Accidental Shanty

One complication that will need to be addressed as I move forward is the distinction between intentional squatters and accidental shanties.
Most of the time what I want are the real squatters, those who moved in on a property with the intention to act illegally. In this regard I have discovered that prior to 1900 many people thought of property rights as something malleable and slightly inconvenient. Sort of like jaywalking, which is something everyone does but can be infuriating in others when you are driving the car that nearly runs them down. Actual occupancy and usage was the standard these people held property to. Idle property was a kind of crime against society. That perspective not only justifies squatting but makes it a moral imperative. Progress demands that the land be put to some productive use, and some squatters enthusiastically and loudly pursued this goal to extremes. Most were quieter and more modest consumers of others land but the rationalization among squatters is strikingly uniform: Empty Land is Aristocratic and squatters were the ultimate urban yeomen, democrats and levelers without exception.
The progressive rationalization of squatter sovereignty is possibly intentionally ironic since the squatters themselves were viewed by the mainstream as key obstacles to progress. And here is where things get complicated.
The ideological front loading of "squatter" with its intimations of anti-progress and illegality made it an effective smear tool in eviction battles. There is no doubt that the inhabitants of the shantytowns of Manhattan, Brooklyn, or East San Pedro and many other locations knew that they were taking use of the land away from the rightful owners. These are the intentional squatters. The tricky ones are those who got sucked in to squatting through no fault of their own. Problem is, it isn't easy to tell who is who. An example from the June 5, 1901 New York Daily Tribune:

JAMAICA BAY SQUATTERS MUST PAY RENT.
The action brought by the New-Jersey Co-operative
Land Company, of which F. W. Dunton is secretary,
to oust Edward Essix from the occupancy
of certain lands in the meadows of Jamaica Bay,
of ¦which the company claims to be the lessee, tried
before Justice Kadian in the Municipal Court, at
Jamaica, having been decided in favor of the petitioner,
a warrant of eviction was issued and executed
yesterday. The petitioner proceeded upon
the theory that Mr. Essix. who had built a house
on the land, which he occupied as a summer residence,
was a squatter, as his occupancy was without
authority.
The defense set up that the lease held by the
company, which was originally granted by the
town auditors of Jamaica when they were in
authority, prior to the consolidation, and since
then continued under the commonalty of the city
of New-York, was invalid, and that the company
had no legal control over the land.
Justice Kadian held that the validity of the lease
cannot come in as part of the case— least, not
in his court—and. further, that the lease was before
him. and he had no choice but to treat it as
a good lease. He signed an order for the removal
of Mr. Essix from the land.
Th. order was placed in the hands of Sheriff De
Bragga for service. With deputies he went to the
house in question yesterday. and found no one
there. The house is situated on Shad Creek, and
is a two story one. costing, perhaps. $1,500. The
Sheriff forced an entrance and his men carried out
all the furniture, depositing it on the beach. The
doors and windows were then sealed and a sheriff's
notice posted, warning all persons from entering
the house. The company will now demand
rent from the twenty-five other squatters, and if
it is not paid will evict them.

How does one read this? Are Mr Essix and others acting in good faith? The New Jersey Land Co-Operative won this case, but only on the merits of a a lease that the judge refused to question. Call me a cynic, but it might be that the leases were as invalid as claimed by the defendant and the NJ Land Co-Operative stole land from the rightful owners. Maybe the Co-Op is the squatter in this story, albeit a successful one.

Anyone know where Shad Creek was? I think it was on an island in the bay, just south of the wildlife refuge, but I can't be sure.

NYC sets the pace.

New York City gets a lot of attention from urbanists, probably too much but it is the nation's largest city and the national media is based there so there is lots of information and the largest possible audience. Also, and this is the part that bothers me as an urbanist, there is a long standing sense that New York City is the farthest along the path that every other American city will follow. NYC is the future of other cities as they grow and age.
That perception has waned a great deal as the developing world has spawned one megacity after another that not only fails to follow the trajectory of the NYC example but also have failed to even resemble each other in any meaningful way.

But New York's status as an impressively narcissistic urban entity stuffed with excellent print media archives means that NYC is where one turns for accounts of pre-Civil War comments of city squatters. Like this...

From the New York Daily Times, July 12, 1854

Squatting is a weakness of universal humanity, and squatters are in every land a terror and a scourge. The lately civilized inhabitants of San Francisco have just passed through a series of squatter riots. The squatters engross, almost monopolize the legislation of Australia, and in some parts the great advantages secured to the United States by the new treaty with Japan, are presumed to interest, more than all others, the Squatter Sovereigns, for whom the home settlements are getting too hot.
 You think good reader, that we talk of distant lands and regions removed by continents or an ocean. Ask any owner of a vacant lot up town if he believes it. He will tell you that a squatter has his cabin on his lot, and very likely raises radishes or cabbages off his dearly-bought square feet. Nor is it easy to get possession from the intruders. They pay no rent, -they will submit to none. We heard of one simple fellow who did pay a mere nominal charge, - just enough to confess that the title was not in him, - and the consequence was that his cabin was mobbed, and he obliged to flee. They say that they are banded together to support each other in their mutual defense; that they have their lawyers to defend them when suits of ejectment are brought; that the fees are paid by taxes assessed upon each other. We have here additional reasons to pity the rich. The owners of lots, especially of lots about Yorkville, have not taxes only to pay, nor rents only to collect, nor nuisances to keep off, but these squatters to fight with, and their possession to dispute when they are ready to improve their property.

