A Life in Dahlias: J. J. Broomall and His Eagle Rock Dahlia Farm

Copyright © 2026 by Steve K. Lloyd
All rights reserved.

Jesse James Broomall spent much of his life becoming the man Eagle Rock would remember: a dahlia breeder, florist, writer, experimenter, and lifelong student of plant life. The path to his famous garden on Dahlia Drive, now a neighborhood in Los Angeles, was anything but direct.

He was born in Pennsylvania on January 24, 1858. His family were Hicksite Quakers, and as a restless boy he found the long hour of silent worship almost unbearable; he would rather have been outdoors, wandering the fields and woods, picking wildflowers, watching for trout beneath the mossy banks of streams. It would be a mistake to read the horticulturist backward into the child. But the habits of attention are already there, and they never left him.

By 1878, when he was twenty, Broomall was a long way from Pennsylvania. In a later autobiographical article he remembered herding cattle on the Kickapoo Indian Reservation in Brown County, Kansas, and within a few years he had moved farther west still, into the work of building railroads. He was frank about why. Writing half a century later in the Eagle Rock press, he explained that railroad contractors paid four or five times what the Pennsylvania farm had, where the work ran from sunrise past sunset. But money was only part of it. As a boy he had stayed up by candlelight reading stories of frontier figures, and the developing West offered something close to the life he had imagined for himself.

That life is preserved in vivid detail in his autobiographical series When the Iron Horse Came to the Rio Grande. He described the railroad construction camps along the river and the constant movement from one contract to the next, with teams, scrapers, mules, covered wagons, and grading crews. He worked first along the Santa Fe route in New Mexico, for outfits headed by men he remembered as Simms and White. At Martin's Well he joined Curran and Crowell, the best employers he ever had.

John Curran in particular stayed with him. Curran's habit, Broomall wrote, was never to ask whether a difficult thing could be done, but only how best to do it, and Broomall came to believe that example had helped him meet obstacles and discouragement for the rest of his life. The young laborer moved steadily south and west, through New Mexico and into western Texas, handling teams and grading equipment and camp work. He was promoted for a time to corral boss, though he later admitted that supervising hardened mule skinners did not suit him, and he gave the position up.

In the fall of 1881 he crossed the Rio Grande at El Paso with Curran and Crowell and went down into Chihuahua to work on the Mexican Central. What is most striking in his account of those years is how much he noticed that had nothing to do with railroads. He wrote of grasses and cacti, wild potatoes, the fertility of the soil, irrigation and rainfall, the local methods of farming, the effects of heat and drought. On Sundays he climbed the mountains and explored. None of this made him a horticulturist. But the close, patient looking that would later fill his working life is already unmistakable.

Illness finally forced him out of Mexico. He recovered in Chihuahua over the winter of 1881 to 1882, returned north to El Paso, and in March 1882 bought a railroad ticket for San Francisco. The journey gave him his first sight of Southern California. He remembered passing through San Gorgonio Pass on a green spring day and being struck by the contrast between that country and the arid land behind him. The train stopped in Los Angeles, a town he barely knew by name, and he did not get off. His ticket was for San Francisco.

In San Francisco, chance redirected him again. He met a man he had known in Mexico who told him about Seattle, a place Broomall said he had never heard of, and on the strength of that conversation he booked passage north on the steamship George W. Elder, stopping at Victoria before he reached Puget Sound. Seattle, as he remembered it, held perhaps four thousand people and more mud and stumps than he had ever seen gathered in one town. He would stay in the region for most of the next quarter century.

Broomall’s first remembered Washington job was in a sawmill at Port Gamble. By May 1884 he was using a Seattle postal address; by 1889 local records place him in the Seattle area as a laborer or gardener. Somewhere in these years, without any single moment marking the change, horticulture became his settled occupation.

On May 6, 1894, he married Margaret Paine at Everett. Margaret came from a family with horticultural roots of its own; several of her brothers worked as gardeners or florists, among them members of the firm George J. Paine & Bros. Whether the Paines shaped Broomall's own path cannot now be shown, but gardening and floristry were firmly at home in the household the couple made together. By 1900 Jesse and Margaret were living at 557 Aloha Street in Seattle, and Jesse was recorded as a gardener and florist.

He later supplied one especially important detail about the beginning of his dahlia work. Writing in 1929, he recalled that the first dahlia cuttings he ever grew were rooted about 1897 in Snohomish County, in virgin soil rich with leaf mold, and that they grew quickly and bloomed to perfection. It may not have been his first encounter with the flower, but it is the earliest such moment he himself ever named, and he set it down as a beginning.

By 1907 Broomall was listed as a florist in Riverside, California. The next year he registered to vote in Los Angeles County, and by 1910 he and Margaret were living in Eagle Rock, recorded again as a gardener and, this time, an owner of the home they lived in. It was there that his life settled into its most lasting shape.

The clearest surviving glimpse of that life comes from September 1912, when the journalist Estelle Lawton Lindsey visited the Eagle Rock dahlia farm and left one of the finest portraits we have of Broomall at work. She found him watering by hoe and hose as evening came on, the garden around him crowded with dahlias and with life: chickens, goats, a collie underfoot, an Angora cat, a scatter of visitors, and his wife moving among them.

He told Lindsey he grew more than sixty varieties, dozens of them his own. He talked about hybridization and selection, about the surprises of variation, about fragrance and the economic promise of horticulture. He wondered aloud why gardening was not taught in the public schools, and spoke of the plain satisfaction he took in working with flowers. The man Lindsey met in 1912 is already, unmistakably, the one who would spend the next two decades writing about how plants might be made better.

