Added to the National Register of Historic Places on November 20, 1974

Drive through the City of Industry to the Homestead Museum and you pass by dozens of office parks, warehouses and logistics centers. True to its name, the City of Industry is a place where employees outnumber permanent residents by a factor of 253:1. I don’t have the stats to prove it, but I’d wager there’re more square feet of parking lots here than green space. 

Back in the 1840s though, things looked very different. Rancho La Puente, the area surrounding what’s now the City of Industry, was wide-open ranchland back then. It was virtually unpopulated, aside from a couple adobe homes and outbuildings. It’s a preservation miracle that the Workman Adobe from 1842 is still with us. As we’ll see, the way this home expanded and changed over the decades mirrored the turbulent history of the influential Workman family, and of Los Angeles itself.

So who were these Workman folk? William Workman was an English immigrant who moved to the United States in 1822. For the first couple years in his new country, he worked for his brother David at a saddlery in Franklin, Missouri. By the summer of 1825 he had joined a group heading to New Mexico, where he settled in Taos and spent 15 years as a fur trapper, shop owner and distiller of the infamous knock-yer-boots-off whiskey known as “Taos Lightning.” 

Workman was in assimilation mode in the late 1820s. He married Taos native Nicolasa Urioste, became a Mexican citizen (New Mexico was still under Mexican control at the time), and converted to Catholicism all within a few years’ time. 

But by the late 1830s, Workman and his business partner John Rowland had been swept up in some tricky political machinations. A group of Taos rebels assassinated the New Mexican governor in 1837, and forced Workman and Rowland to pledge their loyalty to their cause. Then after former governor Manuel Armijo crushed the revolt and executed its leaders, Workman was arrested. Soon after Texas seceded from Mexico, declared itself a republic and attempted to annex New Mexico. The new Texan president Mirabeau Lamar conscripted Workman and Rowland to help – in what capacity it’s unclear (one source suggests Workman was involved in an assassination plot against Armijo). But suffice it to say, the pair had good reason to skedaddle from New Mexico, and the New Mexican government must have been happy to see them go. Upon learning of Workman and Rowland’s departure, Armijo described then in a this salty letter to the Mexican Ministry of War and Navy: 

“…the naturalized foreigners Juan Rooland [sic] and William Workman, traitors who have gone to California to seduce and confuse its inhabitants, whose exemplary punishment would be the only dike to the torrent of evils that they have committed in this department under my command, and will be the ones which undoubtedly they will commit in the Californias.”

-Manuel Armijo, letter dated September 22, 1841, quoted in the Homestead Museum Blog

In September of 1841, William Workman, Nicolasa and their two kids packed up their furniture, serapes and goods and joined John Rowland and about 60 other travelers heading to California via the Old Spanish Trail. This represented one of the first groups of non-Hispanic settlers of Alta California under Mexican rule, and what an impactful group it was. The party included the Englishman Michael White, a former sailor who established the Michael White Adobe in San Marino, and future LA mayor Benjamin D. Wilson, the namesake of Mount Wilson.

Stained glass from La Casa Nueva, reimagining the Rowland & Workman caravan to California in 1841 (Workman and Temple Family Homestead Museum, City of Industry)

Fairly immediately after landing in Southern California, John Rowland set off to Monterey to ask Mexico’s governor Alvarado for the 18,000-acre Rancho La Puente. For hundreds of years before the Spanish came, this land was stewarded by the Tongva-Gabrieleño people, who set up their settlement of Awig-na near the San José Creek, close to where the Workman Adobe was built. 

When the Spanish missionaries founded Mission San Gabriel, they took the land for their own and forced the villagers from Awig-na to work in the fields. The Tongva herded livestock, harvested wheat and built a granary just north of the Workman homestead. But after Mexico won its independence from Spain, it secularized the missions, and nullified their vast land holdings, including the Mission San Gabriel Arcángel claim to Rancho La Puente. Though mission officials would assert that they still used the land to graze hundreds of cattle through the early 1840s, this land was effectively without an owner between secularization and the arrival of the Workman-Rowland party in 1841.

