Franklin’s provenance is a stumper, but there’s one intriguing clue: A short 1926 biography of early Los Feliz farmer Ambrose Gregory (see Ambrose Avenue) made a point of stating that Gregory’s uncle by marriage, an Englishman named Chapman Abraham Clarke (1840-1926), christened Franklin Avenue. Clarke did indeed own land in the Los Feliz area in 1887 – and the first printed reference I found to Franklin Avenue was in that very year. If true, the bio didn’t suggest whom Clarke was honoring: American founding father Benjamin Franklin? A local settler by that name? All I know is that Clarke had no Franklins in his family tree. Some historians claim that “franklin”, an archaic British term meaning “landowner of free but not noble birth”, is the true source of the name, and that someone (i.e. Clarke) took the word out of Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, whose character Cedric the Saxon is a franklin. Ivanhoe did inspire other street names, so it’s not a completely insane suggestion. But it’s pretty insane. P.S. Franklin Canyon is named for someone else.
Find it on the map:
