We've gotten used to L.A.'s littles and towns - among them Little Ethiopia, Koreatown, Little Armenia, Filipinotown - the places where immigrant aspiration gets a foothold, nostalgia is served, and Jonathan Gold finds the joints he loves. Official recognition of the city's ethnic neighborhoods is fairly recent, but Los Angeles has always been culturally diverse, even as far back as the end of the Mexican colonial period and the start of the city's Americanization.French and Italian communities clustered around the old plaza in the mid-19th century, as did Basques and German Jews, creating some of the city's earliest civic institutions. Sonoratown, north of the plaza, and old Chinatown to the east kept those ethnic communities at a distance. At the edge of San Pedro, a Japanese fishing village - Furusato - flourished on Terminal Island from the turn of the century until World War II and internment.
South and east of downtown, along the Orange County border and straddling it, are lesser-known ethnic communities that continue to hybridize with suburban Los Angeles. Milk made two of them: Bellflower and Artesia, where Holland and the Azores met.
Southeast Los Angeles County is a landscape bounded by the San Gabriel River to the east and the Los Angeles River to the west. It's roughly where the former ranchos Los Cerritos, Los Alamitos, and Los Coyotes share the floodplains of the two rivers. Their annual wandering kept the land open pasture until the last decades of the 19th century, when sheep raising gave way to more intensified agriculture.
By the turn of the century, the southeast was parceled out as fields, orchards, hog farms, and feed lots along a few country roads. Where they crossed, the communities of Bellflower and Artesia grew up around a general store, a hay broker, a post office, a church, and a stop on the Pacific Electric (PE) line that connected Los Angeles to Santa Ana.
By 1900, Artesia (named for its artesian wells) had, according to the city's boosters, a hotel, general store, agricultural implement house, blacksmith shop, and a handsome' schoolhouse built in 1875. German immigrants, like those who founded Anaheim, were among the orchardists and stock raisers, but turban-wearing Hindus were some of the laborers in the groves. The Little India of Artesia's Pioneer Boulevard was 70 years away.
Bellflower was begun by Los Angeles real estate promoter F. E. Woodruff in 1906 (and named Somerset in 1909). Claire S. Thompson built the general store in 1910. The town had a population of 100. By 1912, it was 1,200.
The first general store in Bellflower, 1910. Photo courtesy of the Herald-Examiner Collection - Los Angeles Public Library.
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Bellflower celebrates Independence Day, 1915. The street is Bellflower Boulevard now. Photo courtesy of the Herald-Examiner Collection - Los Angeles Public Library
Bellflower Boulevard at Flower Street, 1956. Photo courtesy of the Herald-Examiner Collection - Los Angeles Public Library
The PE stops in both towns, still unincorporated then, produced an unusual kind of agricultural community. Town lots in Bellflower were big enough for small-scale farming and chicken ranching. Larger parcels in Artesia allowed for fruit cultivation, plant nurseries, and vegetable plots. But the PE also gave residents access to jobs in Los Angeles. (Bellflower Boulevard to Spring Street took just 40 minutes.) The farmer/commuter of 1912 rode the PE to work weekdays and farmed on weekends.
Suburban farmers were fewer by the mid-1920s, as orchards and fields in Bellflower and Artesia were subdivided for house lots, but eight or ten acres along the San Gabriel River was enough for a dairying operation, if it was run right. Instead of on open pasture, dairymen kept their cows penned in lots. Good genetics and good feed produced 400 pounds of milk per year per cow, double the national average.
Pete Van Leeuwen, who had come to Bellflower in 1926, told a reporter for the Los Angeles Times in 1987, I would climb on top of a haystack, and I could count 20 little dairies along Woodruff, Palo Verde and South Street. There were eventually more than 400 dairies and more than 100,000 cows in the riverside towns. Southeast Los Angeles County was the largest milk-producing region in the state.
Like Van Leeuwen, many of the dairymen were from the Netherlands, many of them rural immigrants from crowded Friesland, who had arrived before World War II, as well as Hollanders who came as refugees from post-war devastation and famine. (1944-45 had been the Hongerwinter - Hunger Winter in Dutch.) They were followed in the early 1950s by Dutch-speaking families - some of mixed race - that had fled newly independent Indonesia (the former Dutch East Indies) only to face hardship and discrimination in the Netherlands.
Dairying on the drylot model spread up the banks of the San Gabriel River to Downey, Paramount, La Mirada, Cerritos, La Palma, Cypress, and Norwalk, as well as to Bellflower and Artesia. Most dairies were small, but some combined adjacent properties into a larger operation. Nearly all were family owned.
Bellflower and Artesia welcomed the Dutch-speaking immigrants. There were jobs for experienced dairymen and opportunities to buy land. Banks founded during the first wave of immigration in the 1920s financed the purchases. Congregations of the Dutch Reformed Church and the Christian Reformed Church attended Sunday services whose sermons were in Dutch. A church-affiliated elementary school (and, later, a high school) educated the immigrants' children. Dutch social clubs and even a church-affiliated retirement home gave immigrants a sense of stability. Bakeries and specialty markets satisfied their nostalgic longings.
A 27-acre, Dutch-themed shopping center opened in nearby Lakewood, along with a bowling al
