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The Day My Church Blew Down.....

Well when I was a kid growing up in Upland, my family were members of the Presbyterian Church, located on Euclid just north of 11 th street.....And one of the stories that always came up when the Santa Ana's blew was how our first church blew down....Not just the steeple mind you....The whole church was flattened like a pancake.....In fact almost every building in Upland was blown down.

But back then, certain groups of people were trying to get people to move out here so they never mentioned the winds, or the above normal rainfall nor even the times we got snow....In fact if a story was sent in about how cold it was in Upland that story was killed real fast....The Inland Empire had no more zealous champion of its reputation as a land of milk and honey in the 1890s than the area's newspapers.

Neither rain nor wind nor heat nor cold found its way into the headlines, unless it was bad news about somewhere else......Such calamities locally were often soft-pedaled, because, after all, newspapers had a real interest in motivating investors, business, residents and tourists to keep coming to this place where, they implied, the sun always shines.

After a Santa Ana wind flattened almost everything in its path on Dec. 11, 1891, the Pasadena Star begrudgingly admitted things had been a little breezy......But the newspaper also emphasized the wind was a good thing because it knocked down only substandard buildings and the only losses in orchards were of defective fruit.

This rosy viewpoint may explain the absence from Inland Valley papers of details of a disaster that befell a local church congregation during that same windstorm 115 years ago......The unlucky church members were the first Presbyterians who had in 1887 formed the first church in today's Upland, but back then known as North Ontario.

One year later, the congregation opened a magnificent church building, at Euclid Avenue and Ninth Street.....The Ontario Record said it was the handsomest church built on the Santa Fe (railroad) between Pasadena and San Bernardino.....The spire rises over 100 feet from the ground and could be seen fro miles around.

It was built for $7,600, about $2,000 of which was still owed when it was completed......The congregation worked to reduce the debt until the happy day when the final dollar was paid and the mortgage burned. That was Dec. 10, 1891.....The very next day the Santa Ana winds started to blow, the same storm the Pasadena paper dismissed as so beneficial, and blew the debt-free church building to the ground.

It was reported that one James B. Tays, who operated a mule-powered trolley that ran up the middle of Euclid from Ontario to the mountains, looked out the window of his house on 25th Street in San Antonio Heights and did a double take.....were his eyes deceiving him....No, the church steeple he had grown use to seeing was gone....."The church is gone!" he reportedly exclaimed to his young daughter.....The church members, joyous only a day before, were stunned.

So depressed was the Congregation by this disaster that the wreck of the church lay in the midst of 9th St. for 3 months before any effort was made to clear it up, according to our church history.....The Record, in its first mention of the windy disaster nearly 2 weeks later, reported on Dec. 23 that the congregation actually began working at the site within a few days.....I tend to believe our history....You have to remember that until the late 60's it was the papers, realtors and weather people to always paint the most cheerful image of this area....Even if it were 18 degrees and snowing like in December 1968, or in January, 1949 when nearly 18 inches of snow fell all the way down to the Ontario Airport....The Daily Bulletin reported that light dusting covered the streets and roofs...Light they wrote...Hah!

Members collected reusable materials from the wreckage and saved money by using plans from Scientific American magazine....Residents from throughout the area, Presbyterians and others, donated money and labor to help the rebuilding effort......It took less than a year for a new Presbyterian church to rise from the wreckage caused by that strong Santa Ana Wind. On Oct. 2, 1892, the new church was dedicated by its congregation.

Gary Hall, the ghostpainter