 Los Angeles was still a growing frontier town in the early 1870s, when a group of public-spirited citizens led by Judge Robert Maclay Widney first saw the need and imagined establishing a university in the city.It took nearly a decade for this vision to become a reality, but in 1879 Widney formed a board of trustees and on July 29, 1879, secured a donation of 308 lots of undeveloped land in South Los Angeles from three prominent members of the community — Ozro W. Childs, a Protestant Los Angeles horticulturist and merchant; former California governor John G. Downey, an Irish-Catholic pharmacist and businessman; and Isaias W. Hellman, a German-Jewish Los Angeles philanthropist and banker/founder of Farmers and Merchants Bank of Los Angeles.The gift provided land for a campus as well as a source of endowment, the seeds of financial support for the nascent institution.