Pasadena seems almost designed to hide where its money and institutional habits came from. The city presents itself through palms, orange groves, Craftsman houses, gardens, libraries, mountains and clean California light. Wabash, Indiana, belongs to a different visual world: river traffic, warehouses, machine shops, trucks, furnaces, controls, rubber goods and the heavily worked transportation corridor of the Midwest. Yet once the migration of people, companies and technical functions is followed rather than the survival of individual company names, the distance between the two places becomes surprisingly short.
The first connection is wonderfully literal. Modern Pasadena developed from the Indiana Colony, an organized group centered in Indianapolis that went looking for a warmer western settlement after the severe winter of 1872–73. Daniel M. Berry traveled to Southern California on behalf of the group, land from Rancho San Pasqual was selected, and the San Gabriel Orange Grove Association divided the tract among investors in January 1874. A 1917 history preserved by the Library of Congress was devoted specifically to the Indiana Colony and its evolution into Pasadena, while contemporary California histories recorded its corporate organization and division of land into agricultural parcels.
The photographs show how far Pasadena traveled in a generation. The first school stood amid barely developed agricultural land around 1874, while the Giddings homestead still looked unmistakably like a frontier farm; by 1912, Orange Grove Boulevard had acquired palms, electric streetlights and the manicured appearance that helped turn Pasadena into a national symbol of western affluence.
Pasadena Was an Indiana Development Project
The Indiana Colony should be understood as an investment and infrastructure project rather than merely a migration of families. Its organizers pooled money, created an association, purchased approximately 4,000 acres, surveyed the tract and distributed parcels according to shares. A historical account published in 1917 described January 27, 1874, as the day on which the settlers physically selected their lots, transforming an idea organized in Indiana into an actual California settlement.
That process would have looked familiar anywhere in the nineteenth-century interior. Land had to become title; title had to be made productive; roads and water had to make the parcels usable; schools, churches, shops and a post office had to stabilize the settlement. Pasadena’s early commercial crop was citrus rather than Indiana grain or livestock, but the underlying method of creating a town remained institutional. The colony was converting geography into property and property into an operating community.
What changed in California was the product that eventually became most valuable. Pasadena could sell oranges, but it could also sell climate. Health seekers and winter visitors arrived from colder parts of the country, resort hotels followed, and land whose original value depended upon agricultural productivity acquired another kind of premium: it offered distance from snow, smoke and the visibly industrial city. Early promotional literature was already praising Pasadena as a garden-like alternative to harsher eastern environments.
This allowed industrial wealth to undergo a remarkable change of costume. Money accumulated in railroads, mines, steel mills, factories and banking could move into Pasadena without bringing the furnace or smokestack with it. The factory remained somewhere else while its profits reappeared as a garden, bungalow, hotel, private library or institutional endowment.
Huntington Turned Movement Into Property and Property Into Memory
Henry E. Huntington became one of the great masters of this transformation. His Pacific Electric system helped organize movement across Southern California, while related land interests benefited from making previously distant property accessible to development. The Huntington’s educational material describes a network that eventually exceeded 1,300 miles and notes Huntington’s practice of purchasing land around trolley lines as the region developed.
The mechanism was simple and powerful. A rail line increased accessibility; accessibility increased property value; houses and businesses brought passengers; and growing traffic justified further transportation. It was the metropolitan-scale descendant of the much older canal, road and railroad logic that had built interior towns.
Henry Huntington appears here in the cultivated environment of his California estate, while Throop Hall shows the early institutional architecture of the school that would become Caltech. The images belong to different organizations, but together they capture Pasadena’s unusual ability to turn accumulated wealth into cultural and scientific institutions instead of leaving it in visibly industrial form.
Huntington’s final public identity makes the conversion especially clear. In 1919, Henry and Arabella Huntington placed the estate and collections into the trust that became the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. Transportation and property wealth had been transformed into an institution governing books, manuscripts, art, scholarship and cultural memory.
Only a few miles away, Pasadena was building the complementary institution. Throop University, founded in 1891, passed through several organizational forms before becoming the California Institute of Technology in 1920. George Ellery Hale, Arthur Noyes and Robert Millikan helped remake a small local school into an institution centered on high-level scientific research.
