HOLLYWOOD FOREVER CEMETERY

Col. James Ward Eddy

 

 

By Allan R. Ellenberger

 

Colonel James Ward Eddy, a Los Angeles pioneer, was a personal friend of President Abraham Lincoln and was the founder and builder of the historic Angel’s Flight railroad in downtown Los Angeles.

 

A Java, New York native, Eddy was born on May 30, 1832 and received his education in the public schools and at the Genesee Wesleyan Seminary and Genesee College at Lima, New York. He taught school for a time in western New York until going to Illinois in 1853, where he studied law and was admitted to the bar in Chicago in 1855.

 

He practiced in Batavia, Illinois for several years, during which time he was a member of the Board of Education, County Supervisor, member of the State Legislature in 1866 and member to the State Senate in 1870. He was district collector of internal revenues under President Ulysses S. Grant.

 

Active in Lincoln’s campaign for president, and a personal friend of Lincoln, Eddy was in Washington at the time war was declared, and enlisted in Cassius M. Clay and Gen. James H. Lane’s battalion which was formed for the protection of Washington during the first month of the war. He received a certificate of thanks for his services rendered, signed by Abraham Lincoln, and Simon Cameron, secretary of war.

 

Coming west, Eddy spent three years in railroad construction in Arizona, where he built a branch of the Santa Fe road south from the town of Flagstaff.

 

Eddy moved to Los Angeles in 1895 where he settled and surveyed the first transmission line for water power from Kern river to Los Angeles, which was later obtained and used by the Pacific Electric Railroad Company of Los Angeles.

  

 

 

 Angels’ Flight

 

In 1901 Eddy was the visionary who convinced City Hall to grant him a 30-year franchise to construct and operate an inclined railway that he called Angel’s Flight. The funicular system of two counterbalanced cars traveled up and down parallel tracks and transported passengers along the steep grade between Third and Hill Streets and Bunker Hill, where Eddy lived. The ride lasted one minute and cost one cent.

 

Eddy also served as vice-president of the California Children’s Home, president of the Los Angeles Orthopedic Hospital, and was member of the Chamber of Commerce.

  

 

 

Eddy’s first marriage was to Isabella A. Worsley, of Bavaria, Illinois, who accompanied him to Los Angeles in 1895. She died here soon afterwards.

 

 

 

They were the parents of two children, Carrie Eddy Sheffler, of Coldwater Canyon, and George E. Eddy, a civil engineer who died at 23 years old, after finishing the engineering work at Aurora, Illinois, electric railroad system.

 

 

Eddy married a second time in 1900 to Jane M. Wiswell, a native of Vermont. She died in 1913.

After retiring from business, James Ward Eddy moved with his granddaughter, Pearl Hansel, to Eagle Rock where he built a beautiful home on West Colorado Blvd.

 

 

  

James Ward Eddy died at his home on April 13, 1916 and was buried at Hollywood Cemetery next to his two wives and son in the Griffith Lawn (Section 7).

 

 

 

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