Location: East side of Baldwin Lake, across from Queen Anne Cottage.
Dedicated in 2018.
Panel 1
Sign text: Baldwin Lake casts a long shadow of history at the core of the Arboretum, its four acres bearing witness to a who’s who of settlers and owners of note over the years. Before recorded history, Gabrielino villagers called this home place Aleupkigna, roughly and aptly translated as “a place of many waters.” Subsequent Spanish occupation was locally centered at Mission San Gabriel (1771), and by 1806 the land was known as Rancho Santa Anita, an agricultural outpost of the Mission. The first private owner of Rancho Santa Anita was a naturalized Scotsman named Hugo Reid, who married Victoria, a widow of Gabrielino descent. Possible remnants of the Reid home near the Lake remain, though greatly altered by subsequent owners of this fertile, valuable land.
When Elias Jackson ‘Lucky’ Baldwin purchased Rancho Santa Anita in 1875, the ranch was situated on a 2,000 acre artesian belt, a benefit of the Raymond (Hill) Fault. Sixty percent of Baldwin Ranch irrigation waters came from artesian sources; the remaining forty percent was piped in from nearby Big and Little Santa Anita Canyons where Baldwin had acquired water rights. Lucky Baldwin deepened the natural lake basin in the 1880s, reportedly 12 to 15 feet, and effectively transformed his natural holding reservoir into a postcard-perfect scenic wonder surrounded by a stone retaining wall capped with signature granite boulders. Irrigation purposes were still served with nearby orchards and vineyards the direct beneficiaries, but tourism and potential land sales came into play as Baldwin looked to transform his prime ranch property into saleable city lots.
In 1903, ‘Lucky’ Baldwin engineered the incorporation of the City of Arcadia and became its first elected mayor. His lakeside home site included both the transformed Reid adobe structure, fully modernized for his purposes, and a guesthouse identified variously as a cottage, clubhouse or even ‘casino.’ Both the modest Adobe and the elegant Queen Anne Cottage remain today, and both are designated historic landmarks, but their setting includes a cultural landscape feature becoming increasingly rare in today’s urban setting. Baldwin Lake is a treasure unto itself, recognized on the National Register of Historic Places as a significant contributor to Baldwin’s architectural gems (Cottage and matching Coach Barn), but additionally a jewel in today’s urban watershed, an important recharge basin, an oasis, in effect, in the asphalt jungle that surrounds the Arboretum.
