If you've ever driven the 400 block of East Bennett Avenue near Minnesota Avenue, you've seen it: walls of vivid pink climbing right up the trunks of the palms. Those vines are not just pretty. They are a California Registered Historical Landmark, and their story reaches back to a whaling ship.
Planted in 1901 by the R.W. Hamlins, early Glendora citrus growers, the Glendora Bougainvillea is California Historical Landmark No. 912. The landmark plaque, placed in 1978, describes it as the largest growth of this exotic plant in the United States and records that the parent stock was brought to California by a whaling ship around 1870.
The plaque, placed by the State Department of Parks and Recreation in cooperation with the L.J. Pittman family on January 7, 1978, also notes that the vines survive as one of the best remaining examples of the early 20th-century promotional image of California as paradise. In the booster era, images of lush, flowering vines and palm-lined streets were exactly how California sold itself to the rest of the country. On Bennett Avenue, that postcard image is still alive and blooming.
The recognition does not stop at the state level. The Glendora Bougainvillea is also listed on the National Register of Historic Places, added in February 1978, with significance in landscape architecture, agriculture, and social history. It is a rare thing: a living landmark. Most historic markers commemorate a building or an event. This one commemorates a plant that has simply kept growing for 125 years.
The vines and their stone monument sit right along Bennett Avenue, visible from the street, where the pink blooms spill over the hedges and climb the palm trunks. On a clear morning you can catch the pink against a blue sky with the moon still out.
Glendora is full of these quiet pieces of history, and they are part of what gives our neighborhoods their character. If you are curious about the stories behind the streets you are thinking of calling home, I am always happy to share what I know.
Erika Baños-Soria | Broker Associate, Coldwell Banker Envision | DRE #01809655
Sources
- National Register of Historic Places listing (National Park Service)
- California Historical Landmark No. 912 guidebook entry
- The landmark plaque at E. Bennett Ave. and Minnesota Ave., Glendora (placed January 7, 1978); plaque text quoted from the plaque itself.
