LOOKING BACK

Sometimes it does all boil down to one person.

James McFadden was the name you heard around town in the 1800s, when

Newport Beach was merely a wharfside village known predominantly as the

home of McFadden’s company, the Newport Wharf and Lumber Company.

Enormous freight and passenger vessels stopped by to load and unload

here, and McFadden’s dream was to make Newport (it was a “new port”)

Beach the best commercial shipping port that Southern California ever

saw, according to “Newport Beach: The First Century: 1888-1988.”

This didn’t happen, because the city instead took a less industrial

route to fame. But McFadden’s name is what we arrive at when we trace the

origins way, way back.

“He is part of what built our community here in the area, what with

the railroad coming down here and bringing all the lumber and the ships,”

said Gay Wassall-Kelly, a long-time resident of Newport Beach.

McFadden was born in 1833 and died in 1918. Considered the founder of

Newport Beach, he was a resident of Santa Ana but owned and ran maritime

shipping businesses on the bay at Newport Landing and on the oceanfront

too.

McFadden and his family were also ranchers, and at one point they had

trouble keeping wild horses from destroying their crop, Wassall-Kelly

said. They ordered lumber to keep the horses out, and that one train of

wood eventually grew into an industry.

The story starts with McFadden’s purchase of what was then called the

Rancho Santa Ana lands. He was a widower from New York and only 35 years

old. He saw Newport Bay as having seaport potential.

Many settlers became farmers and by the mid 1870s, the city had a

general store, a post office and a school.

In the meantime, the McFaddens -- James and his brother Robert --

engaged in the lumber business, bringing loaded vessels in and out of

Newport bay.

They had a special boat made for this task in San Francisco. The

schooner was aptly called the Newport. But increased populations in the

1880s, coupled with the completion of the Santa Fe Railroad and a

resurgence in building, made it impossible for the McFadden team and

Newport Harbor alone to supply the entire community with lumber.

The bay was also dangerous at parts. Ground swells, shallow waters and

other landscape-hazards had caused the death of many sailors.

James McFadden was always trying to solicit federal help for harbor

improvements. In the late 1880’s, in the middle of yet another attempt by

McFadden to get government aid, an employee named Tom Rule drowned in the

bay while working.

According to “Newport Beach: The First Century,” the brothers had

mourned when yet another set of seaman had drowned in the violent bay.

One theory is that Rule’s death was what made the brothers give up their

business at Newport Landing.

They eventually moved it from the bay to the oceanfront, began to

build a wharf and even a railway to Santa Ana. By August of 1888, the

project was completed and the city’s prosperous streak as a shipping port

began.

“They had the foresight and opened the Newport Beach area to the

world, and look what we’ve got,” Wassall-Kelly said.

* Do you know of a person, place or event that deserves a historical

Look Back? Let us know. Contact Young Chang by fax at (949) 646-4170;

e-mail at [email protected]; or mail her at c/o Daily Pilot, 330 W.

Bay St., Costa Mesa, CA 92627.