Sometimes it takes something like this to point out the obvious: anyone who breaks ranks and pays ground rent to the nominal owner needs to be forced out. This needs to be developed as an idea.

New York City, 1854

Military subsidy

With Veteran's Day closing in I present this, a thematic squatter post.

What if you are a country that has to fight a large number of wars on a regular basis that leave you cash poor, but pay off with immense territorial gains?
That was the United States in the 18th and 19th Centuries. Very early on the Continental Congress determined that the surest way to gain the loyalty of the populace and recruits for the army was to promise to pay soldiers in the land liberated from the British. Depending upon where they enlisted, privates were promised 50 to 100 acres to serve out their term of service, while an officer might be entitled up to 5,000 acres of their own choosing. Similar generosity to the extent of 50 to 800 acres was extended to Hessian mercenaries as an enticement to desert. From the perspective of the congress this policy of land bounties had few downsides: men would fight for the promise of land more readily than some distant payoff, the underpopulated (and hence vulnerable) frontier gained settlers with military training, and best of all there were no short-term costs and only long-term gains. Win-win-win.
So through the decades Military Land Warrants were an expected benefit of fighting for one's country, and the grants remained generous right up until the policy was suspended in 1855. Of course not everyone wanted to move to the frontier, and what does one do with 5,000 acres of Indiana swamp anyway? The answer is: sell it. Some states, like Ohio, were developed in a speculative land craze that created huge fortunes. Both Virginia and the Continental Congress set aside prime territory along the Ohio River and Lake Erie for redemption through these grant warrants. The city of Cleveland, for example, was originally platted by the speculative Ohio Company who paid for the site in part using Military land Warrants that they bought on the cheap from veterans who had no interest in moving west. A similar speculative boom set off in Indiana after the War of 1812 is given credit for slowing the growth of the state for decades.

These bounties created endless problems. Because the warrants were as good as cash, actually better than cash given the frontier epidemic of counterfeiting and wildcat banks, people were loath to redeem them for land. The federal government honored the last bounty warrants in the 1960s, and some states still have militia warrants in circulation. Our friend Mrs Hamilton also tried to obtain East San Pedro using warrants, but failed.
The waves of speculation fueled in part by capitalists buying out bounties also created a crisis of title similar to the one we are experiencing today. By pooling warrants and cash purchases capitalists bought prime real estate and left it to rise in value. This led to squatting.

Anyway, the policy of distributing land to veterans ended long before the sentiment that they deserved a bounty as a reward for their service.

One recurring story is that of the ancient veteran living on a military base long after their service has ended. Because of the time period I am looking at most closely during the period of  intensifying sentiment against squatters at the turn of the twentieth century, most of these veterans fought in the Civil War. As a rule these vets aren't tossed off the reservation without a crust or roof over their heads. Instead these former soldiers are something like mascots that have become too infirm to care for themselves or need to be removed because of new policies.

Typical is the story of Jack Johnson, a Civil War vet who lived for decades in a shed on the grounds of the Annapolis, MD Naval Academy. Here is the article from the Baltimore Sun:

OUT OF THE NAVAL ACADEMY
Last Squatter on Property Acquired Has to
Go - Officers Build Him a House
ANNAPOLIS Md., Feb 29 (1904) - The last
person to occupy an abode on that part of
Annapolis recently added to the Naval
Academy is John Jackson an old sailor
grown to be a town character who performed
a splendid feat of gallantry in the
civil war, and for which he received a medal
from the Government.
The latest part of Annapolis to be taken
in the Academy was thickly settled
and nearly all the inhabitants left nearly
a year ago. Jackson, however, who has
been reduced on account of his habits, to
absolute penury took his quarters in a
shanty which been used to store fish
nets. From this shelter the authorities
have not had the heart to move him. It
has become imperatively necessary how-
ever to clear the area and several naval
officers clubbed together and built him a
small home in another part of the city.
Jackson's heroism was shown during the
siege of Charleston when he was a sailor
on the United States monitor Miantonomoh.
Several torpedoes were drifting down on
the ship, which was in a such a position
she could not avoid them. Jackson swam
to them and unscrewed their caps thus,
rendering harmless.