Rowland secured the title to Rancho La Puente from Governor Alvarado in early 1842, then returned to New Mexico in April to bring the rest of his family to their new home. In the meantime, William Workman put up a small temporary shanty to live in while he built the earliest portion of his permanent adobe home. The Workman Adobe v1 was livable by the end of 1842, by which point the Workmans had planted bean and corn crops, and began a small farming and ranching operation. 

While no photographs or detailed descriptions exist of that first version of the adobe, we can surmise based on the materials that survived over the years and descriptions of later renovations that it started as a simple one-story rectangular home made of two-foot-thick adobe blocks, covered in white plaster. It was divided into a central multipurpose living/dining room, with a bedroom to the east and a guest room to the west. Based on all the available evidence, it seems likely that this earliest iteration of the adobe had porches extending north and south.

One rather atypical feature was that the house was raised about three feet above grade, to allow for a partially submerged basement. There was a kitchen down there, and storage space for wine when the Workman clan were giving that a go. 

The Workman family and their holdings expanded a lot during the 1840s. Governor Pío Pico formally added William Workman to the title for Rancho La Puente in 1845, and enlarged Rowland & Workman’s land to 48,790 acres; the pair informally split the rancho into two halves, with Workman taking the western and central portions. Pico also co-granted the Mission San Gabriel Arcángel to Workman and the early Scottish pioneer Hugo Reid, and even granted Workman ownership of Alcatraz Island, with the provision that he build a lighthouse on it (he didn’t). All of this was ostensibly a thank you for Workman’s support of Pio Pico in his bloodless battle against governor Micheltorena, which ended in Pico’s governorship.

Also in 1845, William and Nicolasa’s daughter Antonia Margarita married Francis Pliny Fisk (FPF) Temple, a forward-thinking businessman and the half brother to Don Juan Temple, one of the area’s wealthiest men (and the namesake of Temple Street). The marriage was a historically significant one for a number of reasons. It’s often called the first in Los Angeles between two people with non-Spanish last names. And the union of the Workman and Temple families would have a major impact on LA’s development for decades to come.

In the early years of the Workman ranch, much of the family’s income came from selling cattle hides and beef tallow up the coast and down to South America, via the rudimentary port at San Pedro. But things changed for Southern California’s ranchers when gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill in 1848. All of a sudden there was a huge market for meat, from all the prospectors and miners pouring into California from the eastern US, Mexico and elsewhere. Beef became the main export of the Workman ranch, as it did for other ranchers in the area.  

The 1850s brought a lot of change to California. The end of the Mexican-American War in 1848, and California’s admission to the US in the fall of 1850, brought in new political, legal and economic realities that transformed life for ranching families like the Workmans and Temples. William Workman and John Rowland were embroiled in a thorny dispute with the federal government over whether their ownership of Rancho La Puente was legitimate – a question that was only decided in their favor in 1867, 15 years after Workman had submitted his claim to the US Land Commission. 

The Workman Adobe grew alongside the family’s financial fortunes in the 1850s. An 1855 newspaper article about the funeral of William’s brother, David, describes a Masonic procession from the “upper portion of the building” (likely the original adobe section) to the “large room containing the corpse,” in a new southern section. David was the first family member buried at El Campo Santo, the private cemetery the Workmans built in the 1850s. 

In 1856, artist Henry Miller stayed with the Workmans and wrote: “Mr. Workman’s house is a one story building of adobe and forms a square with a yard in the middle. The house is well-finished, and painted with oil colors on the inside and outside, imitating marble, and afterwards varnished.”

By this time the house had expanded from three rooms to 13. There were now two parallel wings of about 130 feet each, jutting south from the original adobe to form an upside-down U shape. On the east was a smoking room with a fireplace and a commissary for ranch employees, shops for a butcher and a blacksmith, and an enclosed room with a water well. On the west was a new sitting room just south of the original guest room, then south of that a small room used as a private school for William and Nicolasa’s grandkids, a saddlery and grain storage. A 20-foot wooden gate connected the two wings at the south end; rising over the middle of it was a pigeon house, where the family kept birds what for eatin’. 