One institution collected the past while the other constructed technical futures. Pasadena had developed both an archive and a laboratory.
The Rocket Men Took the Laboratory Into the Arroyo
The famous rocket story begins in surroundings much rougher than Caltech’s architecture suggests. During the 1930s, Frank Malina, Jack Parsons, Edward Forman and others working around Theodore von Kármán began experimenting with rocket propulsion. Because explosions and rocket motors did not mix well with an ordinary college campus, the group moved into the Arroyo Seco, where isolation, rough terrain and proximity to Pasadena created an ideal experimental zone.
JPL traces its institutional origins to those experiments. The first successful tests in the Arroyo in 1936 were conducted with improvised equipment and sandbagged apparatus that looked more like a backyard machine experiment than the beginning of planetary exploration. Military interest followed as the group developed jet-assisted takeoff systems for aircraft, and the informal rocket circle gradually became institutionalized research.
The transition is visible in these two images. The early JPL group sits in the dirt beside improvised equipment; Aerojet’s later test work already belongs to the world of aircraft, contracts and organized propulsion engineering. Within a remarkably short period, the experimental rocket had acquired laboratories, payrolls, procurement systems and corporate ownership.
That transition produced Aerojet Engineering Corporation, founded in 1942 by figures from the Caltech rocket circle. Then the geography shifted again. General Tire and Rubber Company of Akron purchased Aerojet in 1945, taking an experimental Southern California rocket business into the corporate structure of an Ohio rubber company. The present-day corporate history of Aerojet Rocketdyne describes that acquisition explicitly and notes how the company descended from General Tire’s expansion into aerospace.
The road economy had reached the rocket.
General Tire Brings the Story Back to Wabash
This is where Wabash stops being merely a point of comparison and becomes part of the documented corporate geography. General Tire maintained a manufacturing operation in Wabash, and wartime material from the Indiana state government lists General Tire alongside Service Motor Company and Honeywell among the town’s defense-related manufacturers. A 1945 industry advertisement for General’s Wabash mechanical-goods division promoted precision rubber products for aircraft, electrical equipment, instruments and vibration isolation.
The afterlife of that relationship is still sitting in government paperwork. In August 2025, the Indiana Department of Environmental Management addressed a remediation letter for the Former General Tire property at 1 General Street in Wabash to both the City of Wabash and Aerojet Rocketdyne Holdings, Inc. The letter describes the nearly thirty-acre former manufacturing property and its industrial history.
That surviving document is remarkable because no interpretive leap is necessary. Wabash, General Tire and Aerojet Rocketdyne appear together on a twenty-first-century state environmental record because corporate succession preserved a relationship created generations earlier.
A company born in Akron’s rubber economy had acquired the Pasadena rocket company. Its industrial footprint also reached Wabash. Road technology, aircraft components and rocket propulsion were now different sections of a corporate history that had become national rather than local.
Honeywell Is the Even Cleaner Wabash-to-Space Story
General Tire supplies one route west, but the strongest direct Wabash-to-space line may actually be Honeywell.
Mark C. Honeywell was born and raised in Wabash and developed his heating business there. Honeywell’s own corporate history dates the formation of Honeywell Heating Specialty Company to 1906 and describes Mark Honeywell’s specialization in hot-water heat generators. In 1927 his company merged with Minneapolis Heat Regulator Company to create Minneapolis-Honeywell Regulator Company, allowing the Wabash name and control technology to move into a much larger industrial organization.
The sequence in these images is almost the entire argument in miniature. Mark C. Honeywell begins as a Wabash industrialist working in heating and automatic control; the early Honeywell Heating Specialty material belongs to that domestic mechanical world; the Apollo command module represents the environment into which Honeywell technology eventually expanded.
The crucial word is control. A thermostat detects a condition and causes a system to respond. The scale can grow dramatically while the underlying engineering problem remains recognizable: sensing, feedback, stability and controlled adjustment.
