This street was named for the man who laid it out: Harry Vespasian Wheeler (1850-1929), who surveyed the 148 acre Atwood Addition in 1925. A failed schoolteacher in his native Vermont – Vermont Drive, one block west, surely owes its name to him – Wheeler got into civil and mining engineering and was in California by 1879 with his wife Sarah. After a few years in Santa Rosa and San Diego, by 1898 the Wheelers and their adopted son Harry Jr. were in Long Beach, where Harry Sr. designed sewer systems; they soon relocated to L.A. Wheeler frequently and unsuccessfully ran on the Prohibitionist ticket for both county and state surveyor; he must have known Newhall landowners Marshall Atwood and Henry Clay Needham through temperance circles.
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