Added to Whittier’s core streets at the tail end of 1887, Camilla Street was a gift to Kate Camilla Lindley (1854-1926), then-wife of Whittier cofounder Hervey Lindley. (She never went by “Camilla”; I guess “Kate Street” just didn’t have the same ring to it.) Our subject, born Kate Camilla Owens in Pennsylvania, was the daughter of a prominent lawyer and surveyor. Her family moved to a farm outside of Waterloo, Iowa in 1865 and ten years later she married young lumber baron Hervey Lindley. The two came to Los Angeles in 1886. Although they would own a house and hundreds of acres of farmland in Whittier, it appears that Hervey, with his myriad business and political interests, mostly stayed in L.A. Kate’s parents and two of her three siblings soon moved out here to keep her company. Good thing, too: Hervey abandoned Kate in 1902 and she secured her divorce from him in 1905. She remained a pillar of the Whittier community for the rest of her life – but she lived on Greenleaf, not on Camilla. Family footnote: Kate’s brother Madison Owens cofounded a law firm that would eventually count Richard Nixon as a partner.
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