Named not for the Australian city but for landowner Horace Alrah Bourne (1862-1917), who laid out this street in 1903-1904. (Why he didn’t just go with “Bourne Avenue” is a mystery; the city had no conflicting streets with that name.) Bourne was born in Indiana, the only child of a farming couple. A woodworker by trade, he and his widowed (divorced?) mother Eliza (1835-1921) moved to Los Angeles in 1886. He briefly went back home two years later to marry local girl Ida Lee Driggs (1866-1943). All three Bournes – there were no children – lived in DTLA until around 1901, when they moved into a house on Vermont near its present-day intersection with Melbourne. By this point, Bourne had graduated from making window frames to owning a mattress factory; he would later run a wood planing mill. The Bournes inexplicably relocated to Downey c. 1909 while also keeping a cottage in Manhattan Beach. They returned to their Vermont Ave. house in early 1917, but Bourne had a stroke while serving on jury duty and passed away that July. Ida and Eliza soon returned to Manhattan Beach. After Eliza’s death, Ida spent her final years in the Indiana town where she grew up.
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