This 1905 street surely honors Reuben Frederick “R.F.” McClellan (1859-1930) although he lived on Santa Monica at Wellesley. McClellan, whom friends knew as “Fred”, was born in Maine and grew up in Minnesota, where he rose from lumber camps into forest management. The course of his life would change in 1898 when, during the Klondike Gold Rush, he led a group of miners to Alaska. They didn’t find much gold on that first outing, but two years later his men found copper – tons of it. After years of lawsuits disputing ownership of this priceless lode, McClellan emerged victorious and became a wealthy man. He, his wife Grace, and their little boy Neil moved to Sawtelle in 1904; two years later, McClellan was president of the brand new Citizens’ State Bank of Sawtelle. (William Sawtelle himself was VP.) Along with his banking and mining pursuits, McClellan was elected to the L.A. County Board of Supervisors in 1916 and there he served – often as chairman – until his death. McClellan’s final decade reads like a soap opera: Grace died of breast cancer in 1921; he married Elma Brunty, forty-one years his junior, in 1923; Neil perished in a small plane crash near El Segundo in 1925; and finally, with just a year left in his own life, he sired Reuben Frederick Jr. and left Sawtelle for Beverly Hills.
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