M.J. Bundy was a native of Ohio who came to southern California in the mid-1870s. As president of the Santa Ana, Orange, and Tustin Street Railway Company, as well as a merchant and grower, he was one of the leading citizens of Tustin in the last two decades of the nineteenth century.
Milton John Bundy was born October 20, 1837, in Athens County, Ohio, the oldest of six children born into a Quaker family. His mother was Sarah Doudna (1819-1892) and his father, Nathan Bundy (1814-1846), died when Milton was just eight years old. Apparently, the death of his father split up the family, for at the age of thirteen Milton was living with a Quaker couple and their four children on a farm near Marion, Ohio. (Marion was the hometown of future president Warren G. Harding.)
By 1860 Milton was reunited with his mother in Marion where he worked at the family farm to help support his younger siblings. The next year, when the Civil War broke out, Milton attempted to enlist in the Union Army but was turned down due to what the doctors called a “tobacco heart.” This affliction was described as a rapid, irregular heartbeat believed to be the result of excessive use of tobacco. If this was true, Bundy either gave up the habit or had an iron constitution, for he lived to the age of 90.
At some point in the 1860s Bundy moved to Ames, Iowa, where he married Elizabeth “Lizzie” Carr on September 16, 1868. His eighteen-year-old bride was a native of Kentucky and the couple would eventually have two children, Harry Edwin Bundy (1869-1918), and Nellie Bundy (1872-1890), before divorcing sometime before 1880.
By 1875 M.J. Bundy was working as a house painter and living in Santa Monica, California, but would soon move to Santa Ana. Shortly after arriving in Santa Ana Bundy went into partnership with James McFadden in a hardware store and would remain with the business for the next two decades.
Milton Bundy remarried on March 15, 1882, in Pasadena. His new bride was Sarah A. (Cleaver) Heighton (1840-1902), a divorced mother of four, the two youngest still teenagers.
Sarah was the aunt of Mrs. Coralinn Rice of Tustin, and perhaps that is how she and M.J. met.
Four months later Bundy’s ex-wife Lizzie died back in Kentucky, while their two children Harry and Nellie, not even in their teens, were boarding with two young female teachers in Pasadena.
Probably around 1887 Bundy purchased a tract of land in Tustin that became known as the Bundy Addition. His property ran west from Pacific Street to Glen Avenue (now Tustin Avenue), and from First Street south to Main Street. The Bundy home was on the north side of Main Street, near B Street, and was a showplace of the young town
