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A little tidbit about my hometown.
A little tidbit about my hometown.
Train got off on the right track
Typed copy of the “Press-Enterprise” article “Sunday, April 23, 1989”
Out of the Past, Tom Patterson
Enthusiasm greeted Lakeview, Perris line
The occasion was one of enthusiasm and optimism at 7 o’clock one morning in 1899, when the first passenger train ran between Perris and Lakeview.
Frank E. Brown, whose real estate promotions had been mostly disastrous for his buyers since his initial success with Redlands and Big Bear Lake a decade earlier, was present with a group of 20 potential buyers, mostly from Chicago. He was, at the time, devoting himself to selling Lakeview property. Col. L. P. Hansen of Pasadena, a major investor in the new community, was prominent among the greeters.
The train pulled from its starting point, called Lakeview Junction, on the San Jacinto branch line alongside what’s now Bowen Road in the northerly part of Perris. It moved east, staying south of Nuevo Road past the point where rocky outcroppings (the southern extension of Bernasconi Hills), extend south of the road. From there it veered north, crossed Nuevo Road and ran between the San Jacinto River and the east foot of Bernasconi (or Lakeview) Hot Springs.
North of the springs, and north of the present Ramona Expressway, it crossed the river and preceded eastward ti its terminal, 8.2 miles from the junction.
The station was yet to be built, but was later mapped on the west side of Magnolia Avenue, although if that street ever actually existed as originally mapped it has long since been cut back to Lakeview Avenue, which runs along the south side of the present Ramona Expressway. The station was built north of the later Expressway.
The introductory special train arrived at the Lakeview stopping place (which had a wyefor turn-around) shortly after 8 a.m.
The Riverside Press & Horticulturist reported, “Scores of settlers for miles around were on hand when the train pulled in; a large flag floated over Hotel Hansen, and a spirit of general jollity prevailed.
“In the evening the visitors were entertaining with music and dancing at the Hotel, many people from Perris, San Jacinto and other nearby towns being present.
“The Santa Fe Company has contracted for the completion of a $1,500 Station at Lakeview, work on which will be commenced next week. As soon as this is completed a regular freight service will be established over the line.”
Assuming the rail company’s usual practice was followed, the Lakeview promoters had paid the cost of building the line, which must have seemed a chancy investment, from a strictly railroad point of view, even though competition from the automobile and motor truck wasn’t yet in sight.
Most people today, probably including many who live in Lakeview, have never heard of the line although it operated in a limited way for 38 years until it was abandoned in 1937. The rails were removed soon afterward.
Traces of the old right-of –way can be identified today, north of the Ramona Expressway and alongside the abandoned hot springs resort and at a few other points-that is, if someone like Walt Embertson points them out. Walt was born in Lakeview in 1911 and has lived there ever since.
He and his friends once caught some carp in the river next to the hot springs and sold them to campers (or squatters) at the springs for enough money to ride the train from there to Lakeview station. (Never mind that there was no station or siding at the springs. On such a line the stops and starts were rather informal.)
In his early youth, Walt says, there was a daily mixed train – freight cars plus one passenger car, but the passenger car was discontinued, probably before 1920.
Lakeview was one of several communities of the county to which prospective buyers were given train or bus trips from Los Angeles, followed by a picnic and sales pitch among the banners, pennants and booster signs of subdivision.
The Hansen Hotel was a three-story frame structure. Eventually reduced to two-story height, the building has long housed the Lakeview Market at the corner of Hansen Avenue and Lakeview, just off the Ramona Expressway.
Embertson recalls that in his youth there was both a passenger station and a freight warehouse at the terminal – and a pickle factory as well. During World War I there was also a rock crusher, which crushed silica from the Lakeview Mountains quarry, to the south and east. (When finely ground and combined with other materials, silica absorbs gas – and was used in World War I gas masks.)
Early in the life of the line there were great expectations. The original 1894 subdivision map of “Lake View Town Site” the rail route was shown extending eastward to the edge of the subdivision and presumably beyond.
Indeed, Embertson recalls that the roadbed or berm of the line did extend three miles east, to Bridge Street through open land north of the present Expressway. Rails were never laid there.
The subdivision map of Lake View Town Site was filed in 1894 by John Wolfskill, whose father had obtained the Rancho San Jacinto Nuevo y Potrero by marrying its grantee, Maria Antonia Estudillo de Pedrorena. In 1898 he filled the map of an addition to the east, but meanwhile, or soon afterward, F.E. Brown had acquired some 10,000 or more acres of the Wolfskill ranch and had taken over the promotion of the town.
Lakeview (the post office put the two words together) had its ups and downs. The early water wells failed and early orchards died. Grain farming survived. New wells gave the community new life.
Nuevo was founded in 1914 to the south; new orchards and farms were started in both communities. A drying yard for fruits, mostly apricots, operated near the Lakeview Market.
A 1924 advertising pamphlet for Nuevo Gardens, a later Nuevo subdivision, told prospective buyers that the Santa Fe provided freight service for the community and that the railroad was “very desirous of seeing our development progress so there will be enough business to warrant passenger service.”
By that time, though, the automobile was pretty well along. There was never a Nuevo station. The rails missed the center of original community by two miles or more. One map not published by the railroad does show a “station grounds” slightly east of the present Perris Valley Flood Control Channel, still farther from Nuevo.
As all railroad buffs know, the Perris-Lakeview line was only one of many, in Riverside County and elsewhere, that were built on the basis of expectations that didn’t materialize. Many towns were founded along them were given an early impetus by them. Eventually, though, the railroads were for long hauls and few stops.
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