There are similar stories from all over the country demonstrating that a kind of informal charity bounty was in place for veterans for decades after the land bounty system ended and decades before the GI Bill created a modern analogue.

In between we have the Bonus Army.

More Circles...

Happy Vet's day.

Furs, cars, and big circles

Home again, at the expense of two dead computers I have blocked out the San Pedro section pretty well. I don't assume I am done with it, but I can start to look to other parts of the chapter. What do I know about Tammany anyway? Time to learn.

As a relief to those of you waiting patiently for more I offer: Detroit.
Yeah.
In 1901 Detroit was a growing city of diverse manufacturers and a rail hub into Canada that had nothing but bright prospects ahead. Like most American cities of its size, Detroit was a magnet for immigrants and country lads looking for a future and a fortune. Oliver Zunz is the go to person for Detroit in this era, his Changing Face of Inequality is a model of social science research.  But as I am arguing here, there is another angle to the story of urban housing than segregation and slums and since it is Detroit (the ultimate corporate city) it is fitting that the origins are in America's first great corporation.

 The American Fur Company was born from a chance encounter of John Jacob Astor with a fur trader on board the ship bringing him to America from Germany in 1783. Astor left the ship determined to invest in the trade and within twenty years had already amassed a quarter of a million dollars and incredible influence over the beaver pelt trade. The lack of organized American trading companies west of the Alleghenies and particularly in the Louisiana Purchase provided the opportunity for Astor to gain even more control, and he invested heavily in land and posts throughout the Northwest Territories. In 1808 Detroit was a central hub of the business, a situation that was cemented in place when Astor incorporated the American Fur Company that year in Michigan and based his operations there. Detroit prospered under the three decades of Astor's fur monopoly, growing from a frontier town of about 1,000 residents to a city of 10,000.

J.J. Astor (1763-1848)

Forbes estimates that (adjusted for inflation) Astor's estimated $20 million worth at his death makes him the richest American who ever lived, but most of that was Manhattan real estate and none of it furs. Six years before his death came the bankruptcy of the American Fur Company, which had been losing increasingly large amounts of money as silk replaced beaver as the fashionable hat material. As part of the dissolution of the company the courts handed control of the properties to Mr. George Ehninger, the company secretary and Astor's nephew, for sale and disposal. Detroit took decades to regain its economic footing.
And so in 1842 the company that built Detroit and made America's greatest fortune ended operation. Except it didn't.

Detroit 1897

Return to 1901 when Detroit is booming once again with a population of ~290,000 persons and the American Fur Company is again an active business for a few short hours. I imagine that some speculator walking the margins of the city accidentally resurrected the company when he asked a few shanty dwellers what it would take for them to sell out and discovered that they had no title. Or perhaps our would-be developer looked into the tax records of a property he had an eye on and discovered that the lands were fifty-nine years in arrears.
There being no living heirs to Mr. Ehninger there was no competent agent to sign over the deeds to the properties or pay the back taxes. So for the time that it took for the state court to appoint an agent to the time that agent signed away the last of the company property the American Fur Company lived again and the squatters lost their homes.
You will notice what became the usual pattern as the twentieth century advanced; the squatters lost despite having more than enough tenure to claim adverse possession.

Now advance another century and some to 2010. The corporations that built the city and created some of the greatest fortunes in America have gone bankrupt. Detroit has lost its economic footing and there are thousands of unsalable vacant properties throughout the city. Result: Squatters.

Inadvertent

There don't seem to be any rules about what causes a squatter colony, or what circumstances will encourage them. Writing about Brooklyn and New York City gave me the conviction that inattentive landlords were a major cause of the large settlements characterizing those places. Now I am not so sure. It may be that the classic shantytown metastasizes where landlords aren't in residence, but opportunity knocks in many ways. Back to San Pedro for an example:

