whig ticket. But having developed a cough, and with his family and friends fearing tuberculosis, he was advised to move to the West. At that time, the Western frontier was Wisconsin, and in 1836 he moved to Milwaukee. There he became a success at trading land and cattle.
In 1847, after the American success in the Mexican-American War, Horton traveled to St. Louis, then the gateway to the Western frontier, and purchased 1500 acres (6 km²) of land in the rural wilderness of northern Wisconsin. In 1848 he filed the first warrant for what would become the town of Hortonville, in Outagamie County near Green Bay. At the time, the small settlement was quite far from the rest of the world. Today, although it is rather in the shadow of the larger cities of Green Bay and Appleton, Hortonville still exists as a thriving small town, with a current (2000) population of over 2000.
In 1851, with his town a success, Horton decided to join many in seeking his fortune in the gold fields of California. He sold his interests for $7000, and traveled to El Dorado County, the heart of the Mother Lode. However, he became a success yet again not so much through gold, but through trading ice in the mining towns. In 1857, he returned to Wisconsin via Panama. During an Indian attack, he lost a bag of gold dust worth $10,000, but kept the money he had made trading ice.
During the late 1850s and early 1860s, Horton spent some time in the East, even marrying his second wife, a prominent New Jersey woman. Horton's first wife, whom he met in Wisconsin, had died of consumption early on. Horton is known to have married at least thrice, but one of his children claimed he married about five times.
In 1862 Horton returned to California, this time to San Francisco, where he opened a furniture and household goods store at 6th and Market streets. While there he heard about growing settlement and interest in a small town called San Diego, located in far southern California, just north of the U.S.-Mexico border. It had become heavily acclaimed for its dry, warm, healthy climate, very welcome to many cold-weary Easterners. Upon visiting there, he noticed that while the small town was built around the old Spanish presidio (fortress) well inland near the mouth of the San Diego River, no large settlements had been made along the large San Diego Bay just a few miles south, even though all ships sailing to the town docked in the bay.
[edit] New Town San Diego
So in 1867 Horton sold off his merchandise in San Francisco and journeyed to San Diego. There he bought 960 acres (3.9 km²) of land on San Diego Bay for just 27 1/2 cents an acre ($67.95/km²), which became known as Horton's Addition. At first there was much opposition from the residents of the former site of the town, which became known as "Old Town" and still is to this day. But new businesses began to flood into the new tract due to its greater convenience for ships arriving from the East. Eventually the new addition began to eclipse Old Town in importance as the heart of the growing city. Local land exploded in price throughout the 1880s, making Horton a success yet again. More people from the East came in when the California Southern Railroad (now a part of BNSF Railway) became the first line to connect the city with the rest of America's rail network in 1885. Unfortunately, land values crashed in the late 1880's, devastating much of Horton's fortune. By the time he died in 1910, he had lost much of his former wealth.
[edit] Politics
Alonzo Horton went down in history as a tireless, enthusiastic supporter of the interests of whatever locality he happened to be living in, saying after moving to Wisconsin, "My principal is to be as happy as I can everyday, to try and make everyone else as happy as I can, and to try to make no one unhappy." He also had something of an effect on San Diego's political scene; when he moved there in late 1860s, most locals, many of whom had migrated from the South or the border states, had supported the South during the Civil War and were Copperheads, or Democratic sympathizers of the Confederacy in an officially Union state. Upon being told that San Diego was a "Copperhead hole", Horton remarked, "Then I shall make it a Republican hole," and encouraged strong Republican sentiment in the city's newspapers. To this day San Diego remains a Republican bastion.
[edit] Religion
Alonzo Horton was one of San Diego’s early Unitarians. In addition to driving the waterfront growth of the newly incorporated city of San Diego, the visionary businessman sought out others who wanted to establish a center for religious education and Unitarian thought.
Along with several other prominent San Diegans, their efforts bore fruit when a small group (including 10 children) met for the first time as the Unitarian Sunday School on June 22, 1873. Alonzo Horton donated their meeting space: Horton Hall, San Diego’s first public theater, containing 400 seats.
Within a year the growing school held its first public worship service, and in 1877 it formally organized as The Unitarian Society of San Diego, with Judge Luce serving as its first president. One of these was Judge Moses Luce, a Civil War hero, recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor, and founder of what is today San Diego’s oldest law firm: Luce, Forward, Hamilton & Scripps LLP. So began the First Unitarian Universalist Church of San Diego.
[edit] Epilogue
Horton was married five times, but had no children. He died at Agnew Sanitarium and is buried at Mt. Hope Cemetery, both in San Diego.
[edit] See also
- "Alonzo Horton, Founder of Modern San Diego", San Diego State University thesis by Ward T. Donley, 1952.
