Early Monrovia Structures Research

John C.

Birthdate:

John Calvin Anderson was a carpenter working in Los Angeles when  Monrovia was being subdivided in 1887, and if he wasn't the first  builder to make Monrovia his home, then he was among the first.  Besides  his own house, Anderson built Monrovia's first hotel, the Mills Hotel,  on the west side of Myrtle between Lemon and Orange (Carew 406). Anderson  was born June 1, 1844, in Ohio.  His headstone at Live Oak Cemetery in  Monrovia, California, indicates he was in the Union Army, but little  else is known about his life before he came to California.  His wife,  Elizabeth H. Lindesmith, was born November 30, 1853, also in Ohio.

Los  Angeles California Voter registration lists indicate that John C.  Anderson was in Los Angeles by 1873, where he is listed as a carpenter.   The 1888 voter registration entry has him living in Monrovia working as  a contractor.  He had bought three lots (16, 17, & 18) in Block A  of the Town of Monrovia Subdivision and built a house on Lot 16 that was  valued in 1888 at $700.  That house still stands today and is the site  of the Anderson House Museum.  After John Anderson's death, his wife  continued to live in their house but sold off the other two lots.

John  C. Anderson died on January 25, 1902, and his wife Lizzie died on April  18, 1929.  They are both buried in Live Oak Cemetery in Monrovia.  The  Andersons had two sons.  Lewis Harvey Anderson was born on January 7,  1883, in Los Angeles County.  As a teenager, he worked in a hardware  store in Monrovia, but his life's vocation was as a forest ranger with  the U.S. Forestry Service.  He married in 1918 but had no children.   Lewis Anderson died on October 22, 1956.

George Howard Anderson  was born August 23, 1886, in Millport, Ohio, and lived almost his entire  life in the house his father built at 215 E. Lime Avenue.  He was  employed as a bank cashier for the Security-First National Bank (later  Security Pacific) in Monrovia from 1905 until he retired in the 1960s.   He continued living in the family house after his mother died in 1929.

When he died in 1974, George Anderson left the house to his bank to as a  trustee for the California Community Foundation which is a charitable  trust.  The Foundation then donated the property to Friends of the  Monrovia Public Library who donated it to the Monrovia Historical  Society which restored it and furnished it as it would have been in the  1880s.  Today it is a museum that illustrates what life was like for a  middle class family in Monrovia at the turn of the last century.

George Anderson never married.

For more detailed biographical information on the Crandall and Denslow families, contact the Monrovia Historical Museum Foundation.  A fee will be charged for access to the information.

monroviahistoricalmuseum.org

monroviahistoricalmuseum@gmx.co