Long Beach beat out San Pedro in laying first claim to Terminal, but for Long Beach this was just the first hurdle to cross because their high-handed manner set off a storm of opposition that San Pedro could use to over throw the annexation.
San Pedro was quick off the block, setting up an East San Pedro postal office and police force in the early spring of 1906 that operated throughout the summer in competition with the West Long Beach post office and police force. One factor that Long Beach had in its favor that San Pedro didn't was an alliance with the Salt Lake RR who held the deeds to all of Terminal Island.
And the Salt Lake RR was hardly an inattentive landlord. They prevented squatting on Terminal Island proper with rigor, and did their best to motivate the local Army Corps of Engineers to evict the breakwater squatters through direct appeals and a lot of fencing across the end of the island. From the perspective of the SLRR, the greatest advantage to annexation by Long Beach is that it would finally give them an active and sympathetic partner in patrolling their island and evicting squatters. This population that they could not control was the only real challenge to the Long Beach annexation and the Salt Lake continued to apply pressure to force them out.
San Pedro officials were wide awake to this aspect of the Salt Lake RR/Long Beach alliance and when they visited the island in preparation of the annexation vote they made a point of tearing down fences blocking access to the breakwater, a fact noted approvingly by the squatter colony. As the lawsuits challenging the Long Beach vote moved toward a hearing San Pedro put in motion plans to win back partial control of the bay if the legal route failed, plans that exploited the presence of the fisherman colony.
In early-April news leaks out that the city of San Pedro is offering to buy squatter claims on the breakwater. The East San Pedro buyout can be read as both a canny attempt to prevent the Salt Lake RR or Long Beach from buying the claims first, but also a prequel to dividing the wholly man-made lands of the breakwater from Terminal Island to which the Salt Lake RR held a clear claim purchased from the Sepulvida heirs.
The response to the news changed the political and demographic situation on the island completely. Before the annexation the breakwater colony was composed of a few fishermen and their families, many of which were prepared to move to another location or sell out cheap as they always had before.
The prospect of a buyout attracted hoards of new squatters. These new breakwater residents were speculators attracted to East San Pedro with the promise of low risk and a quick profit. One settler was reportedly holding out for $20,000 on his section of the breakwater. With things at such a fever pitch San Pedro backed off of its offer to buy out claims, but the damage was done. A rumor in early May fingered one mysterious buyer that people feared would prove to be a front for the Salt Lake RR or its ally the Crescent Warehouse Company. Instead it turned out to be the tenacious Mrs Hamilton who purchased nineteen separate claims in short order while also filing a preemption claim upon the entire breakwater using Valentine Script as payment.
Although the colony at East San Pedro predates the Long Beach annexation, East San Pedro became a community in the following six months and grew exponentially in population and permanence. Thus, ironically, the East San Pedro squatter colony was born of the numerous attempts to stamp it out.

Shoestring

I am traveling at the moment, looking for work, and internet is hard to come by. It makes it hard to keep up a schedule of daily writing.

Where was I?

 As of 1900 the harbor at San Pedro was destined to be Los Angeles' only viable sea access. As I narrated earlier, the SP line abandoned their pier in Santa Monica and instead developed their excellent concession at the foot of the San Pedro bluffs, always with an eye on the competition across the bay. Now it is time to tell the story of the Terminal Railroad and the shoestrings.

Shoestrings in annexation lingo are tactical additions that add almost nothing to the city in manufacturing, area, or taxation, but instead allow access to more valuable properties. Many states, including California, only allow annexations of contiguous territory. A shoestring annexation is a solution that obeys the letter of the law while grotesquely violating the spirit.

The narrow strip attaching Central LA to the harbor is one of the best known examples of a shoestring. The corridor to Harbor City was attached to the city in 1906 as a prequel to consolidation with Wilmington and San Pedro. As anyone familiar with annexation processes is aware, there is a lot of planning and drumming of enthusiasm preceding votes on attachments. Talk of the LA shoestring predates its 1906 accomplishment by a decade. Similarly San Pedro was discussing eventual consolidation with Los Angeles even before the harbor improvement bill entered the Senate. Once improvements actually began San Pedro could afford to be complacent to a degree. After all, Los Angeles city officials wanted the harbor access and San Pedro ruled the harbor. Wilmington, the only other city directly facing the bay, was effectively blocked by salt flats into a secondary role in the harbor and with San Pedro shared the ambition to consolidate with Los Angeles. As of 1905 everything seemed on track for unification.
It was Long Beach and its alliance with the Terminal Railroad that proved the wild card. By promising the railroad valuable leases to the waterfront and with a legacy of preexisting tax benefits already in place with Long Beach, the city forged a strong link with the east bay rail interests. The bond only grew stronger when the Terminal was reincorporated as the San Pedro, Los Angeles, and Salt Lake Railroad in 1901. The new corporation had every intention of challenging the SP hegemony over Southern California and represented an incursion of the powerful Union Pacific into enemy territory through a proxy. A vast expansion of the Salt Lake's harbor facilities on Terminal Island was planned, but first the railroad needed to consolidate its control over Terminal Island.
In 1904 the Salt Lake attempted to evict the fisherman colony occupying the end of the breakwater, but within the boundaries of what the railroad considered as its property. The fishermen refused to relocate. Other disputes erupted between the newly aggressive management of the railroad and their tenants in Terminal over opening roads and alcohol sales. A third challenge arose when San Pedro decided it was time to make its ownership of the island formal.
When San Pedro announced in August of 1905 that the city planned to annex Terminal Island and would hold a vote the following October to finalize the attachment, the railroad and Long Beach quickly organized a preemptive election in September. Held under suspicious circumstances, the September referendum favored attachment to Long Beach by a margin of four votes and Long Beach immediately moved to obtain an injunction against the San Pedro vote.
This is the second shoestring. On the authority of that election Long Beach obtained a narrow addition following the Salt Lake right of way whose only purpose was to gain control over the harbor mouth. Between the new residents of Long Beach and the other city neighborhoods was a desolate and undeveloped stretch of salt marsh and sand extending several miles. Needless to say their was outrage and cries of foul play.

