Guion Hamilton (1 results)

No Binding. Condition: vg. Iowa Embezzler Promotes Otay in 1887-88Rare unrecorded pictorial promotional sheet for the Otay townsite tract in southeastern San Diego County. Issued by real estate promoters Guion, Hamilton & Hartley and printed b. Pictorial lettersheet printed in blue-grey ink. Vignette of a village or town settlement. Manuscript letter on verso dated at San Diego, Nov. 8, 1888. Old fold marks. A bit toning to one panel. Else very good. Iowa Embezzler Promotes Otay in 1887-88Rare unrecorded pictorial promotional sheet for the Otay townsite tract in southeastern San Diego County. Issued by real estate promoters Guion, Hamilton & Hartley and printed by local San Diego job printers Ferguson, Bumgardner & Co. this illustrated real estate promotional also served as a lettersheet (the present example with a handwritten letter by A. E. Peck, Jr. Secretary of the San Diego Savings & Loan Assn. dated Nov. 8, 1888, see below for details of his alleged financial crimes). While the printing is not dated, we know from local San Diego newspaper advertisements that Guion, Hamilton & Hartley were heavily promoting their Otay townsite beginning in the summer of 1887 through early 1888. The exuberant text envisions a bucolic suburb ten miles southeast of San Diego in the Otay Valley:Otay. Extensive improvements are going on, values are increasing steadily, and the time is now ripe for a good suburban town. The climate is not excelled in the world, and the whole tract is underlaid with pure, soft and cold mountain water at a depth of from 25 to 40 feet. We have platted this magnificent piece of land under the name of Otay in honor of the valley, and so popular is the location that one hundred lots were taken in a retail way within two hours of the time it was put on the market. We have put a steam motor on the ground and several trains are now running daily between Otay and San Diego.The sheet is illustrated with a curious scene showing a small village with a hotel bearing a sign "Hotel Iturbide" - but no such hotel was built at Otay. A hotel of that name was established in Ensenada, Baja California at about the same time as this Otay promotional. The printers likely re-purposed or modified the illustration originally made for a Baja California-related promotional work, which they are known to have produced.Southeast of Chula Vista lay Otay, terminus of the National City and Otay Motor Railway. The auction system was used here fairly effectively. Free lunches were an additional attraction for Otay prospects - Glenn S. Dumke, The Boom of the Eighties in Southern California, p.148.Otay Tract: Context and HistoryThe promotion of the Otay tract in southeastern San Diego County in 1887-88 was a characteristically ambitious boom-era scheme: promoters advertised Otay not simply as farm or grazing land, but as the site of a new town, tied to subdivision sales, transportation access, and industry. Contemporary development was closely linked to the National City & Otay Railway, organized in late 1886 by the San Diego Land & Town Company, and to the much-publicized Otay Watch Works, around which future growth was supposed to coalesce; San Diego historians describe Otay as one of the largest of the boom promotions, with the Babcock organization and financier Frank Kimball among the principal figures behind it. In the short term the project generated excitement and some real building, but like so many South Bay promotions it was only a partial success: the broader San Diego real-estate bubble collapsed by spring 1888, speculation outran durable settlement, and Otay never fulfilled the grand expectations attached to it, though it survived as a small community with railroad, commercial buildings, and later agricultural development.San Diego Job PrintersFerguso. Map. …