Named in 1893 on a tract owned by Isabella Thornton (1837-1926), whose maiden name was Riggin. In fact her tract was located at Humphreys Avenue in East L.A., a mile and a half west of where Riggin Street now starts (its original stretch became part of East 1st Street in the 1930s), and it’s possible that the street was actually named in 1886 on adjoining tract owned by John Humphreys and Isabella’s brother Eugene. Anyway, our subject was a wealthy widow who came to Los Angeles from St. Louis in 1882 with Eugene, their father John, and her children Pearl and Charles. (I couldn’t dig up much about her late husband Charles H. Thornton Sr., except that he was a Kentucky-born lawyer who had a daughter with his first wife and died in 1879.) She would come to purchase and develop acreage across the Southland while ultimately residing in Hancock Park with Pearl, who never married. As for her son Charles Jr., his life was troubled and brief: he spent years in reform school, was twice sent to insane asylums, and finally blew his brains out in front of a St. Louis hotel in November 1898. He was only twenty-four.
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