Les Storrs Santa Monica Portrait of a City Yesterday and Today, Santa Monica Bank: Santa Monica, CA, 1974, 67 pp. 1874
"Already a major land owner, Colonel Baker in 1874 married Dona Arcadia Bandini de Stearns, widow of Don Abel Steans, an American who had come to California as one of the very earliest American settlers.
"She was also the daughter of Don Juan Bandini, one of the wealthiest and most distinguished of the pioneer citizens of Los Angeles county, and the progenitor of a family very well known to this day . . .
"Then came Sen. John Percival Jones, universially regarded as the founder of Santa Monica. Senator Jones, who had made a fortune in mining operations in Nevada, having been one of the developers of the Comstock lode, first visited the area in 1874 . . . there was a small resort at the mouth of Santa Monica Canyon.
"There was also a very small commercial port operating from a wooden pier just west of the present site of the Santa Monica municipal pier. Small coastal vessels put in, when weather permitted, and loaded asphalt mined from the La Brea pits which then were part of the Rancho La Brea which had been acquired by the Hancock family.
"Senator Jones was impressed with the potential of Sant Monica even though Los Angeles at that time was a small town. Santa Monica, he believed, needed a railroad in order to achieve its destiny."