Merchant-turned-financier John Hubert Norton (c. 1845-1911) opened his Norton Place tract at Wilshire and Norton in 1905. (This street was labeled “Woolsey Avenue” on the tract map, but soon took Norton’s name.) John H. Norton was a Massachusetts native who went west in the late 1860s. He settled in Arizona in 1876 and got rich as a government contractor, running a general store at Fort Grant (then an army base, now a state prison). Norton and a Petaluma girl named Mamie Van Doren (yes, really; 1863-1929) got married in 1886 and moved to Los Angeles in 1894, where Norton invested in nearly major industry in town. Their only child Amy (1890-1923) married the son of CA governor Henry T. Gage shortly after her father’s death; she would marry twice more before dying at 32 after an operation.
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