Glendale’s earliest known Armenian settler

Archival records reveal the story of Megerdich James Normart, who arrived in Tropico 130 years ago and whose brother became Fresno’s earliest known Armenian visitor.

Los Angeles-area newspaper archives reveal that a forgotten figure, Megerdich James B. Normart (originally Yanikian), bought 10 acres of land in Tropico, today’s south Glendale, on Monday, May 25, 1896, and lived there for 24 years before moving to Long Beach.1 This ostensibly made him the first Armenian in Glendale, the modern “capital” of the Armenian diaspora, settling there 15 years before the previously identified record holders, the Ignatosian and Jamgochian families, ancestors of the late Paul Ignatius.

The Normart (Yanikian) brothers.

Megerdich James and his wife, Eliza Gardiner Normart, were recognized as among Tropico’s early settlers and local pioneers in Glendale-area newspaper entries from 1918 and 1921, respectively.3 Part of their originally purchased tract still bears their name, “Normart’s Tract,” at the corner of Columbus Avenue and Chevy Chase Drive.

A Christmas party at the Normarts’ home, “Barz Doon,” highlighted in the newspaper.

The couple were Quakers who led several agricultural and real estate enterprises in the area. At least three of their original homes are still standing. The most prominent, built in 1906, was referred to at the time as the “pretty new villa ‘Barz Doon’” (“simple house” in Armenian).5 Located at 352 W. Chevy Chase Drive, it hosted several events such as a Christmas party in 1907, attended by guests from Pasadena, Los Angeles and Fresno.6 Megerdich James was also a foreman at Pacific Art Tile Works, a well-known local tile factory, which is today a Costco on Los Feliz Boulevard near Glendale.

An address where he sold chickens in 1911 corresponds to the present-day Garfield Campus of Glendale Community College.

He was a neighbor and friend of Nelson C. Burch, an attorney, newspaper editor and city clerk who had also served as a bodyguard for President Lincoln during the Civil War.

A newspaper announcement regarding the return of the Normarts to Glendale.

The Normarts hosted prominent Armenian-American guests including Alexander and Lily Alchian of Fresno, parents of famed UCLA economist Armen Alchian; Serope Yotnelpire Parney, an early settler in Pasadena and La Cañada, California, a forest ranger and inspector for the U.S. Forestry Service west of the Rocky Mountains; and Sarkis Mihran Minasian of New York, an early Armenian immigrant to the United States who arrived in 1845.

Minasian was a millionaire philanthropist involved in the sale of American household goods in Constantinople, a sponsor of Armenian settlement in California and one of the first Armenian visitors to Los Angeles in 1883.

In the absence of an available extant biography, there are around 200 Los Angeles-area newspaper entries, six Glendale city directories and other official documents that help shed more light on the elusive life of Megerdich James Normart. Together, they allow a partial reconstruction of his time in Tropico through land and home sales, visitors received, travels made and general life events. Among those events were a 1901 social excursion with the Tropico Outing Club to the ruins of the San Fernando Mission, where he reportedly met two supercentenarian Native Americans; acknowledgment in 1913 as one of Tropico’s “most wide-awake and faithful citizens” for being the first patron of the community’s new U.S. Post office and thus helping in the “competition with the Wells-Fargo company monopolies”; and recognition in 1911 as one of 40 heirs to a whopping $85,000,000 unclaimed will ($3 billion today) held by the Bank of England.12 He also suffered setbacks such as sustaining injuries from being trampled on by a horse in 1902 and after falling from a tree while trimming it in 1917.

In addition to receiving visitors from different parts of Los Angeles, Fresno, Tucson, Arizona, Wyoming and Philadelphia, the Normarts traveled extensively, making many trips to Pasadena, La Cañada, Santa Monica, Long Beach, Fresno, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C.

Megerdich James B. Normart was born in Erzurum, Ottoman Armenia, in 1843 to Markar and Yakout Yanikian. He was one of nine children, with six brothers and three sisters.He immigrated to the United States in 1887, spending a year in Philadelphia before moving to Fresno.

His older brother, Mardiros Frank Normart, is the earliest known Armenian visitor to Fresno, arriving in either 1874 or 1876. He later returned to Philadelphia before moving back to settle in Fresno in the mid-1880s inviting the rest of his family from abroad. Upon arriving in the United States in 1871, Mardiros Frank changed the family surname to “Normart,” meaning “new man” in Armenian, because he felt like a new man upon his arrival. The rest of the family subsequently adopted the name.

In 1895, Mardiros Frank opened the famous Normart merchandise store in Visalia, near Fresno. The business sold and repaired bicycles and hunting equipment and also offered taxidermy, gunsmithing, locksmithing, tanning and furs.

In 1893, Megerdich James was naturalized as a U.S. citizen in Fresno. In 1895, he married Eliza Gardiner, the sister of his sister-in-law (Frank’s wife’s, Mary G. Normart’s sister). Eliza was born in New Jersey in 1853 to a family with roots in New England. At the time of their marriage, he was 51 and she was 42. The couple had no children.

The 1910 U.S. census reports that this was Megerdich James’s second marriage and Eliza’s first. A brief Normart family history corroborates the earlier marriage, indicating that his first wife died under unknown circumstances. The same family history states that he had a daughter from that marriage, although her  fate remains unknown. After living in Tropico and Glendale for 24 years, from 1896 to 1920, the Normarts moved to Long Beach in 1921. Megerdich James died there in 1927 at age 83, and Eliza died in 1940 at age 87. They are buried at Westminster Memorial Park in Orange County, in graves that lack tombstones, possibly reflecting Quaker traditions, emphasizing humility in death.

There are several possible reasons for why Megerdich James has been largely absent from local and modern history accounts. Interestingly, he is mentioned in a unique 2014 historic resources report prepared for the city of Glendale on the history of south Glendale, but only in passing. One explanation is the passage of time between the earliest Armenian immigrants and the later, larger waves of arrivals, leading to a gap in diasporic communal or institutional memory. Another is that Megerdich and Eliza had no direct descendants to preserve their story. Their move from the Glendale area to Long Beach may also have contributed to their gradual disappearance from local historical narratives. There is also the difficulty, as articulated by historian of Armenian-American diaspora Benjamin F. Alexander, which is common to diasporan communities, namely, the maintenance of robust archives outside institutions such as churches, schools, clubs and political organizations.

One of many real estate advertisements placed by Normart, Los Angeles Times, Oct. 31, 1909. A final and more simple explanation as to how they have not been present specifically in California Armenian diasporic studies and histories, one of the most recent examples being their absence in Dr. Daniel Fittante’s specific and spectacular study of Armenians in Glendale, “Ethnopolitical Entrepreneurs: Outsiders Inside Armenian Los Angeles” (2023), is that their last name, “Normart,” lacks the traditionally common suffix for Armenian surnames, the “-ian” or “-yan,” leading to their having been relatively “off the radar” for those interested in the study of local Armenian history. 

It was research into the early Armenian history of Fresno and the family history of its first Armenian visitor, Mardiros Frank Normart, that led to the discovery of Megerdich James Normart and his ties to early Glendale. The recent digitalization of many Los Angeles- and Glendale-area newspaper archives helped uncover the trove of microfilm copies of newspaper entries related to the Normart couple. This research hopes to shed light on an earlier, pre-Genocide period of diasporan Armenian life in the United States, particularly in Southern California, and to provide a stronger sense of grounding for Armenian-American diasporic identity in the region. Today, the concentration of Armenians in the greater Los Angeles area has led many to describe it as the “capital” of the modern Armenian diaspora.

The lives of Megerdich James B. and Eliza G. Normart suggest that they were not only the earliest known Armenian-related residents of Glendale, but also among the area’s early pioneers and long-term settlers, recognized as such during their own lifetimes. They witnessed a fascinating period in Southern California history, as Los Angeles evolved from a largely agricultural and ranching region of orange groves and railroads into a modern metropolis shaped by electric streetcars, oil production and automobiles.