By the 1960s, Honeywell was deeply involved in aerospace and defense. The company’s own history states that 16,000 Honeywell parts were used in fourteen electronic devices making up the Apollo 11 spacecraft’s Stabilization and Control Systems. Honeywell pilots also participated in flight testing with Neil Armstrong.
A business whose Wabash origins involved controlling hot-water heating had reached a spacecraft whose survival depended upon maintaining attitude, stability and controlled motion beyond Earth.
That is a much more literal technological migration than simply saying Midwestern industrial culture influenced California. Wabash-born control engineering had become space-age control engineering.
Nixon Makes the Indiana-to-California Migration Even Stranger
Richard Nixon introduces another Indiana migration into the same Southern California landscape, and this one is genealogical as well as institutional. Nixon was born in Yorba Linda in 1913, but his mother, Hannah Milhous Nixon, was born near Butlerville in Jennings County, Indiana, in 1885. The Nixon Library records that Hannah’s Milhous family moved from Indiana to Whittier, California, in 1897, when she was twelve.
The migration was not an isolated family decision. Nixon Library material describes the Milhous family joining the developing Quaker colony at Whittier along with other families from Jennings County. Hannah’s father, Franklin Milhous, had lived in Indiana from childhood and moved his family into Southern California’s Quaker settlement during the same larger westward movement that had already produced the Indiana Colony at Pasadena.
Whittier and Pasadena were separate communities, so they should not be collapsed into one colony. What matters is the repeated migration pattern. Southern California was receiving organized groups from the interior who arrived with religious communities, family networks, property practices and commercial ambitions already formed.
The transportation connection becomes almost too neat. Nixon Library family records state that Richard Nixon’s father, Frank Nixon, worked as a streetcar motorman on the Pacific Electric line between Los Angeles and Whittier after moving from Ohio to California.
Henry Huntington’s electric transportation system therefore was not merely part of the regional backdrop to Nixon’s upbringing. Nixon’s father actually worked inside that transportation world.
Nixon, Honeywell and the Moon Meet in 1969
The convergences become especially vivid on July 20, 1969. President Nixon sat in the Oval Office and spoke by telephone-radio transmission with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin while they stood on the Moon. The National Archives preserves both the photographs and records of the call.
Inside the Apollo spacecraft supporting that mission were thousands of Honeywell components in the stabilization-and-control system. The Wabash heating company had become an aerospace-controls corporation at exactly the historical moment when the son of an Indiana-born woman was president and publicly speaking to astronauts on the lunar surface.
Nixon’s Apollo call, the spacecraft environment, and the later image of Nixon at San Clemente capture three layers of the same California story. Southern California had become simultaneously a presidential base, a center of aerospace culture and a landscape where technology could be presented through national spectacle rather than through the older visual language of the factory town.
Honeywell’s presence also complicates any simple triumphal version of this technological expansion. The company was simultaneously a major aerospace and defense contractor. A 1971 Minnesota Supreme Court case records a shareholder dispute arising from the Honeywell Project, whose participants were attempting to challenge the company’s production of munitions associated with the Vietnam War; the court’s opinion specifically discusses Honeywell’s fragmentation-bomb production and the activist campaign that began during the late 1960s.
That places Honeywell directly inside one of the central tensions of the Nixon era. The same control-and-engineering corporation could supply technology associated with Apollo while also working in weapons and military systems that attracted intense antiwar opposition. The issue was debated publicly, litigated by shareholders and protested outside Honeywell facilities rather than existing as a hidden contradiction.
Howard Hughes Enters Nixon’s California
Howard Hughes belongs naturally in this story because he occupied aviation and entertainment simultaneously. By the 1940s and 1950s, Hughes could move between aircraft development, defense technology, film production, personal celebrity and corporate finance with a freedom that would have been difficult to imagine in the earlier industrial economy.
Hughes also intersected with the Nixon family long before Watergate. In 1956, Hughes Tool Company provided a $205,000 loan connected to Donald Nixon’s struggling business, with Hannah Nixon’s Whittier property used as security. Nixon Library materials preserve the Nixon side’s account of the transaction and Richard Nixon’s repeated statement that he had no ownership in Donald’s business and had not participated in negotiating the loan. The episode nevertheless became a political issue during the 1960 presidential campaign and again during Nixon’s 1962 California gubernatorial race.
The geographical detail deserves attention. Hannah Nixon, the Indiana-born Quaker migrant, had become part of Southern California property society. The Hughes loan then placed her Whittier property inside a financial transaction connecting her son’s family to one of America’s most famous aviation magnates.
The Hughes relationship surfaced again during Nixon’s presidency in a different form. National Archives records from the Watergate Special Prosecution Force include a dedicated Hughes/Rebozo investigation, while the Watergate investigative roadmap records a safe-deposit box used by Nixon friend Charles “Bebe” Rebozo for campaign funds that included $100,000 from Hughes. These records document the financial trail and subsequent investigation; by themselves they do not establish that a particular government action was purchased in exchange.
That distinction is important because the documented story is already significant without turning the financial relationships into something the surviving records cannot prove.
General Tire Then Bought Hughes’s Movie Studio
Hughes’s RKO ownership creates the next extraordinary corporate junction. RKO Radio Pictures belonged to the visible machinery of Hollywood: sound stages, stars, publicity, theaters and a huge library of films. In 1955, Hughes sold RKO to General Tire through its broadcasting interests.
General Tire’s corporate descendant describes the company’s history as including ownership of radio and television stations, movie studios and Aerojet. The same history specifically dates General Tire’s purchase of Aerojet to 1945.
The three images capture the mid-century California convergence remarkably well. Howard Hughes represents the aviation-and-film entrepreneur; the RKO building carries the radio transmitter directly into the studio’s visual identity; Nixon’s San Clemente presidency shows how Southern California itself had become part of national political power.
General Tire’s expansion makes the ownership structure especially revealing. Rubber connected it to road transportation. Aerojet connected it to propulsion and missiles. Broadcasting connected it to radio and television. RKO added a motion-picture library whose images could be licensed and circulated repeatedly through those broadcast systems.
A tire company had become a channel company.
The RKO Library Was Infrastructure Too
A film library looks less like infrastructure than a railroad or factory because its freight is invisible until projected. Yet economically, a mature movie catalog solves a familiar problem. The owner possesses reproducible material that can be licensed, routed through distribution systems, shown in different markets and reused without manufacturing the original production again.
That made RKO extraordinarily useful to a company already interested in broadcasting. General Tire did not need to manufacture every story anew when it could own a library of images and the channels capable of bringing those images into homes.
The progression from road to radio is less strange when framed this way. The railroad routes physical freight. The telephone routes speech. Broadcasting routes electromagnetic signals. Film libraries supply reusable traffic for visual distribution systems.
What changes is the cargo.
Nixon’s California Was Built From the Same Migrations
Nixon eventually established his Western White House at La Casa Pacifica in San Clemente, reinforcing his political identity with Southern California long after he had moved onto the national stage. The Nixon Library still treats the San Clemente operation as a major part of his presidential geography.
His personal history makes the westward migration underneath that geography unusually visible. His maternal family had come out of Indiana. His father worked the Southern California electric railway system. Nixon grew up in the citrus-and-Quaker environment of Yorba Linda and Whittier, entered California politics, became president during the Apollo era, interacted publicly with the space program, and repeatedly crossed paths with the Hughes financial world.
That does not make Nixon the architect of Pasadena’s industrial transformation. He is useful because his life sits inside so many of the systems that transformation produced: California migration, citrus settlement, electric transportation, aerospace, television politics, defense policy and the Hughes economy.
Honeywell Shows What Actually Traveled West
The Honeywell line helps prevent the entire story from becoming merely a collection of famous California names. Mark Honeywell’s early Wabash business dealt with an extremely practical problem: regulating heat. The technological principle was that a machine could detect a changing condition and respond without constant human intervention.
Over decades that principle escaped the house.
Industrial controls regulated factories. Instruments measured processes. Avionics controlled aircraft. Guidance and stabilization systems controlled machines moving through air and space. The surroundings grew fantastically more complicated, but detection, feedback and response remained at the center.
That is one of the clearest ways to understand what happened between Wabash and Pasadena. The Midwest did not simply export money west. It exported techniques for controlling increasingly complicated systems.
The thermostat and the rocket belong to dramatically different scales of engineering, yet both depend upon knowing the present state of a system and making the correct adjustment before instability becomes failure.
By the 1970s the Old Categories Had Collapsed
By Nixon’s presidency, many categories that had looked distinct in 1900 had become almost impossible to keep apart. Aerospace companies depended on electronics, computers, guidance systems and government contracts. Media companies depended on broadcasting licenses, telecommunications technology and reusable intellectual property. Defense firms could produce civilian controls and military systems simultaneously. Universities conducted open research while participating in government-sponsored technical programs.
The controversy surrounding Honeywell during the Vietnam era illustrates the new scale clearly. A name still associated in millions of homes with thermostats had also become significant enough in defense production that activists organized an entire movement around forcing the company to leave the weapons business. The 1971 Minnesota Supreme Court case preserved that conflict in the legal record.
At the same time, Honeywell technology was part of the American space program. Nixon was speaking with astronauts on the Moon. Hughes occupied the overlapping worlds of aviation and entertainment. General Tire’s corporate descendants carried both the Wabash manufacturing residue and Aerojet’s rocket history.
These were no longer town-sized systems.
They had become national networks.
How Wabash Ended Up in Pasadena
Wabash never relocated to Pasadena in the literal sense, and Pasadena never became an Indiana company town. The more interesting history is the repeated migration of people, capital and functions across the continent.
Indianapolis investors organized the settlement that became Pasadena. Indiana Quakers from Jennings County moved to Whittier, including the family of Richard Nixon’s mother. Frank Nixon worked inside the Pacific Electric transportation system associated with Henry Huntington’s Southern California expansion. Mark Honeywell built a Wabash controls business whose corporate successor supplied thousands of parts to Apollo 11. General Tire operated a major Wabash manufacturing plant while its corporate organization also owned the Aerojet rocket company born from the Caltech circle. Howard Hughes bridged aviation and Hollywood and later had documented financial dealings touching the Nixon family and Nixon’s political circle.
Each strand has its own history, and keeping those histories distinct is what makes the overlap meaningful.
The larger transformation was from visible industrial power to distributed systems power. In the nineteenth-century town, the important machinery could often be seen: warehouse, bank, railroad, quarry, courthouse, mill and factory. In twentieth-century Southern California, similar organizational power dispersed into research institutes, defense contractors, communications systems, estates, libraries, movie studios and aerospace laboratories.
Pasadena is one of the best places in America to see that conversion because the beginning and the end look so radically different. The Indiana Colony starts with agricultural lots, dirt roads and a small schoolhouse. Within a few generations the same landscape contains Caltech and JPL, while the surrounding Southern California economy contains Hughes Aircraft, RKO, the Nixon political world and an enormous aerospace-defense complex.
Wabash supplies the other end of the telescope. There, Mark Honeywell’s controls, Service’s transportation machinery and General Tire’s manufacturing footprint make the older industrial substrate easier to recognize. A 2025 Indiana environmental document can still place “Former General Tire,” Wabash and Aerojet Rocketdyne Holdings on the same page.
That may be the most revealing image of the entire story, even though it is only paperwork. The historical path from an Indiana factory town to the rocket economy of Southern California did not remain visible as a single company or a single family. It survived through mergers, migration, contracts, property, technology and institutions whose public identities changed much faster than the functions underneath them.
By the time Nixon was talking to astronauts standing on the Moon, the transformation was nearly complete. A Wabash-born control company was inside the spacecraft, a California president with an Indiana-born mother was on the telephone, Caltech’s former rocket experimenters had helped create a major aerospace industry, and General Tire had already linked Midwestern manufacturing, Aerojet propulsion, broadcasting and a Hollywood film library inside the same expanding corporate genealogy.
The Midwest had not disappeared from California. It had become difficult to see because so much of it had learned to look like the future.