Abalone CoveEra 2 of 10 · The Story
Vanderlip
1906 to 1924
Box score
| Year | Actor | Event | Parcel / APN | Outcome | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1906 | Kumekichi Ishibashi | Pioneers Japanese American farming at Portuguese Bend | Portuguese Bend | 200+ families farming by late 1930s | community history |
| 1910 | Frank A. Vanderlip Sr. | Attends Jekyll Island meeting | — | Co-architect of Federal Reserve | Vanderlip 1935 memoir |
| 1912-13 | Frank A. Vanderlip Sr. | Purchases Rancho Palos Verdes from Bixby syndicate | ~16,002 ac | "Closed the deal without first having seen the property" — Baughey 1947 | Baughey 1947; Vanderlip 1935 |
| 1920 | Vanderlip syndicate | Sells ~3,200 ac to PVE/Miraleste developers; Palos Verdes Corporation founded | ~12,800 ac retained | PV Corporation established | Baughey 1947 |
| 1942 | US government | Executive Order 9066 — Japanese American internment | Portuguese Bend | Only 5 families returned; peninsula farming era ends | federal record |
| 2021 | Hatano family | Last Japanese American farm on the peninsula evicted | Portuguese Bend | Pre-1942 tomato genetics survive as volunteer plants | community record |
A purchase, sight unseen
Frank A. Vanderlip Sr. was the president of National City Bank of New York when he travelled to Jekyll Island, Georgia, in November 1910 to meet with a small group of bankers and the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. The Jekyll Island meeting produced the outline of what became, three years later, the Federal Reserve Act. In his 1935 autobiography From Farm Boy to Financier, Vanderlip describes both that meeting and, in later chapters, the purchase of the Palos Verdes Peninsula a few years afterward.
Col. Robert M. Baughey, writing for the Palos Verdes Corporation in the 1947 tenth-anniversary issue of the Palos Verdes News, put the mechanics of the deal on the corporate record:
"Mr. Vanderlip conducted all of the negotiations and assumed full responsibility in the purchase of Rancho Palos Verdes, closed the deal without first having seen the property."
Vanderlip's syndicate took title to approximately 16,002 acres — the bulk of Jotham Bixby's 1882 partition award — and began planning. What he had bought was Lot H of Rancho Los Palos Verdes, the same Lot H named in every deed and declaration on the south peninsula thereafter.
The farmers who were already here
The peninsula Vanderlip bought was not empty. Kumekichi Ishibashi had begun farming at Portuguese Bend in 1906, and by the late 1930s more than 200 Japanese American families were farming the peninsula's coastal benches. Tomatoes, strawberries, flowers. The 1942 federal internment order under Executive Order 9066 ended that. Only five families returned after the war. The Hatano family maintained the last Japanese American farm on the peninsula until 2021, when it was evicted.
Pre-1942 tomato genetics still grow as volunteer plants in yards around Portuguese Bend — seeds from the lineage that predates the war, surviving as weeds in what were once farms. They are, as a matter of botanical inheritance, the oldest continuously-present agricultural thing on the peninsula.
Syndicate to corporation
By 1920, Vanderlip and his partners had sold approximately 3,200 acres — the northern end of the peninsula — to developers who would later incorporate Palos Verdes Estates (1939) and develop Miraleste. The remainder, roughly 12,800 acres including all of what is now Rancho Palos Verdes and Rolling Hills, was held by what became the Palos Verdes Corporation. The corporation was formally re-organized in Delaware in 1925. The next era belongs to it.