The public record caught up with him slowly. By 1920 the census no longer called him simply a gardener; his occupation was given as a specialist, “raising dahlias.” His own catalogs make the identity plainer still. By 1924 they carried the Dahlia Farm at 5221 Dahlia Drive, the same address where he would die in 1937.

Broomall was never only a commercial grower of flowers. Beginning in 1918 he published installments of The Evolution of the Dahlia in his catalogs, writing over the years about heredity and variation, color and climate, propagation, breeding, plant vigor, and the possibilities of improvement. By the 1920s he was planning to revise and expand this accumulated work into a book under that same title. The completed volume never appeared, but much of what he meant for it survives across catalogs, newspaper essays, and related publications.

His curiosity ran well past the mechanics of growing. He wrote about education and agriculture, about plant improvement and social questions, and about his own years in the developing West, returning late in life to the railroad camps of his youth in When the Iron Horse Came to the Rio Grande. A longtime neighbor, C. E. Harsh, remembered him as a man denied much formal schooling who had educated himself instead through experience, reading, observation, and experiment. The exact extent of his schooling remains undocumented, but that description fits the mind visible everywhere in his writing.

His dahlias preserved a biography of their own. Many carried the names of people in his personal and local world: neighbors, friends, Eagle Rock families, civic figures. In 1931 he named a deep-pink dahlia “Elizabeth McKelvey” for the president of the Los Angeles District of Federated Women's Clubs, and formally presented the flower and its tuber at a large gathering at Eagle Rock High School. Taken together, the names in his catalogs are more than a commercial inventory. They preserve fragments of the human world that surrounded the Dahlia Farm.

No name was more personal than “Margaret E. Broomall”, the remarkable white dahlia he named for his wife. Writing about that flower, he referred directly to his private plant book, where he kept records of seedlings, parentage, evaluations, and observations. It is a small but telling glimpse of the method behind the public displays: he was not breeding by memory. He kept records, compared generations, and returned to the same questions across many years. Margaret herself appears only rarely in the surviving record. Lindsey's 1912 visit offers one of the clearest contemporary glimpses of her at the farm, moving naturally through the setting that surrounded her husband's work; beyond that, the evidence does not support assigning her a documented role in the breeding or the business.

By the late 1920s Broomall's eyesight was failing. In an announcement for the 1928 season he told his customers that failing eyesight had compelled him to give up what he called “the commercial part of the Dahlia business,” and Charles G. Reed of Success Dahlia Gardens in Lawrence, Massachusetts, took over the mail-order and catalog side of the operation.

But giving up the trade was not the same as giving up the work, and the distinction matters. Success Dahlia Gardens announced that Broomall would now devote himself to breeding, and that his future introductions would come exclusively through the firm; Broomall himself assured customers he meant to keep trying to improve the dahlia. His writings continued to appear in the Success catalogs from 1928 through 1933, and his cultivars went on circulating under the new arrangement. He had withdrawn from the machinery of commerce, not from the pursuit that had drawn him to flowers in the first place.

His curiosity was never confined to a single plant. His later writings show him experimenting with avocados, figs, and other crops while he went on thinking broadly about improvement. By 1934 he was writing about the neglected possibilities of the fig, sowing large numbers of Smyrna fig seeds in the hope of producing something better, or at least something different, and describing in the newspapers the germination, the crowded seedlings, the transplanting, and the ordinary difficulties of fig culture in Eagle Rock. Memorial notices would remember this fig work as one of the projects occupying him near the end. The dahlia held its place at the center of his reputation, but it was never the whole measure of the man.

He remained a familiar and respected figure in Eagle Rock into old age. In September 1935, according to a later memorial notice from the American Dahlia Society, the Society gave him a gold medal in recognition of his work developing superior new varieties; the original announcement has not been recovered, so the exact title of the honor remains uncertain. He went on experimenting almost to the end.

Jesse James Broomall died suddenly at his home at 5221 Dahlia Drive on Sunday, November 14, 1937, at seventy-nine. Contemporary reports laid his death to heart failure, and his remains were sent to Seattle for burial. The two Eagle Rock papers that reported it remembered far more than a successful florist. The Advertiser called him a nationally noted horticulturist and recalled his dahlia work, his writings on the pioneer West, his early railroad years, his time in Mexico, and his unbroken interest in new plants. The Sentinel printed a tribute from C. E. Harsh, who had lived across the street for eighteen years and remembered him as a kind neighbor, a true friend, an honorable man, and a lifelong student of plant life, one who had kept trying to produce better varieties until the very end.

He never published the book he envisioned, and the fate of his plant books and working papers is unknown. But the work survives in other forms: in catalogs and newspaper essays, in photographs, in named cultivars, in the scattered record of a long and unusual life. The American Dahlia Society remembered him as an important breeder; Eagle Rock, as one of its distinguished citizens. His own writing reveals something larger, a man who spent decades looking closely at living things, asking questions of them, trying his answers in the garden, and then setting down what he thought he had learned.

The restless Pennsylvania boy who preferred woods and wildflowers to silent worship had traveled through Kansas cattle country, New Mexico railroad camps, Chihuahua, California, and Puget Sound before he settled at last in Eagle Rock. There, on Dahlia Drive, the wandering stopped.

The observing did not.

This book owes a great deal to my dahlia friend Margaret “EM” Laverty, whose gifts as a genealogist and historical detective are matched only by what she can do with animals and with dahlias. 

She traced the census records that follow Broomall across the country, ran the elusive obituary to ground, and turned up the delightful newspaper article that comes next, “An Evening at Broomall's Dahlia Farm: Eagle Rock, 1912.” Without her patience for the archive, much of J. J.'s story would still be scattered and half-lost.

Thank you, Margaret. You helped me bring his story back to life.

— SKL