The last on harbor improvements

Today's text is the Report of Board to Locate a Deep Water Harbor at Port Los Angeles or San Pedro California -1897- which is really nothing more than the technical reports digested for Senate reading and published by the Army Corps of Engineers.
The best parts are the maps that I hoped would better illustrate the platting of the town of Terminal, but instead showed how quickly the town grew from a pair of crossing streets next to the station to ten or more streets.
Also nice was that the surveyor's maps confirm that I have the outline of 1870 San Pedro harbor more or less correct. The differences being where dredging was already begun and a ship channel opened to traffic. Mormon Island apparently didn't even survive this first round of changes.

Anyway, now on to the meat of the story.

Stephen M. White, chatterbox

Yesterday was a time of troubles. For anyone wondering why their Asus Essentio CM5570 will not light up when they hit the on button...the answer is mechanical not hardware. The two-piece assembly relies upon a microswitch remaining glued in place, which happens to be something it doesn't do well. Superglue is the best fix, but first you have to figure out that is the problem.
With that obstacle overcome I then dove into the formidable Stephen M. White: Californian, citizen, lawyer, senator. His life and his work. A character sketch, by Leroy E. Mosher. Together with his principal public addresses, compiled by Robert Woodland Gates: Times-Mirror Publishing, Los Angeles 1903.
It comes in Two Volumes.



This is useful stuff because it provides the best and thickest descriptions of what specific advantages the harbor at San Pedro held over all challengers, physical and political.  From an engineer's perspective the harbor at San Pedro was half done and secure, sheltered as it was by barrier islands and bottomed with sand and stone that provided excellent anchorages.
But the real reason Senator White and his publisher ally Harrison Otis wanted San Pedro chosen was because it would frustrate C.P. Huntington, whose potential monopoly over rail access to Santa Monica was a theme Senator White would return to endlessly over the course of the hearings. In common with other railroads of the era, Huntington's Southern Pacific Railroad didn't do much to maintain a positive public image:



But this was business at its cutthroat best, so when Huntington spied an opportunity to dominate Santa Monica he took it. First he acquired a right of way that would prevent any other rail access to the beach, then he built a marvelous wharf to handle all of the freight bound for transfer to and from his trains. As a final piece he began a slander campaign against San Pedro arguing that the harbor there was exposed and dangerous. With these pieces in place he returned to Washington to lobby for Federal money to complete the harbor at Santa Monica. He almost won his concession.

Against Huntington and the SP Line were White and Otis, but there was another overwhelming factor that favored San Pedro over Santa Monica: reality. Huntington's option would have been incredibly difficult to build, and expensive to maintain. In the end building an artificial harbor at Santa Monica probably wouldn't have prevented the development of San Pedro. So many railroads and other port facilities were already there that some dredging program would have happened within the decade anyway and Otis had the business community of LA standing firmly behind him.
As things played out San Pedro got the harbor, the harbor got squatters, and Los Angeles got San Pedro and the harbor (in 1909).

Santa Monica got the shoppes and a pretty pier. Progress is like that.

The relentless Mrs Hamilton.

In reviewing articles today I rediscovered an article that I didn't fully understand until now. In June of 1907 there was a small item about a woman on Terminal Island sowing new made land with barley. The government engineers dredging and filling that area pulled down the fences and dumped silt on top of the newly sown ground.
It wasn't until today that I noticed that the woman was our friend Mrs Louis Mary Hamilton who was apparently strengthening her legal case by claiming it as agricultural ground.

The harbor Richard Dana didn't see.

San Pedro Harbor changed a lot in forty years. A couple of islands disappeared, the biggest barrier island changed its name, and there was a lot of infill.

The people I am most interested in lived near the end of Terminal Island, just east of the breakwater. East San Pedro.

Making a map like this is Hugely Helpful. I now know where things are when I read about them and I have better insights into how things developed. For example I had not noticed until today that the streets in Terminal (the neighborhood near the train station) are only odd numbered. The reason for this is the Terminal Railroad platted a town with streets on both sides of its tracks, and all the even numbers began and ended on the north side. When the LA & SL RR took over ~1900 they scrapped the idea of streets north of the tracks and subleased to a lumber company instead. This caused trouble, and odd numbered streets.

First map.

So, using the 1923 Wilmington quad topo map and a few other sources including the text I found yesterday we get this:

There are some tweaks that need doing, like losing the top 10th and adjusting the "Smith Is." label, but it will do for two hour's work.

From the 1871Chief Engineer's Report to the Secretary of War

I have been trying for a few days now to describe the original landscape of San Pedro Bay, which is easy/hard. Easy because I have dozens of descriptions and images, but very little that explains what the original arrangement looked like.  This is what the Army Corps of Engineers had to say in 1871:



It is hard to beat that for concision and accuracy. Now I know what I am looking at on the topo map and it greatly expands my understanding of accounts of the community on the breakwater. I think I am getting close to being ready to contact the San Pedro Historical Society.

