A recent post here about the short-lived Wilmington Journal newspaper and its publisher, A. The prominent Banning family of Wilmington and what is now the Port of Los Angeles owned Catalina for nearly thirty years from the early 1890s to the late 1910s and brought about major changes to the island as a tourist paradise, centered on the island’s sole town, Avalon. Temple who held claims on the southwest portion of the island, though, as is all too often the case, nothing came of the efforts to find precious metals there. Later, it was a land grant under Mexico and fell under the ownership of a variety of figures after the American era began in the late 1840s.įor a brief period there was a mining boom on the island and among the speculators were William Workman and his son-in-law F.P.F.
Santa Catalina Island for millenia was Pimu, home to native indigenous people who also resided in the thousands on the mainland of what is now greater Los Angeles.
