Phineas Banning (1830-1885) was an American businessman, stagecoach driver, entrepreneur, and general best known to history as 'the Father of the Port of Los Angeles.' It was his drive and ambition that served to lay the foundations for what would become one of the busiest and most productive ports in the world.

Early Life

Banning was born in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1830, the seventh of eleven children. At the age of thirteen, he moved to Philadelphia to work in his oldest brother's law firm. By his late teens, Banning was working on the busy dockyards of Philadelphia. At the age of twenty, Banning signed up to work a passage to an exotic destination, poorly known location--Southern California.

California and Enterprise

Banning arrived in San Pedro, California in 1851, after a long and harrowing land and sea voyage that included crossing the isthmus of Panama by land before taking another ship north to California. The twenty-one year old was ambitious and full of energy, and soon found work in the tiny fishing village of San Pedro initially as a store clerk and later as a stagecoach driver on the small line that connected the coastal hamlet with the tiny pueblo of Los Angeles, a dusty town of less than 2,000 inhabitants over twenty miles to the inland north.

Ever ambitious, Banning eventually saved his money, bought his own supplies, and began his own staging and shipping company, eventually establishing a small but extremely successful business over several years. By the 1860's, Banning wagons were traveling to Salt Lake City, the Kern River gold fields, the new military installation at Yuma, Arizona, the Mormon settlement at San Bernardino, and in a general arc around the Southern California region.

Banning was not content to consolidate business interests in staging. He also began expanding the rudimentary harbor and dock systems at San Pedro from their early beginnings as illegal exchange sites for mission contraband during the Spanish and Mexican eras, and began the process of making them efficient, manageable enterprises. In the late 1850's, Banning and a group of other local Southern California investors purchased 640 acres of land adjacent to San Pedro for the expansion of the port. The new land purchase was soon incorporated as Wilmington, after Banning's Delaware birthplace. Banning invested the profits from his bourgeoning trade networks into the development of a more sophisticated port complex and for the creation of roads, telegraphs and other connections to Los Angeles. In 1859, the first ocean-going vessel anchored in the Los Angeles-Wilmington harbor, and the 1860s saw the beginning of small-scale maritime trade between San Pedro and ships anchored in the deeper parts of the harbor. After a government-funded dredging made a deepwater harbor and breakwater a reality, the port continued to grow at a steady rate.

Family Life

Banning married Rebecca Sanford, the younger sister of his first California employer. Phineas and Rebecca had eight children, of which three survived into adulthood--William Banning (1857-1946), Joseph Brent Banning (1862-1920), and Hancock Banning (1865-1925). Family life was relatively stable in the Banning household, and Phineas was doting, if distant father to his three boys, who grew up around the docks that were beginning to expand in San Pedro. Rebecca Sanford died in childbirth in 1868, and the child, Vincent Banning, died as well. Banning subsequently married a wealthy heiress, Mary Hollister, whose family lent the name to the city of Hollister, California. Phineas and Mary had three children, two of which survived to adulthood--Mary H. Banning (1871-1953) and Lucy Tichenor Banning (1873-1929).

Southern Californian Development: 1860-1880

Civil War California

Following the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, several Southern states broke away to form the Confederate States of America, beginning the American Civil War (1861-1865). The reaches of war were felt as far off as California, and particularly in Los Angeles, which contained large numbers of Confederate sympathizers , a particularly alarming development for the new territory. An astute businessman as well as vocal patriot, Banning and fellow Californian politician B.D. Wilson donated adjacent plots of land in Wilmington for the construction of a military base. The strategic outpost, named Camp Drum (1861-1871), served as the headquarters of the Union's Southwestern command for the state of California and territory of Arizona. The move brought Union troops to Wilmington, where they quickly realized that all spending money would be readily reincorporated into Banning's business enterprises, bringing the Delaware transplant even more riches. Following the close of the American Civil War in 1865, Camp Drum eventually disbanded, but the port and harbor continued to grow.

In an amusing anecdote, the American government presented Banning with an honorific title, that of brigadier general of the California first brigade. The title was purely symbolic, yet Banning insisted on being referred to as "General Banning" for the last two decades of his life.

1870s: Railroads, Industries, and Breakwaters

Banning spent the 1870s in a frenzy of activity. He worked as senator in the California state senate, campaigining for greater transportation connections to the city of Los Angeles and the growing port, his personal project. Banning eventually pushed through the plan for a small railroad linking Wilmington/San Pedro with the main city of Los Angeles, effectively halving the time necessary for the trip, but the joy was short-lived. The Southern Pacific Railroad began building track to connect Southern California to the greater national ralroad lines, and demanded much of Los Angeles' prime real estate, an enormous sum of money, and Banning's small connector line railroad in exchange for adding Los Angeles as a terminus on the railroad. Realizing that Los Angeles would wither into nothingness if the company bypassed it, the city complied and Banning surrendered his hard-earned railroad.

Several personal successes marked the decade for Banning as well, however. The first breakwater was built for the nascent port in 1873, and Banning began to work for the Southern Pacific as a railroad agent. By 1880, the fifty year old Banning had retreated to the peacefulness of his life in Wilmington and managed several smaller business interests; it was on a business trip to San Francisco in 1884 that Banning was struck by a streetcar and eventually died of his injuries in 1885.

Banning's legacies lived on, however, and the dreams of the irrepressible Anglo businessman were realized with the final federal approval of the Port of Los Angeles in the early twentieth century, and the completion of a full breakwater in 1914, creating one of the busiest harbors in the world. Banning's chief residence, constructed in Wilmington in 1863, is open to the public as a museum and display depicting Victorian California life.

External Links

• Phineas Banning biography

• Banning Residence Museum, Wilmington, California