The courtyard formed by the wings and south-facing porch contained tropical fruit trees (later orange trees) that flourished year round, plus a grape arbor down the middle. In the early 1850s the Workmans mostly sold their grapes to local vintners. But by 1860, Workman had a significant winemaking operation on his hands. According to the agricultural schedule of the 1860 census, he was storing some 6,000 gallons of home-made vino.

It was a prescient move for the Workmans to expand their agricultural holdings, because the cattle industry was hit hard in the 1860s. A month of heavy rains began on Christmas Eve 1861, followed by destructive flooding, and then two years of drought that starved many SoCal cattle to death. The rancho era was already on its way out, no thanks to the dwindling Gold Rush and increasing competition from midwestern and Texan ranchers. All of those water woes of the early 1860s were the proverbial final nail in the coffin. 

The Workman clan stayed afloat by diversifying. By the late 1860s they had some 5,000 acres of wheat, plus cotton, tobacco, sugar-cane and hops, in addition to the fruit and wine grapes that already took up significant acreage on the Workman ranch. And in 1871, after their partnership with pioneering banker Isaias W. Hellman fizzled, William Workman and his son-in-law FPF Temple formed the Workman & Temple bank. It was headquartered in a brand new three-story structure at the intersection of Main, Spring & Temple streets, the centerpiece of an entire block financed by FPF Temple. The building’s long gone now, knocked down in the early 1920s to make way for the current LA City Hall. 

The early 1870s were heady years for Workman and Temple. They invested in oil, water and railroad infrastructure, real estate, new construction downtown, the expansion of the port in San Pedro, and – crucially – the silver mines that served the Comstock Lode near Virginia City, Nevada.

Just like he had in the Gold Rush days, Workman put some of his investment profits to work in remodeling his house around 1870. The changes to the Workman Adobe were dramatic: the two projecting wings were largely demolished, and new rooms with red brick walls, covered in plaster, were added to the north and south of the original adobe core, turning the upside-down U into a squat H. A brick second story was added (though left unfinished until decades later), covered by a steeply-pitched roof, and punctuated by four chimneys atop several new coal-burning fireplaces. 

The entire house was decked out in arched, tripartite windows separated by Corinthian columns, ornate balustrades, quoins and decorative brackets holding up the eaves. The house transformed from a humble Spanish adobe to a handsome country house in a mishmash of European revival styles. Some conjecture that this was a nostalgic ode to William Workman’s youth in England. Maybe, but there was plenty of Italian and Greek influence in the remodeled house, too. 

Most sources attribute the remodel to Ezra F. Kysor, LA’s first professional architect, who coincidentally came to LA from New York by way of…Virginia City, Nevada. Kysor designed a staggering number of pre-19th century LA buildings. Though most of them are demolished, the buildings that aren’t are among our most cherished landmarks, including the Pico House and Merced Theatre at the Plaza, the Samuel Foy House & Michael Sanders House (where Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video was filmed) on the 1300 Block of Carroll Avenue and later, St. Vibiana’s Cathedral. Given the decades-long relationship between Pio Pico and William Workman, it’s totally conceivable that Pico introduced Kysor to Workman after Kysor designed the Pico Hotel. And the family tradition continued: Kysor would later build a house in Boyle Heights for William and Nicolasa Workman’s son, Joseph.

The Workman and Temple families lived high on the hog in the early 1870s. Five years after the renovation though, everything changed. A financial panic took hold of California on August 24, 1875, due in large part to an over-inflated investment bubble in the speculative silver mining firms working the Comstock Lode in Nevada. When that bubble burst, depositors in San Francisco’s Bank of California rushed to pull out their money. The bank closed, and its President William Ralston was found floating in San Francisco Bay the next day. 