Where the shanties were.

Rule of thumb. If you want to find squatters in an American city the first place to look is along the waterfront.

1. In coastal cities you look to the tidal basins. In Brooklyn this would be Red Hook. In Los Angeles this would be Terminal Island.
2. Inland look to the river floodplains. Chicago's entertaining Streeterville sideshow notwithstanding, the real action was in the river bottoms. Goose Island for example was much more successful and longer lived. In Denver the whole Platte River bottom was a colony.
3. As a corollary look for improvements and reclamation projects. Dikes and levees in Kansas City, New Orleans, Memphis were excellent places to build a stilt house or tie up a houseboat. The dredge and infill projects of harbors also create a whole lot of land that no one owns or cares much about.

Next, look to the parks and public lands. This is for two reasons.

1. There was a lot of open land in convenient locations open for settlement. San Antonio, Texas, had a terrible time keeping people off of its school lots, and San Francisco's police were so tied up evicting people houses built in the middle of  streets, alleys, and private property that they had to tell the city that they no longer had the resources to also demolish houses built in public parks.
2. Many parks are built on land reclaimed from squatters. New York's Central Park is a well known example, but Kansas City and Minneapolis did this too.

 Neglected lands. This is the hardest to locate without specific references to guide your search, but the stories...

1. Estate battles are classic progenitors of shanties. As the different sides of the struggle slug it out in court there is no one with the authority to call in the police to evict the interlopers. The longer the fight goes on, the more established the new residents become. 
2. Speculative properties. Nothing spells neglect like absentee owner. Whole Midwestern cities sprang up on land owned by someone in New York or Boston. East St. Louis is my favorite example.
3. It is my perception that empty houses were less common in the past, so that may be why they figure less often in the nineteenth century than they do in the twentieth or the present.  If nothing else the real estate mess has given a whole new dimension to squatting. It is now possible to squat in the house that you bought while you await foreclosure proceedings to figure out who really owns the property. Which is really just a twist on the estate battle angle I guess.

Crow Hill, Brooklyn

"Crow Hill," Charles Lewis Fussell, 1890, oil on canvas, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (inv. no. 1973.12.45). Thanks to Lisa Gott who found this.

One big elephant in the room is the race and ethnicity angle to squatting.
The Shanty Irish get all the attention it seems, probably because of their high profile in New York City. The Irish presence is so dominant in setting the template of urban squattering that it is virtually a precondition that the Irish be there first to establish a colony before anyone else.
One good example is Chicago's Swedetown. According to the canonical history of Swedes in Chicago, by the 1860s there was an Irish shantytown west of the river that accepted some Swedish residents. In the wake of the Great Fire of 1871 the Swedish colony migrated north to Goose Island, while the Irish headed south to the Union Stockyards having passed on the vital lessons of shanty living to their former neighbors.
Examples of the odd German colony, or Norwegians down in Minneapolis' Bohemian Flats, or Brooklyn's Red Hook, always seem to find that the Irish were there first.
So this is why Crow Hill gets my attention. Like many shantytowns it has several names that also refer to nearby communities (Carrville, Weeksville), but one name stands out: Blackville. The origins of Crow Hill, just like the boundaries, are blurry, but the area was an established free-black settlement long before the Civil War. Like most shantytowns not every resident of Crow Hill was a squatter, but this is an example of a recognizably ethnic squatter colony arising independent of an Irish seed.
Another topic to cover.

Oh, California. Oh, Federalism.

This laboratory of Democracy stuff tires me sometimes.
Just when I was settled into a comfortable level of familiarity with preemption laws, agricultural lands acts, common law principles of adverse possession, I start looking at specific legal cases and discover that none of those apply. Instead I find local exceptions like the California Possessory Act of 1852.
See, when the US of A "bought" California from Mexico as part of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo we promised to honor the system of land grants and the rights of former Mexican citizens to their property. This wouldn't have been a problem if things had gone as expected and settlers from the east had trickled into the territory at the usual rate. Problem was, there was a gold rush within a year of the transfer and the new residents didn't care much for the property rights of anyone.
Later in this project I will be working on sections describing the 1850-2 Sacramento Squatter War. For now I will just say that the newly-minted state government was persuaded to pass legislation that reads a lot like a draft of the federal homesteading act passed ten years later. The key principle of the act is simple; it gives precedence of claim to the person physically in possession of land. Like the federal Homestead Act of 1862 the design was to discourage speculators and to boost settlement.This from a decision in 1871:

By the time we get to Mrs. Hamilton and the culmination of her six years of legal wrangles with the Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad in 1912, the act had been repealed but the principle remained as a legal avenue to challenge the leasehold of the LA&SL over Terminal Island.Her lawyers argued before the State Supreme Court that her occupation and use of the land in question was a prior claim in keeping with the precedents and legal environment of California. The court honored the logic of that argument, but refused her claim because her occupation did not meet the agricultural standards of the act. In other words, because she was renting out houses and not farming or ranching she failed to meet the same conditions of the 1852 law as the LA&SL.
Reading the decision it quickly becomes obvious why the court agreed to hear the case. They bundled all of Mrs Hamilton's legal troubles into a single hearing and disposed of her preemption claim in a single paragraph of a nine page decision. What they really wanted to settle was the constitutional issue of possession and leasing of tidal lands. Hamilton's attorneys argued that the land was federal property and therefore open to preemption, but the court decided that the state constitution (Article V, section 3) gave the state, and therefore the municipalities of the state, ownership and leasing rights.
Boring, huh? I promise to work on the presentation.
Granted, California is a special case but I expect a lot more of this going forward.

Mrs Louise Hamilton.

Look at what I found...

Bless Google Books.

Discovery.

View Larger Map

In the process of a random search of a Chicago Sanitation report from January 2, 1895 I found the following:

The context is the purchase of a right of way for the expansion of the Illinois Sanitary Drainage and Ship Canal. By the late 1880's about 1% of Chicago's population was a victim of the city's success (read: typhoid, cholera, etc). The remarkable combination of effluent from the Union Stockyards and the less exotic (but equally nasty) civilian contributions to the sluggish Chicago River  made downtown a smelly place. In addition, the north-flowing Chicago River emptied into Lake Michigan a little too close to the city's drinking water uptake for comfort. The genius solution was to modernize the fifty-year old Illinois Ship Canal by dredging and adding locks that deepened the channel and reversed the flow of the river. This met with some objections from proposed downstream communities as far away as St Louis that didn't want to share Chicago's sewage. Anyone familiar with Chicago will not be surprised that they were ignored and the plan was rammed through the state government over all objections and construction was hurried to complete the canal just ahead of injunctions intended to stop its opening.
But back to Charles Jindrich. The old canal was still active in the 1890s, if at a fraction of the tonnage handled in the pre-railroad days, and land along its banks was valuable. It struck me today that because squatters appeared along every navigable waterway in the late 19th century, records of the expansion of the Chicago River Memorial Poop and Sloop Canal (I made that name up. It's a joke) was a natural place to find official mentions of squatters.
So imagine my interest when Charles Jindrich pops up as a squatter on the canal in the area near where Interstate 55 crosses Western Avenue (Northeast quarter of Section 36, Township 39N, Range 13E). My probable relative profited pretty well too as a result of his property crimes. In 1892 the median family income in Chicago was about $475, so ol' Chuck got the modern equivalent of a $20,000 bribe to not contest Chicago's condemnation of a property he didn't own.
Nice.

Things that need to be found.

I am still in the materials phase of writing. Why is it so hard to find simple things, things that should be readily available?
Several things that I would really love to discover are maps of San Pedro Harbor, circa 1890, 1905, and 1910. There is a birdseye of the harbor dated 1905 in many places but it is really a 1893 effort and it doesn't show Terminal Island. I did find an 1893 sketch map of the harbor which will do in a pinch for the earliest period. Favorite would be Sanborn Atlases.
Short of detailed maps what I could really use are locations for the Los Angeles and Salt Lake RR terminal and wharf, and the Carse Machine Works and Shipbuilding Company.
Then there is case law. There are lawsuits brought by John Webb claiming all of Terminal Island, Mrs. Louise M. Hamilton's series of lawsuits claiming possession of 26 acres in East San Pedro, another suit to use Valentine Script to purchase the land, then another staking a claim under the agricultural lands act. San Pedro sued and was counter-sued by Long Beach endlessly between 1905-1909.
The minutes of the Long Beach and San Pedro city council would be very useful.

See...not so much.

A new book about squatters in Red Hook

Today I heard from Roger Kvarsvik, an email friend in Bergen, Norway. His book describing the 20th century shantytowns built and inhabited by Norwegian sailors in Red Hook, Brooklyn has been published. Problem is...det er kun tilgjengelig i norske.

http://www.spartacus.no/index.php?ID=Bok&counter=546

Free State of Farquier County

Here is the opening of the chapter. I add it for Michelle, who grew up nearby.

