One of the very few white men in this district was José Mascarel (a powerfully-built French sea-captain and master of the ship that brought Don Luis Vignes to the Southland), who settled in Los Angeles in 1844, marrying an Indian woman. He had come with Prudhomme and others; and under Captain Henseley had taken part in the military events at San Bartolo and the Mesa. By 1865, when he was Mayor of the city, he had already accumulated a number of important real estate holdings and owned, with another Frenchman, Juan Barri, a baker, the block extending east on the south side of Commercial Street, from Main to Los Angeles, which had been built in 1861 to take the place of several old adobes. This the owners later divided, Mascarel taking the southeast corner of Commercial and Main streets, and Barri the southwest corner of Commercial and Los Angeles streets. In the seventies, I. W. Hellman bought the Mascarel corner, and in 1883, the Farmers & Merchants Bank moved to that location, where it remained until the institution purchased the southwest corner of Fourth and Main streets, for the erection of its own building. Andrés Ramirez was another Sonora Town merchant. He had come from Mexico in 1844, and sold general merchandise in what, for a while, was dubbed the Street of the Maids. Later, this was better known as Upper Main Street; and still later it was called San Fernando Street. Louis Abarca was a tradesman and a neighbor of Ramirez. Prosperous until the advent of the pioneer, he little by little became poorer, and finally withdrew from business. Juan Bernard, a native of French Switzerland, whose daughter married D. Botiller, now an important landowner, came to California by way of the Horn, in search of the precious metal, preceding me to this land of sunshine. For awhile, he had a brickyard on Buena Vista Street; but in the late seventies, soon after marrying Señorita Susana Machado, daughter of Don Agustin Machado, he bought a vineyard on Alameda Street, picturesquely enclosed by a high adobe or brick wall much after the fashion of a European _château_. He also came to own the site of the Natick House. A clever linguist and a man of attractive personality, he passed away in 1889. An American by the name of George Walters lived on Upper Main Street, among the denizens of which locality he was an influential person. Born at New Orleans as early as 1809, Walters had trapped and traded in the Rocky Mountains, then teamed for awhile between Santa Fé and neighboring points. Near the end of 1844, he left New Mexico in company with James Waters, Jim Beckwith and other travelers, finally reaching Los Angeles. Walters, who settled in San Bernardino, was at the Chino Ranch, with B. D. Wilson and Louis Robidoux, when so many Americans were made prisoners.