Andrew Belcher Gray (1820-1862)
Andrew Belcher Gray, a visionary engineer, is the only man who may be accurately called the "founder" of modern (Anglo-U.S.) San Diego. Gray conceived and initiated the plan to build a port facility and subdivision for San Diego, located on the mainland side of the bay, three miles south of the old town, rather than out on Point Loma at Playa.
Assisting Gray in locating New San Diego of 1850 on the site of the present city, was a young West Pointer, Lt. Thomas Denton Johns. They are unsung heroes of San Diego history, an oversight caused by the reports of historians W. Gifford Smith, Wm. E. Smythe and other early San Diego historians who quoted the reminiscing of aging pioneers as fact. Consequently, a fascinating chapter in the city history was dismissed by Smythe as "The Abortive Attempt to Start a New Town."
Today, we have the original letters and legal documents, written in New Town by the men involved, plus communication with nationwide historical archives. These sources reveal exciting pictures of people.
Joining Gray and Johns in founding New San Diego were four compatriots: William Heath Davis, Jose A. Aguirre and Miguel de Pedrorena [and Wm C. Ferrell]. Each owned 20 per cent; Wm. C. Ferrell and Johns had 10 per cent each. These statistics are new to local history buffs who have accepted William H. Davis as the "founder" of New San Diego since he made that claim to a San Diego Union reporter in 1897. He played a major role as one of six partners.
The six were a distinguished group to be in such a remote, sparsely settled place as the Districto de San Diego, the pueblo's designation in February of 1850, when Gray introduced his plan In Old Town. Johns, as Gray's assistant, knew the plan and also informed the men that a large Army supply depot was to be built on the proposed site, which he had helped Gray survey and map during the first six weeks of 1850.
The proposed New San Diego townsite was a quarter-section (160 acres) of virgin pueblo land, located on the level area south of today's Broadway and west of Front Street. The tract was surveyed and mapped exactly square, 2,640 feet from corner to corner. The western and southern boundaries were submerged at high tide, since Gray ran his survey to the bulkhead line to be as near the channel as possible. The tidelands were claimed by state and city years later, but when the six partners purchased the 160-acre site from San Diego's acting alcalde, Thomas W. Sutherland, on March 18, 1850, the deed included that tideland. Gray was more interested in the harbor of San Diego as a terminus for a transcontinental southern railroad and a link in a global transportation chain, than he was in a land speculator's venture.
Gray was a scientific, pioneering engineer and although he sought wealth, his love of. exploration and research drove his engineering career from the age of 13 until his death at a drafting table at just 42.
Gray, son of William and Sarah Scott Gray, was born In 1920 at Norfolk, Va., where his father was British consul. At 13, he was placed under the tutelage of a leading military engineer and learned his profession surveying the Mississippi Delta.
In 1849, Gray was recognized as one of the leading authorities on civil engineering in the country and was appointed by President James Polk as chief surveyor on the U.S. Boundary Commission.
The commission arrived at San Diego Bay in the summer of 1849, several months before starting a new survey with the Mexican Commission to define the territory ceded the U.S. by Mexico in the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo which ended the war. Gray spent the summer and fall surveying the shoreline and sounding the bay. During that study, Gray met Lieutenant Johns, U.S. Army subsistence officer in charge of a small supply building at La Playa. He told Johns his idea for a proper anchorage for San Diego.
Gray, scholar that he was, had studied the records of Spanish expeditions into San Diego Bay from 1602, through Panteja's charts made in 1782. The Spanish had anchored at a sand spit located where Market Street intersects Pacific Highway today.
They called the place Punta de los Muertos after burying scurvy victims there. Gray said the channel was wider and deeper off point of the dead than opposite La Playa, the anchorage used then.
Johns was a 26-year-old Pennsylvanian who had graduated from the U.S. Military Academy in 1848 with Bachelor of Science degree in engineering and a brevet as Second Lieutenant. He arrived at San Diego with the war-tough 2nd Infantry aboard the propellor steamship "Edith" in April of 1849.
The two engineers were only four years apart in age, but Gray was a veteran with 15 years experience in engineering. Johns' letters reveal his respect for Gray's knowledge and the two men were close friends.
The New San Diego mapping was finished by mid-February. Gray introduced his plan to Davis, a ship-owning San Francisco merchant visiting with his wife in the home of her uncle, Jose A. Estudillo, during February of 1850. Maria Estudillo Davis wanted to live in San Diego, having spent half of her 20 years there with her aunt Guadalupe Arguello, a sister of Don Jose Estudillo. Davis and three other men were planning a port development at La Playa, but after seeing Gray's plan, the La Playa project was forgotten. Davis made New San Diego a land developer's speculation - unwise, for few settlers then migrated to Southern California.