There is a legend in Farquier County, Virginia, that John Marshall was the father of the durable squatter colony centered on the town named for him. The story goes that when America's preeminent Chief Justice jump-started his political career in the early days of the republic by exchanging votes for usufruct rights on a vacant 200 acre parcel he owned in the foothills of the Blue Ridge (Washington Times 1904). This offer attracted landless men who would be otherwise ineligible to vote and with their help Marshall sat two terms as the state representative from Farquier County. When Marshall left for higher office he kindly allowed the original tenants to remain unmolested, and was either unconcerned or unaware that his property continued to act as a magnet for landless Virginians long after he had moved beyond the need for their votes. By the time Justice Marshall died in 1835 the tenants had enjoyed five decades of rent free access to his property and had successfully avoided paying taxes by pointing out that they had not improved the land. Shortly before his death Marshall sued to re-establish his right to issue leases and collect rents from his erstwhile tenants, winning against their claims that they became the rightful owners upon the expiration of the original leases issued by Lord Fairfax in the 1760s (Marshall v. Foley et. al.).

But winning the right to collect rents is not the same as having the money in hand. Neither was the state of Virginia able to convince the residents of the area that taxes were a necessary obligation. At some point in the mid-nineteenth century the area was dubbed the Free State and acquired a reputation as a region of outlaws and shiftless layabouts that was at first a point of perverse pride, but in time became an embarrassment. By the early twentieth century the area was well cultivated and above average in tax observance and the real distinctiveness of the Free State quietly passed. Yet memories of the Free State persist in Farquier County, if muddled with regional stories of bootleggers and gambling that have replaced squatting as the reason for the name in most people's minds.

It is wrong to assume that Marshall's political motives behind his accidental begetting of the Farquier County Free State were uniquely cynical. Instead of a unique instance, the political history of squatter colonies is replete with examples of politicians actively cultivating the votes and allegiance of the squatter bloc. The most lasting and influential example of pandering to the squatter vote is the Federal Preemption act of 1841 that in effect opened all public lands to alienation through squatting. That act also set the precedent for the later mining and homestead acts, both of which use actual possession and improvement of the property as a precondition for granting the title. As an instrument for disposing of vast tracts of potential farmland with minimal supervision and at a profit, preemption is reasonably efficient. As a tool for urban development problems emerge.

Overview

This is what happens when you need to organize your thoughts. Bits of things are wrong with it, pieces are missing, pathways are not complete. On the whole though I think it lays out what I am going for with this project.
So what is squatting? The easiest answer to this complicated question is that it is taking possession of real property to which you do not have legally recognized rights.
There are a few iconic squattertypes in the US of A:
The easiest stuff to run down and document is the Shanty Irish connections. This is why there are so many lines running in and out of that corner in the diagram above. The Shanty Irish are iconic in part because they were a high profile immigrant population in 19th century New York City and for decades were a mainstay of Tammany Hall.

Either circumstance would have made them Enemies of Progress and a Detriment to the City, but the combination made them an evil to be stamped out by right thinking land developers. Which they were at great profit to the developers, but which did nothing to rid the city of squalor, poverty, or the Irish.

Another icon is the sturdy pioneer. They went forth seeking freedom from civilization, bravely opening the country at great risk to themselves, and moving on when things got too civ-lized.

A subset of the sturdy pioneers were claim jumpers. They aren't terribly interesting because they seem to be mostly an invention of Louis L'Amore and Max Brand. Oddly their web presence is almost entirely links to a chain of family restaurants. What kind of message does this send to the children?

In more recent decades there is the alt-culture movement that occupies vacant urban properties as an applied philosophic statement.

These iconic squatters avoid the stigma of homelessness, although they can have a lot in common and get confused in public opinion. By publication proportions I get the impression that the population of present day squatters is about 47% graphic novelist. I like that.

Less noted is the society squatter, which is something I want to highlight. There are other squattertypes that still need to be brought forward, although from what I am finding there is no specific "type" that is more prone to squatting that others. Some of the biggest trespassers in Brooklyn were major businesses, and in the chapter I am working on right now an entire community was given leases on land they had squatted for decades as a reward in an annexation struggle.
Old squatters don't fade away, they go mainstream.

One thing that I still need to think through is where I stand on The Mystery of Capital.

Beginning

I have a project.
It begins with a chapter sample that goes to the publisher, and then grows into a book.

Because I don't seem to be able to do things the easy way I am building a chapter from scratch, even though I already have an article all written up and ready to go. It makes sense in a way, it takes longer but this way I have a chapter instead of an adapted article, and I am that much closer to being done.

The book? It is a history of shanty towns and squatting in the US. The chapter is about the politics of squatting, how squatters were able to gain access to Tammany Hall and other political offices. The longest part will be a case study of East San Pedro, out in the bay on the breakwater. The origins of the colony are fuzzy, but at some point soon after the government built the breakwater connecting Rattlesnake Island to Deadman's Island shacks began appearing along its length. Twenty-five years later the community consisted of hundreds of people, dozens of shacks, and was the target of a campaign by the Salt Lake Railroad to evict them. That is where it gets interesting.
More on this as I pull the chapter together.

Anyone with knowledge, stories, or resources about squatters anywhere in the US can feel free to contact me through this page. I am particularly in examples of urban squatters because that seems to me to be the great untold story.

Happy Trails to us all.