At the end of the immigrant trail, the newish state of California was coincidentally undergoing a defining experience and forming its identity. Less known and understood, but arguably as significant as our Gold Rush (1849-59), was our Health Rush. An accepted estimate is that 25% of the hundreds of thousands of westering people moved for reasons of health. Not every ill person made it to California, but of those who did, most ended up in the state’s warm, dry south. Many reinvented themselves here, and became Californians.

The study of climate, called climatology, evolved from the mid-19th century in tandem with tuberculosis in crowded, industrializing cities in the East and Midwest. Although the tuberculosis bacteria was identified in 1860, no reliable cure was discovered until WWII. Many therapies were tried. Hundreds of thousands died, and fear of the disease pulsed through society. From the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th Centuries, moving to a healthy climate with plenty of fresh air was the most-recommended therapy, and not just for TB — but for all pulmonary diseases, as well as other conditions including alcoholism, neurasthenia, and more generally, health broken by the Civil War. After 1900, isolation became understood to be the best way to stop the spread of tuberculosis, and the sanitaria movement began containing the disease.

But for a full generation before, the most popular cure placed Altadena in its cross hairs. According to climatology precepts, the ideal situation for human health was a dry Mediterranean climate one to two thousand feet above sea level. Altadena: check! Early land advertisements lauded the perfection of our location “above the noxious fogs of Pasadena,” adding that it was also not too high.

Neither “miasma” (thought to be carried by fog) nor thin, freezing, night air to impede healing in the Highlands, as our area was known before 1887. Iowan John Woodbury borrowed the name Altadena that year from a defunct nursery for his new subdivision.

It is no surprise that health seekers of some means, education, and imagination landed here and in other settlements along the San Gabriel foothills from the 1880s through the 1920s. Altadena’s specific attractions were many: rail lines up from Pasadena (one of Southern California’s earliest, toniest settlements founded by cultured, tea-totaling, Midwesterners); the adjacent world-renowned health resort of Sierra Madre Villa; and neighboring Sierra Madre, the target of a sophisticated sales campaign aimed at the “well-off ill” of New and Old England. It didn’t hurt that Altadena’s land was a bit cheaper and more sparsely populated than its neighbors, while similarly situated against the gorgeous San Gabriel range.

While the health-seeker story has been often described, its legacy as a major force in California culture hasn’t yet been fully appreciated. Our state is still associated with redemptive qualities — and the idea that its citizens are health-obsessed has only increased with time. In the 19th century this message was spread by real estate developers and gallons of ink in newspapers, books, publications, and personal letters. Altadena offers a fascinating example supporting the importance of health-seeking to regional identity, as well as to our community’s very existence.

At least seven institutions dedicated to treating respiratory illness and avoiding ill health in vulnerable children were established here between 1887 and the mid-1920s — despite a population of only a few hundred at the beginning and a few thousand by the end of the period. Several survived through the 1930s and a few, beyond. And more informal health camps and resorts, as well as what today would be called board and care homes, became rooted in Altadena and the foothills behind. La Viña Sanatorium, the most famous and long-lived, was a non-profit institution established by Dr. Stehman in 1911 to treat less well-heeled sufferers in the Progressive Era.

The fact that Altadena never incorporated as a city was key to health and land use here. Unlike Pasadena, we lacked the power of the ordinance to restrict health-related or other businesses. In the city to the south, a cough was enough to get one evicted from a boarding house; that is why Mountain View Cemetery, established to serve Pasadena, had to locate outside its limits. Levi Giddings, who arrived in the Highlands in 1875 and bought a few thousand acres, turned over some of his land very profitably to found the cemetery in 1881. Today it, along with the Mausoleum added in the 1920s, is Altadena’s longest continually operating business (and still owned by the same family.) Giddings, along with even earlier arrivals including Benjamin Eaton (1865), developed water resources as soon as they came, making the arid wasteland directly north of Pasadena saleable. (see Altadena Heritage Newsletter, Fall/Winter 2020 pages 8-9.

The founder of Sierra Madre, N.C. Carter, purchased 845 acres at $20 per acre in 1881 from Lucky Baldwin, the same year brothers Fred and John Woodbury bought 937 acres of the future Altadena for $5 an acre from Pasadena. The two communities make interesting “comps.” Their geography and water resources were similar, but they were marketed differently. Carter, from America’s first planned industrial town of Lowell, Massachusetts, had recovered from TB in California, and was a born salesman who had found success dealing real estate for Lucky Baldwin. His brilliant sales campaign included an “amateur newspaper” mailed to prospective buyers in the Northeast, and aimed straight at the well-off sick. He personally escorted private train car loads of “lungers” (as TB sufferers were informally called) to Sierra Madre from New England every year, and targeted the same group in England, where he made deals with pulmonary specialists to refer certain patients to him for the “Sierra Madre Cure.” He sold land in smaller plots at $40-$60 per acre.

Typical Altadena buyers, by comparison, were farmers and vintners (and a few millionaires) who paid less for larger tracts purchased from various sellers rather than a single slick developer. Growth this decade was more off-hand, but attracted a continuing trickle of investors. Southern California values began catching fire as the 1880s unfolded into a boom that peaked — but turned to bust, just as the Woodburys launched Altadena. Timing, as Lucky Baldwin often stated, was the key to success in real estate.

Major depression took up most of the 1890s, with a single bright exception in our area being the Mount Lowe Railway, opened in 1893. Altadena remained a backwater that thousands of rich tourists and health seekers saw from train windows on their way to Mount Lowe’s fancy resorts. The most well-known of these who gave Altadena a second look was Zane Grey, who passed through as a dentist on his honeymoon in 1906, and moved here permanently in 1920 after becoming rich as an author who defined the west for the rest of the county.

When Sierra Madre incorporated in 1907, its first official acts were establishing a public health department and declaring a central zone covering most of the town that banned institutions “for the care and treatment of mental, contagious, or pulmonary diseases.” Tent-houses, where less affluent health-seekers lived, were also prohibited, as city officials struggled to “dispel the illusion… that this city is nothing but a big consumptive camp.” Successive ordinances passed by younger, healthier newcomers (with no nostalgia for the town’s tubercular founders), restricted small board and care homes to two patients; hotels, restaurants, camps, and resorts posted signs barring entry to those with pulmonary disease; and newspaper editorials suggested that Sierra Madre’s needy ill be taken care of at “Dr. Stehman’s Sanitarium four miles to the west” — otherwise known as La Viña Sanitarium, in Altadena!

An absent/far flung county government, sparse population, and ideal location worked to make our community a mecca for the ill — especially as they were pushed out elsewhere. Sick people didn’t appear to cause problems here, at least not ones that left records — perhaps because there were so few records! A.C Vroman, who moved to Pasadena for his health, did mention in his memoir a camp of indigent sufferers in a tent camp in the 1890s behind Altadena.