Judge John Main

More Sunnyslope Cemetery Stories

          On October 7, 1819, I was born into a family of 10 children.  Our country had inaugurated George Washington as its first president in 1789, only forty years before my birth in Moravia, New York.

          From that state, I moved to Wisconsin where I worked on a farm, but I later traveled to Ohio and was employed in a bakery.  After that, in the early 1850’s, I settled in Arkansas and once again changed professions when I began to raft timber down the Mississippi River.

          This employment provided enough money for me to become a landowner, for I purchased a farm on the Arkansas River when I was 25 years old.  By now I had married Martha Ann Davis who had one son, John T. who died a few years ago in 1894 and is also buried in this very cemetery.

          After my first wife’s death, I was married again to Julia Ann Morgan from Dardanelles, Arkansas.  Although she bore six children, only two, both girls, survived to womanhood, and one of them, Sarah, traveled all the way from Nashville, Missouri, to attend my funeral.

          I lived on my place on the Arkansas River until 1857 when I settled in Nashville, Missouri.  Just before the Civil War, I served as postmaster for the town.

          You might say that I was unlucky in wives because my second wife died also.  Let me tell you how I met my third wife.  During the Civil War, I fought on the Union side but was captured; she took refuge at a military fort where I met her when a prisoner exchange was being arranged.  I married my third wife, Martha B. Hottell, on August 4, 1863.  You may remember that was the same year as the Battle of Gettysburg.  Martha bore eleven children, four of who were alive at the time of my death.

          During reconstruction, after the war, I returned to my old homestead in Nashville, Missouri and was appointed a Superior Judge of Barton County by the Governor and served for two years.  Although I was asked to stand for re-election, I was unwilling to do so.  Since that time, I have always been called Judge Main.

          In 1890, I moved to Corona, the final destination in my quest for ‘the good life’.  The year before, I had traveled here and invested in a lemon grove.  I had made a great deal of money from the town of Nashville, which I had laid out and sold.  This was just a part of a large land area which I had bought and reclaimed from the wilds of Missouri.

          You could say that I was a self-made man because except for a legacy of $500 from my father’s estate, which I received long after I was financially independent, I had no assistance from anyone.  In fact, I owned 7,000 acres of land in Missouri at the time I ‘came into my inheritance’. 

          My friends in Corona knew me to be a very generous man who helped anyone who asked.  They used to say that “I never let my left hand know the good my right hand dispensed.”

          My friends also were aware that I was industrious and vigorous, for I didn’t enjoy life unless I was involved in some kind of work.  In fact a few weeks before my death, I was hauling a load of empty fruit boxes from a grove out on Main Street when I was tipped out and fell; this accident resulted in the internal injuries which caused my death.  The Union funeral was held in the First Baptist church whose spacious auditorium was filled with friends who wanted to pay their last respects.

          Now that you know who I am, I would like to tell you about the house I lived in during my years in Corona.  When we came here, the town was still called South Riverside.  We moved into our house on January 13, 1894; it was a lovely two story house at 101 South East Grand Boulevard; the address was later changed to 610 East Grand Boulevard.  Actually the house number did not really matter in those early days because there were so few houses here at that time and most people called our house ‘the Judge Main House on the Boulevard’.  After my death, another family bought the house, but the second story was destroyed by fire in 1920.  The next owner, a building contractor, removed the entire upper portion and finished the house in the style called California Bungalow.

          Over the years, since that time, the house, after further construction, was divided into a duplex and then had two numbers: 608 and 610.  The house was improved by adding two more rooms, another bath and a patio in the back.  Later owners built a five unit apartment building at the rear of the large property and called them the AvaJean Apartments, after their daughter.  (The name was changed to Chavarin’s Apartments in the year 2000.)  So now there are three addresses for my house: 608, 610, and 612.  Even with all the renovations that have taken place, one distinctive feature has remained unchanged—the curved walkway in front of the house. 

          I died on January 5, 1899, one year shy of the turn of the century, at the grand old age of 79.  Although I was buried in this cemetery, I did not spend much of my life in Corona; actually I moved to this area in 1890 and thus lived there only for nine years.  You might call me a vagabond or even an adventurer because I came west to carve out my fortune, as the saying goes.

          Are you counting on your fingers?  I married three different women and fathered 18 children!  By the way, my last wife did survive me and died at our daughter’s home in Sierra Madre in 1915.