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Community Corner

Diamond Bar: A Tale of Two School Districts

This is the first in a series of three articles tracing the formation of the two school districts serving Diamond Bar.

Before East San Gabriel Valley families grew children to send to schools, farmers grew citrus and ranchers grew cattle. And Prior to Pomona’s incorporation in 1888, there were no civic corporate boundaries drawn to determine school attendance.

Instead, the private property lines of farms and ranches, now traced by the power lines bisecting the city, determined which school district the children of Diamond Bar were to attend.

The Early History of Diamond Bar's Schools

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In 1876, local schools slowly took seed in what is now South Diamond Bar, in the Lemon subdivision of the San Jose District. On the north side of the town near where Lanterman Developmental Center now sits, adjacent to a former Butterfield line stop, first opened for business.

In the 1890s, the Lemon School was built in the south end of modern-day Diamond Bar. According to the 1976 GATE student project, “Walnut, Diamond Bar & Spadra’s Unknown Past":

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“Each day, the teacher arrived by train from El Monte to provide instruction for students in grades first through eighth. No depot at the school existed, but the train operator would drop (the teacher) off there in the morning and pick her up in the evening.”

The division for attendance of both schools was drawn along ranch property lines. Children in what is now North Diamond Bar attended Spadra. Those living to the south joined children from Walnut, Hudson (La Puente) and Rowland areas, filling the seats at the one-room Lemon School.

As the area prospered, the needs of the growing population of children needed more schoolhouses. The school names changed with time and usage. When the Lemon school reached capacity in 1907, local legend has the first floor of the building was raised to insert a new ground floor underneath.

In 1920, the Lemon campus was replaced by a structure with four classrooms and took the name, the Walnut Grammar School. In 1946, the school’s name changed again, this time as the Walnut Elementary School. And in 1954, when the building was discovered as not meeting earthquake codes, the school was replaced with a building meeting earthquake safety standards.

In these early days, student commutes in the rural communities could be long. Johnnie Mutz, son of the Tres Hermanos Ranch foreman, was driven to a bus stop on Brea Canyon to catch his ride. With stops, another half hour each way was added to travel time to and from school.

The small size of the schools at this time allowed school personnel to multi-task. The school superintendent was also the principal. The custodian was also the bus driver, who lived in a duplex on-site.

The number of students continuing their education past the 8th grade grew large enough by 1914 to justify the establishment of the La Puente High School District.

In the next installment in this series, learn about the changes in area schools as the community transformed from ranch land to the first large-scale residential development. The next in the series will appear Monday, June 20.

More in area history: 

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