page_title: Harvey Henderson Wilcox
section_title: Hollywood Years
hierarchical_section_title: Harvey Henderson Wilcox / Biography / Hollywood Years
caption_attribution_description: The Hollywood Sign as viewed from the end of Beachwood Drive in the Hollywood Hills.
context_page_description: Harvey Henderson Wilcox owned a ranch west of the city of Los Angeles, which his wife Daeida named Hollywood, and that they founded together in 1887. Hollywood became the center of the movie industry of the United States in the early 1910s.
context_section_description: Harvey and Ida moved from Topeka to Los Angeles in early 1883 and tradition says that Harvey rode in the baggage car with two of his prized horses. In Los Angeles Harvey formed the real estate company of Wilcox and Shaw. Harvey and Ida had one child, a son named Harry, who died in 1886 at the age of 18 months. Family tradition says that to console themselves over the death of their baby, Harvey and Ida would take buggy rides to the beautiful canyons west of Los Angeles. Harvey purchased one of their favorite areas for $150 per acre. It was in an agricultural area of fig and apricot orchards. Harvey tried his hand at raising fruit, but failed and decided to subdivide the land, selling lots for $1,000 each. His wife named the tract "Hollywood." On February 1, 1887, Harvey filed a plat of the subdivision with the Los Angeles County Recorder's office. He would also develop residential property, "The University Tract," surrounding the newly built University of Southern California in 1887.
  Harvey and Ida were not the only members of the family to move to California. At his encouragement, his sister Sarah Luke, brother-in-law Elisha Luke, with her mother, Azubah, took the Atlantic & Pacific Railroad from Ogden to Los Angeles in November 1885 according to Adrian Weekly Press, November 13, 1885. The Lukes planned to stay only for the winter months, but Azaubah intended to remain with her son, Harvey, for the rest of her life. In February 1887 the Lukes and their daughter and son-in-law, Sam and Rosetta Young, with their young son, Almon, and Harvey's recently remarried brother Lewis, left Ogden to permanently settle in Los Angeles where Elisha would also become a real estate agent and land developer. The "Blissfield [Michigan] Advance" said in its Friday, February 18, 1887, edition that "Sam Young and wife and Elisha Luke and wife started for California last Thursday. Thus Ogden loses two of its staunch farmers, and the Prohibs, two valuable members."
  Harvey's brother Lewis Wilcox would soon leave California to return to Lenawee County where he would continue as a minister of the United Brethren church in Dundee, Michigan, until his death ten years later. Azubah died in Los Angeles in 1888 and was buried on the Luke family lot in Angelus-Rosedale Cemetery, her son, Harvey, would be buried next to her in 1891.
  Harvey's brother, Horace, is often credited as being a founder of Hollywood, but Horace, who was one of Harvey's younger brothers, stayed in Michigan where he married first Amanda McCourtie and after her death in 1880, Martha Lord. Horace raised purebred Shropshire sheep on his farm in Woodstock Township, Lenawee County, Michigan, was also the Woodstock School Inspector, and a teacher until his death in 1916. 
  There is no original source that says Harvey H. Wilcox was a Prohibitionist, although he probably was. The only known active Prohibitionists in the family were his sister, Sarah, and her husband, Elisha Luke, and almost certainly Harvey's brothers, twins Lewis and Luther, both of whom were ministers.
caption: Hollywood Sign.
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