When news spread to Los Angeles, the Workman & Temple Bank’s customers rushed to reclaim their deposits, and the bank was forced to close for almost three months. FPF Temple asked the wealthy landowner Elias “Lucky” Baldwin for a $3,000 loan, and put up much of the Workman and Temple families’ real estate holdings as collateral, including the Workman Adobe and Rancho La Puente. But the loan wasn’t enough. After just five weeks back open, the Workman & Temple Bank folded for good. FPF Temple declared bankruptcy, and William Workman lost his homestead of 30+ years to Baldwin. On May 17, 1876, just hours after one of Baldwin’s agents had paid him a visit at the Workman Adobe, William Workman shot himself in the parlor. He was buried in the family cemetery near the grave of his old friend John Rowland. 

Writing of Workman’s suicide, historian Remi Nadeau asserted “That pistol shot sounded the death knell of El Pueblo’s first boom years.” Hyperbole perhaps, but it’s true that his passing, and the failure of the Workman & Temple Bank, coincided with a period of decline in both LA’s population and the assessed value of land in LA County. 

Workman’s death had a big impact on the ranch, too. Young Francis Workman Temple, the 20-something grandson of William and son of FPF, returned from his legal studies in London to help untangle his grandpa’s estate. Francis had been born in the Workman Adobe in 1848, and had worked for his family’s wine business for a few years before William’s suicide. 

Francis came home to live on the homestead for a few years before the foreclosure was finalized, and continued the wine-making and brandy operations that his grandfather had begun. By 1880 he had earned enough to purchase back the home from Lucky Baldwin, plus 75 acres of ranchland, for $5,000. A dramatic reduction from the nearly 49,000 acres that Workman and Rowland used to own, but at least the family had land to live on. The old water tower that now houses a gift shop at the Homestead Museum? We think that was installed in the 1880s, likely by Francis. 

Unfortunately Francis passed away of tuberculosis in 1888, just a couple days shy of his 40th birthday. The homestead and ranch ended up in the hands of Francis’s brother John H. Temple, who struggled financially and lost the property to foreclosure in 1899 after a bad mortgage decision. For the next 17 years a succession of owners from outside the Workman and Temple families owned the homestead, including one schmuck who tried to dismantle the cemetery and desecrate its burial grounds in order to grow barley and graze his cattle. 

A far less destructive duo of real estate investors from Pasadena swapped some land for the homestead in 1907, and one of them – Thurston H. Pratt – moved into the Workman Adobe with his family. They farmed there for a few years, and hosted barbecues and Halloween parties. Eventually they sold the old La Puente ranch to the Puente Rancho Packing Company, a joint-stock company that turned the old Workman winery into a pork butchery specializing in “country sausage,” and grew fruits and vegetables to ship to LA department stores.

The next significant upgrades to the Workman Adobe itself came after 1917, when Walter Temple – 10th son of FPF and Antonia Margarita Temple – bought back his family’s ancestral home and land. Three years prior, Walter’s nine-year-old son Thomas had discovered oil in a puddle on their property in Montebello Hills. The family leased out the land for drilling, and soon they were earning $2,000 per day in oil royalties. Within a few weeks they could afford to plunk down $40k for the house, the cemetery and the 75 acres left to them after the Baldwin foreclosure. 

Walter and his wife Laura yanked the Workman Adobe into the modern age in the 1920s, introducing electricity and heating, and installing closet space. The south porch was enclosed at some point after 1917, perhaps during Walter and Laura’s residence. 

They made all sorts of improvements to the property surrounding the house, too. One of the old winery buildings was transformed into an auditorium. Another outbuilding turned into a nine-car garage, and a third became a 150-seat dining hall. New homes were built for the ranch foreman and servants; a dual purpose reservoir/swimming pool was added, and the Temples even remodeled the second floor of the water tower as a bedroom to use during their frequent visits, before the Temples’ permanent house La Casa Nueva (listed separately on the National Register) was completed on site. 

It was good times for the Temple family during much of the 1920s. Walter parlayed his petroleum success to a career in real estate wheeling and dealing. He developed downtown Alhambra, and invested in construction projects throughout LA County. He even founded a town named after his family, now known as Temple City.

