Ohio-born Thomas Hudson (1842-1915) was a Civil War veteran whose first vocation was running a saloon in St. Joseph, MO in the 1870s. After three family deaths within two years – his nine-year-old son Charles, his first wife Mary, his infant daughter Emma – Hudson married Lavenia Sayle (1855-1930) in 1882. Five years later, the Hudson clan, including daughter Blanche and son Thomas E., trekked out to Los Angeles, where youngest daughter Elizabeth was born. In 1899, they bought seven acres in Hollywood and built a home on the corner of present-day Hollywood Blvd. and Hudson Ave. In fact this street took the Hudson name in 1903 when the family subdivided their property. (An 1887 tract map shows it as a planned road called “Dae Avenue”, after Hollywood founder Daeida Wilcox, but it’s not known if it ever went by that name.) Thomas E. Hudson – that is, the son – remained on Hudson Ave. until his death in 1955. Ironically, the two block stretch of Hudson that the Hudsons actually lived on is no longer called Hudson: it’s now Schrader Blvd.
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