Named after Montrose cofounder Robert Alexander Walton (1876-1961). The North Carolina native was in Burlingame, CA in the 1900 census, working as a coachman for Ansel M. Easton – uncle of photographer Ansel Adams – but by 1904 he was a Los Angeles realtor establishing the Holmes-Walton Company with Frederick A. Holmes. Although Holmes quit in 1908, the firm kept his name. Walton and financier J. Frank Walters (see Florencita Drive) then bought 250 acres in the La Crescenta area in 1910. Dubbing their development Montrose after a “name that town” contest, they laid out its streets in 1913. A Mrs. Mary Green allegedly named Waltonia Drive; she was friends with Walton’s sister Ellen Burton, one of Montrose’s first settlers. Then came heartache: Ellen Burton lost her two daughters in a 1916 car crash, the gloom of WWI and the influenza pandemic stifled Montrose’s growth, and 1919 saw Walton marrying Pearl Hibbard Green – he was the second of her four husbands – only for his bride to kill a woman with her car that spring. The marriage was over within two years and Walton never wed again. All I know is that he stayed in real estate.
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