On March 16, 1850, articles of co-partnership were made between Gray, Aguirre, Davis, and de Pedrorena. Each man was to hold four shares of an 18-share total. Lt. Johns and Ferrell had one share apiece. Ferrell sold his share to Geo. F. Hooper a week later and the 18 shares remained unchanged after that time. No one man owned more property than his initial share. Perhaps Davis spent more money, but his free-wheeling maneuvers were wasted, New San Diego was useful as an Army Supply Base and nothing more during the long unsettled decade before the Civil War.
After the big depot was established and Davis' wharf was built, New San Diego was a busy base. Mule park trains and loaded wagons hauled supplies to the outposts at Santa Ysabel, Valecito, Forts Yuma, Mojave, and Tejon. Davis' advertising in San Francisco papers lured a few men to New Town, but they soon sold out and departed. Aside from civilian quartermaster employes, teamsters and a few officer's families, there were no people to support business. The troops were used as escorts for supply trains and lived at the Mission. They did their meager buying in Old Town, where business was not much brisker than at New Town. Gray returned to the boundary survey in 1851 and two years later sailed for Washington, D.C. Lt. Johns' tour of duty ended in 1852 and he moved to San Francisco as a junior partner with a shipping firm.
The steamer Ohio rammed Davis's Wharf in 1853 and he left it unrepaired. Ships refused to use the dangerous pier and Army supplies had to be lightered ashore. When the Army started steamboat service up the Colorado to Fort Yuma from the Gulf of California in early 1854, new Fort Yuma became Supply Center for the southern district and New San Diego Depot was deserted(except for heavy hardware) when troops were moved into the big building, which became New Diego Barracks until 1927
Gray went to Washington, D.C., to ask that New San Diego be given a post office and to contact owners of Panama to San Francisco steamers in an effort to make New Town a port of call. He was probably selling his practical dream, the Southern Pacific railroad to California.
The owners Of Texas Western Railroad hired Gray to make a survey from Texas to the Pacific Coast. He left San Antonio on New Year's Day of 1854, with a large crew and reached San Diego in June. The Old Town citizens held a ball for Gray, that could be called a farewell party, because he never returned to San Diego. The A. B. Gray Report on the Southern Pacific Railroad was published in 1856 and Gray went to Arizona, where he had a profitable copper mining operation. Working out of Tucson, he made surveys for the government.
When the Civil War started, Gray joined the Army of the Confederacy. As a Captain of Engineers, Gray was detailed by General P.T. Beauregard to design new river defenses when the Union was about to control the Upper Mississippi. On April 16, 1862, while Captain Gray worked quietly over his drawing table, aboard a river steamer above Memphis, the boiler below exploded and he was killed.
At the time of Gray's death, Colonel Johns, commanding the 7th Massachusetts Regiment, was in the field with the Union's Army of the Potomac. When the news reached Johns that the war had started, he, was in Virginia City, Nev., where he owned a large portion of the Great Bonanza. He hurried to San Francisco and sailed on the first available ship bound for Panama, then to Washington, where he was given Command of the 7th Mass., already in the field. Johns had been a popular man in San Francisco after leaving New Town. His position as partner in one of the city's largest shipping firms was prestigious and he commanded the First California Guard. He also served as an elector in a presidential election.
In 1865, Johns was brevetted Brigadier-General. Following the war, General Johns, ever the engineer, turned to gold mining in the mountains of northern Georgia. Due to weakened lungs from wounds suffered in the war, he died after a lingering illness in his home at Poughkeepsie, New York in 1883, aged 59.
[from "Far-Seeing Engineer Visualized Modern San Diego" by Ed Scott, San Diego Union, 7/14/1974.]
GRAY, Andrew B. In addition to his service on the boundary commission, Lieutenant Gray was one of the founders of new San Diego, and probably the original initiator of the project. He was a surveyor of more than ordinary ability, and made a survey for the old Southern Pacific Railroad on the 32d parallel in 1854, as far as the Colorado River; from that point, he made only a reconnaissance into San Diego, but it was sufficient to demonstrate the feasibility of the route. His report was published in 1856, and is a very valuable document. During the Civil War, he became a major-general in the Confederate Army.[from William Ellsworth Smythe's History of San Diego, 1907]
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