But by the late 1920s Walter was overextended. He took out a mortgage on the homestead that he couldn’t pay back. So in 1930, right at the onset of the Great Depression, the Temples had to leave their home. In May of that year the Temples leased 20 acres of their homestead to the Golden State Military Academy (later known as Raenford), including the Workman Adobe, La Casa Nueva and many of the surrounding buildings that had been built or renovated in the 1920s. They kept the remaining 72 acres for commercial walnut farming. 

During Golden State/Raenford’s occupancy, the school converted the Workman Adobe for use as a school. A dormer on the north gable was added in the 1930s, but probably the most enduring adjustment from this period was a central partition wall that divided the larger interior spaces into smaller classrooms. 

With the Temples’ financial condition worsening, in 1932 California Bank foreclosed on the homestead. It was the third and final time that the Workman/Temple clan had lost their longtime home. Golden State/Raenford’s lease was expanded to cover the entire ranch, and the school stayed at the homestead until 1935, when it moved to the San Fernando Valley, setting up shop at a former country club in Encino. 

In 1940 the homestead was purchased by Harry and Lois Brown, who converted it into El Encanto Sanitarium for the next 20+ years. They used the Workman Adobe, La Casa Nueva and the other outbuildings as a convalescent hospital, but in 1963 a California mandate required them to build a new facility north of the existing houses. The newly-established City of Industry bought the Workman Adobe, El Campo Santo Cemetery, water tower and nearby pump house from the Browns in 1963; between 1970 and 1973, the remainder of the homestead was sold piecemeal to the City of Industry.

The City spent $3.4 million restoring the homestead in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, under the supervision of restoration architect Raymond Girvigian (known for restoring the California State Capitol building in Sacramento) and project coordinator Mel Gooch. The decision was made to only work on the exterior of the Workman Adobe, and bring it back to its appearance in the 1870s, after its deluxe renovation by (we think) Ezra Kysor. Workers stripped down multiple layers of decaying wall finish, exposing the original adobe bricks underneath. You can still see some of them through plexiglass windows .

The restoration went slower than expected, thanks in part to the collapse of nearly the entire east wall in 1977, which necessitated its reconstruction out of cement blocks and brick. But once that was all set, they added a new layer of plaster, and artist Dorothy Nersesian (sister-in-law to the restoration architect Girvigian) penciled and stippled the plaster to give it the appearance of textured granite blocks, just like it was described in the 1850s. The restoration work was complete by 1980, and the homestead reopened to the public as a museum in the spring of 1981. For its commitment to historic preservation, the City of Industry was honored by the Los Angeles Conservancy in 1982.

A round of renovations from 2007-2015 finally addressed the Workman Adobe’s interior. The 1930s-era partition was brought down, which meant you could look down the entire length of the original adobe core for the first time in 80+ years. The first floor was remodeled for use as exhibit space, and the old bedrooms are stocked with late 19th century furniture. Some of the pieces were owned by John and Anita Davoust Temple, who lived here for a decade beginning in 1888. 

The 2000s renovations turned up some wonderful surprises. Underneath many layers of paint and wallpaper in the southwest bedroom, workers found some beautifully painted leaves dating to the 1890s. The Homestead Museum has preserved some of the original leaves, and replicated them elsewhere in the room. 

An electrician made another curious discovery upstairs in 2008: four girls’ shoes, none of them matching, had been sitting beneath the floorboards since the late 1800s. There is a European folk tradition of hiding footwear near doors or windows to ward off evil. One theory is that Anita Temple, a Frenchwoman, introduced the shoe-hiding practice to the Workman Adobe after she and John moved in.

What’s resulted from these waves of restoration is a home that exposes its own layered history. You can see evidence of many eras of the Workman Adobe’s story here, from the adobe bricks of the 1840s to the grapevines and fruit trees that buffeted their finances in the 1850s and 1860s; from the major renovation in the 1870s that still defines its look today, to the water tower and interior design of the late 1800s. It’s pretty remarkable how the Workman Adobe interprets the story of its inhabitants, the region, and itself all at once. 

Towards the bottom of the Workman Adobe’s 1974 application for the National Register of Historic Places, there’s a short note from the National Park Service’s architectural historian Bill Lebovich: “Could be combined with other two nominations to form a district.” 

