This street was born in 1914 as Foothill Drive on the 8,170 acre Suburban Foothill Estates tract. (I suspect L.A. Times publisher/Valley developer Harrison Gray Otis owned this huge piece of land, since he did have a ranch on what would become Tarzana, but I’m not 100% certain.) A year later, Los Angeles annexed the SFV. Since L.A. already had a Foothill Drive in the Hollywood Hills, this one was eventually rechristened Wells Drive – probably inspired by a family of citrus growers residing at what is now Wells and Vanalden. George Washington Wells (1858-1935) and Emma Elizabeth Wells (née Coultas, 1866-1952) were Illinoisans who married in 1883 and relocated to the Oxnard area about eleven years later: records showed their daughter Cecil being born in IL in 1893 whereas their sixth and youngest child Rollie was born outside of Oxnard in 1895, so we can estimate the timing of their California move. (Oxnard wasn’t even on the map yet: Rollie’s birth certificate had him born in “Springville”.) George ran a fruit cart and got his jaw broken in a 1907 fight, and the Wellses’ nineteen-year-old son Austin died from a skin infection in 1910. Little else is known about their time there. The family settled on this land around 1914 – they were almost certainly tenants of one Henry R. Bristol, who had purchased eighty acres that year for citrus cultivation and his own home – but left by 1924 to spread out across Los Angeles.
Find it on the map:
