The growth of Los Angeles between 1866 and 1891 was not uniform or predictable at every point. The city grew moderately through the 1860s and 1870s as it organized itself under American rule and developed its agricultural and commercial economy. The arrival of the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1876 began a new phase of growth. The rate wars of the mid-1880s, when competing railroads temporarily reduced transcontinental fares to nearly nothing, produced a speculative land boom and a dramatic population surge that pushed prices to levels that collapsed in a bust around 1888-1889.
Mason navigated this boom and bust as a property owner. The sources indicate that she was selling some property by 1878 for approximately ten times its original purchase price, which places her activity in the pre-boom period of solid but not speculative appreciation. Whether she sold before or after the speculative peak of the 1880s boom is not documented in the sources available here, but the general pattern of a person who bought early in the city’s development and held through substantial appreciation is established.
Her ability to manage this property — to know when to sell, when to hold, how to handle tenants and maintenance and legal requirements — raises the question of how an illiterate woman operated in the property management environment of 1870s and 1880s Los Angeles. The answer, as with the original purchase, is through relationships: she was embedded in a community that included people with literacy and legal knowledge who could help manage the administrative dimension of property ownership. Her son-in-law Charles Owens was a businessman with his own substantial holdings; the extended family structure provided the infrastructure for property management that literacy would otherwise have been required for.