Lebovich had a point. The National Park Service had received three separate applications for the Workman Adobe, the Temple Mansion and El Campo Santo Cemetery on the same day, October 21, 1974. This, despite the three sites being right next to each other, and originating from the same extended family of Los Angeles pioneers. A few years later all three sites would be united as part of the Homestead Museum, as they are today. It’d make sense to consider their history collectively. 

Personally I’m glad that they were kept separate for the purposes of landmark designation. It gives us more cause to consider them individually, as both works of architecture and as built reflections of all the ups and downs endured by the Workman and Temple families over the nearly 100 years that they lived on this property. And the Workman Adobe is the landmark that started it all. 

Thank you to Paul R. Spitzzeri of the Homestead Museum for answering my questions about the Workman Adobe, and for his decades of scholarship about the Workman and Temple families. Seriously, the guy wrote more than two dozen of the sources I consulted for this article.

The Workman Adobe is open for free, guided public tours on Friday, Saturday and Sunday at noon & 2pm (except the fourth weekend of the month). You can also take a free tour of La Casa Nueva at 1 & 3pm those same days, and visit El Campo Santo Cemetery seven days a week from 9am-5pm.

Sources & Recommended Reading

+ “19th-Century California Treasures: Historic Workman Site Open to Public” (Los Angeles Times, May 3, 1981 – via ProQuest)

+ “A Dreadful Thing.” (Los Angeles Daily Star, May 18, 1876 – via Newspapers.com)

+ Avery, Sue: “City of Industry Pays Tab for All Work at 6-Acre Historical Site” (Los Angeles Times, August 2, 1984 – via ProQuest)

+ Birkinshaw, Jack: “Restored Buildings to Open This Spring” (Los Angeles Times, December 28, 1980 – via ProQuest)

+ “The Brothers Workman” (Los Angeles Herald, May 20, 1876 – via Newspapers.com)

+ City of Industry: “Employment Base” (https://www.cityofindustry.org)

+ “City of Industry” (Los Angeles Almanac © 1998-2025 Given Place Media, publishing as Los Angeles Almanac, visited October 23, 2025)

+ “Conservancy Group Names Six Winners” (Los Angeles Times, May 9, 1982 – via ProQuest)

+ Gooch, Millard for the City of Industry: Workman Adobe’s NRHP nomination form

+ Harvey, Steve: “The footprints of a historical mystery” (Los Angeles Times, September 12, 2010 – via ProQuest)

+ “Homestead Museum Introductory Video– English with subtitles” (VIDEO – @homesteadmuseum457 on YouTube, Sep 1, 2023)

+ “Introduction to the Homestead Museum” (VIDEO – @Clark3d on YouTube, November 8, 2011)

+ Kines, Mark Tapio: “Temple Street” (LAStreetNames.com)

+ Meares, Hadley: “Family Plots: El Campo Santo Cemetery at the Workman-Temple Homestead” (PBSSocal.org, September 27, 2013)

+ “Mission City Affinity: The Workman and Temple Family and San Gabriel, 1842-1972” (VIDEO – @homesteadmuseum457 on YouTube, September 18, 2023)

+ “Obsequies of David Workman, Esq.” (Los Angeles Star, November 17, 1855 – via Newspapers.com)

+ Spitzzeri, Paul R.: “All in the Family/Beyond the Grave Two-Fer: The Death and Funeral of David Workman, 1855” (Homestead Museum Blog, October 27, 2017)

+ Spitzzeri, Paul R.: “‘All That Glitters in the Gilded Age’ Preview: A Triple Tragedy for the Workman and Temple Family in Early 1892” (Homestead Museum Blog, April 14, 2022)

+ Spitzzeri, Paul R.: “All the Right Notes: A Cancelled Promissory Note from William Workman to Isaias W. Hellman, 23 June 1866” (Homestead Museum Blog, June 23, 2025)

+ Spitzzeri, Paul R.: “An Exciting New Acquisition: A Photograph of The Workman House by William M. Godfrey, ca. 1872” (Homestead Museum Blog, April 5, 2021)

