Drum Barracks

In the 1860 election Los Angeles County gave John Breckinridge about twice as many votes as Abraham Lincoln. A company of secessionists drilled openly in El Monte. Phineas Banning wrote to Lincoln to say that California could be lost without a federal force standing in it, and then he and Benjamin Wilson sold the government this ground for a dollar apiece.

The post is named for Lieutenant Colonel Richard Coulter Drum of the Department of the Pacific, and its lumber came around Cape Horn because there was no closer source. The California Column that formed here reached the Rio Grande in 1862 and found the Confederates already pulling back; the skirmishes at Picacho Pass and Apache Pass stand as the westernmost fighting of the war.

Then there are the camels. Thirty-one of them, brought to America in the 1850s at the direction of Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, who would shortly become president of the Confederacy. They were stabled at Fort Tejon, moved into Los Angeles, complained about, and pushed down here to a Union garrison. The Army tried running them as a courier line to Fort Mojave. It did not work. They were shipped to Benicia and auctioned in 1863, and the experiment was dropped.

A sculpture of a camel stands in front of the surviving building.