The Annandale name came to this neck of the woods not with the 1906 golf club but twenty years earlier with the Annandale tract. The property, some 294 acres by my count, was owned by Alexander Robert Campbell-Johnston (1812-1888), a retired British colonial official whose father Sir Alexander Johnston (1775-1849) had the same job – and was born in Dumfriesshire, Scotland, where the district of Annandale is located. So there you have it. (It’s the dale, or valley, around the River Annan.) Campbell-Johnston was born in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) while his father was posted there, and would himself act as administrator of Hong Kong in 1841-1842, at the dawn of its era as a British colony. After a subsequent period in England, Campbell-Johnston brought his wife Frances (1836-1893) and at least three of their grown sons to Los Angeles in 1883 and purchased 1,702.64 acres of Rancho San Rafael from Victor Beaudry. (Later reports suggest that the family’s holdings here grew to 2,500 acres.) In 1889, Frances built the Church of the Angels on Mountain Avenue (now Avenue 64) in memory of her late husband. Speaking of dead Campbell-Johnstons, Conway, one of the aforementioned sons, perished with his wife Ida on the Lusitania when it was sunk by a German torpedo in 1915. Annandale Road was named in 1906 or 1907 on the Cheviotdale tract.
Find it on the map:
