Named in 1892 on a rural tract owned by attorney Jackson Alpheus Graves (1852-1933). You’ll note that Graves Avenue intersects with Jackson Avenue: that’s probably a nod to Graves and/or his buddy John E. Jackson, who surveyed the tract. Jackson Graves was born in Iowa and came to Marysville, CA with his family when he was barely five. He graduated from St. Mary’s College, then located in San Francisco, and passed the Bar in that city in 1876 although he himself had recently moved down to Los Angeles. It was in L.A. where Graves would forge a stellar legal career that made him a fortune and friends in high places. In 1879, he wedded Alice Howard Griffith (1857-1939). Her lumber baron father (see Griffith Street) gifted them a thirty acre ranch on the Alhambra/San Marino border in 1885 and they built their forever home there three years later (see Pasqualito Drive). Graves retired from law practice in 1904 to focus on his duties as VP of Farmers & Merchants Bank, run by his powerful pal Isaias W. Hellman, and ascended to the bank’s presidency in 1920 upon Hellman’s death. Graves published a rambling memoir, My Seventy Years in California, in 1929; it is freely available on the Internet if you’d like to know more about the man.
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