+ Spitzzeri, Paul R.: “Behind the Scenes Preview: Early Descriptions of the Workman House, 1856-1865” (Homestead Museum Blog, February 20, 2021)

+ Spitzzeri, Paul R.: “Behind the Scenes Postscript: The Owners of the Workman House, 1899-1917” (Homestead Museum Blog, February 21, 2021)

+ Spitzzeri, Paul R.: “Going With the Flow: The Homestead’s Water Tower” (Homestead Museum Blog, March 31, 2020) 

+ Spitzzeri, Paul R.: “Indigenous Peoples Day and Native Peoples in the Homestead’s History” (Homestead Museum Blog, October 14, 2019)

+ Spitzzeri, Paul R.: “The Land Grant to Rancho La Puente, February 1842” (Homestead Museum Blog, February 28, 2018)

+ Spitzzeri, Paul R.: “Makers of Men”: The Golden State and Raenford Military Academies at the Homestead, 1930-1935 (Homestead Museum Blog, April 16, 2020)

+ Spitzzeri, Paul R.: “No Place Like Home: The Workman House, ca. 1872” (Homestead Museum Blog, October 9, 2019)

+ Spitzzeri, Paul R.: “No Place Like Home: The Workman House in the 1920s” (Homestead Museum Blog, May 6, 2017)

+ Spitzzeri, Paul R.: “On This Day, 1 September 1875: Banking Panic on Election Day!” (Homestead Museum Blog, September 1, 2016)

+ Spitzzeri, Paul R.: “On This Day: The Death of William Workman, 17 May 1876” (Homestead Museum Blog, May 17, 2017)

+ Spitzzeri, Paul R.: “On This Day: Workman House Restoration Photos, 1977” (Homestead Museum Blog, May 24, 2019)

+ Spitzzeri, Paul R.: “Photos of the Pratt and Bassett Families at the Workman Homestead, 1912” (Homestead Museum Blog, April 21, 2024)

+ Spitzzeri, Paul R.: “Read All About It in the Los Angeles Weekly Herald, 3 July 1875, Part Three” (Homestead Museum Blog, July 6, 2025)

+ Spitzzeri, Paul R.: ”Reading Between the Lines in a Letter from Charles W. Tandy of the Temple Estate Company to Walter P. Temple, 17 October 1930” (Homestead Museum Blog, October 17, 2023)

+ Spitzzeri, Paul R.: “The Rise and Fall of Adobe Abodes in Greater Los Angeles, 1851-1876, Part One” (Homestead Museum Blog, June 22, 2024)

+ Spitzzeri, Paul R.: “Take It To The Bank: A Short History of Hellman, Temple and Company, Bankers, 1868-1871, Part One” (Homestead Museum Blog, January 31, 2024)

+ Spitzzeri, Paul R.: “Taken for Granite: Photos of Restoration of Decorative Plaster at the Workman House, 1978” (Homestead Museum Blog, August 15, 2021)

+ Spitzzeri, Paul R.: “Through the Viewfinder: The Temple Block, Los Angeles, ca. 1872” (Homestead Museum Blog, June 30, 2020)

+ Spitzzeri, Paul R.: “’Torrent of Evils’: A Warning About An Immigrant Caravan to California, Fall 1841” (Homestead Museum Blog, November 5, 2018)

+ Spitzzeri, Paul R.: “Working the Land: The Workman Vineyards and Wine-Making, 1840s through 1870s” (Homestead Museum Blog, September 27, 2017)

+ Spitzzeri, Paul R.: The Workman & Temple Families of Southern California, 1830-1930 (Seligson Publishing Incorporated, 2007)

+ Spitzzeri, Paul with Lillian Choy & Alexandra Rasic, editors: “The Story in History: The Workman and Temple Family from 1839 to 1930 (BROCHURE – Homestead Museum, 2009)

+ “Suicide of William Workman.” (Los Angeles Herald, May 19, 1876 – via Newspapers.com)

+“The Summing Up of All Parts: The Workman and Temple Family and Greater LA History, 1830-1930” (VIDEO – @homesteadmuseum457 on YouTube, July 17, 2023)