Elliot in Santa Barbara

This post is about my grandmother, Kate Elliot Turner, daughter of Kate Elliot Trowbridge and Wallace Foot Turner.  When she was three years old her family moved from northern California to Santa Barbara, where her father had been hired to be the Dean of Math at the newly established junior college.  They lived in Santa Barbara from about 1912 to about 1918, when Elliot would have been about nine.

 Elliot, age 2-3 and 3-4?

 Wallace, Ruth, Wallace Jr., Kate Elliot, and Kate Elliot Jr.

Ruth was born Nov. 1916, so this must have been taken around 1917-18, close to the time they left Santa Barbara.

This was before the 1925 earthquake, and the current Spanish style did not exist.  Elliot probably didn't visit Santa Barbara between her childhood and when her daughter's family moved there in 1967.  I imagine it must have been quite a shock, with the look of the downtown area completely changed, and the massive amount of development out to La Cumbre Plaza and beyond.  Here I try to reconstruct a bit of the Santa Barbara Elliot lived in.

Santa Barbara in the 1910's

They lived in this house, at 2126 De La Vina (then called Hollister) between Los Olivos and Padre (then called 1st), which at the time was on the outskirts of town.  This is the house that Elliot's younger sister Ruth was born in.

Elliot's school was Garfield School, just a few blocks away at the corner of Padre (1st) and Bath.  (The building was replaced in the 1935, and is now the Schott Campus of SBCC.)  There was also a separate kindergarten building on 1st Street "near Bath," probably right next door, built in 1912.  (These pictures are from a 1963 Masters thesis on the history of SB schools.)

 

 Garfield School in 1906.

 Garfield School in 1935, just before demolition.  Oddly, the ground seems higher up the sides of the building than in the older picture, and the stairs are gone.

Garfield Kindergarten in 1963 (now no longer there).

They attended the Methodist church, of which there were two at the time, so this may or may not have been the one they went to:

 The American Film Company (the "Flying A") had its studio in Santa Barbara from 1910 to 1922.  It was the biggest movie company in the U.S. at the time, and it was just two blocks from Elliot's house, between State and Chapala, and between Mission and Padre.  This shows the side along Mission Street, at the time and today.

A few blocks down on De La Vina (Hollister) at Sola was the Upham Hotel, shown here in 1887, and today:

And still further down, at Anapamu, was the high school, built in 1902, which also housed the junior college established in 1911.  Here's a picture of it after the earthquake, I'll be trying to find a better picture:

The current Art Museum was the Post Office at the time:

 1915 4th of July Parade down State Street

Note the very utilitarian building behind, where the library now is.

At the site of the current Lobero Theater was the Lobero Opera House, which looked like this:

The pre-earthquake Courthouse looked like this:

Since Santa Barbara was a tourist destination, there were at least two major luxury hotels: the Arlington Hotel at the site of the current Arlington Theater, and the Potter Hotel by the waterfront.

 Additional sites I want to include are Alameda Park and Cottage Hospita, when I find photos.

Here are pictures of Elliot and her little brother Wallace Jr. from the Santa Barbara period, presumably before Ruth was born.

Joshua Elliot Clayton

 Father of Catherine "Kate" Jessie Clayton who married Nelson Seymour Trowbridge.  Joshua Elliot Clayton was from Georgia, came west in the gold rush and became a prominent mining engineer and consultant.

Joshua Elliot Clayton (Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley, via Spence article)

Most of his siblings (including half-siblings from his father's first marriage) stayed in the southeast, but one sister, Joanna "Jo" Bruce Clayton and her husband William Cogan Buckalew came west.  They bought Clayton Ranch in Yuba CA (need to track down origin of this ranch -- one website says it belonged to her brother "John" but this is probably a mistake, although there was a half-brother John who stayed back east -- perhaps it was really her brother Joshua).  After her husband died Jo moved to the bay area.

Joshua Elliot Clayton was married to Naomi B. Wagner, and they had six children, including Kate.  He travelled extensively throughout the west, while it appears that Naomi and the children maintained a home in the east bay.  It appears that they either divorced or perhaps quietly separated.  Naomi went to live in Butte, Montana, with her daughter Mary Jessie, who was married to a John William Gunn. Joshua went on to have a second marriage with Helen Maria Huntley, who had two children from a previous marriage.  One of them, William Huntley Hampton, apparently went into business with his stepfather.

According to the Spence paper (see below), Joshua Elliot Clayton was killed in a stagecoach accident near Wardner, Idaho.  He was buried in Portland, OR, where his second wife had family.


 Sources about Joshua Elliot Clayton's career:

1. An academic paper all about his mining career can be found in:
Spence, C. C. (1980).  Joshua E. Clayton: Pioneer Western Mining Engineer.  Arizona and the West, Vol. 22, Issue 3, pp. 211-222.

2. Documents relating to his mining career are at Yale.

3. The Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley also has documents, including his diaries (which are mostly about his mining activities).  From A Guide to the Manuscript Collections of the Bancroft Library, Vol. 1, pp. 306-307:

4.  A few more letters by JE Clayton are at Brigham Young University's library.

5. A 1958 pamphlet, Ghost Mines of Yosemite, by Douglas Hubbard, tells a brief anecdote involving Joshua Elliot Clayton. The text of the pamphlet is at the Yosemite library online.
6. Mark Twain mentioned Clayton in a letter to his brother, Orion Clemens, in 1862: "These mills here are not worth a d--n -- except Clayton's -- and it is not in full working trim yet." (Mark Twain's Letters: 1853-1866, M.B. Frank & K.M. Sanderson, Eds., p. 186).  The end notes explain:

7. From the Masters thesis of Emily S. Dale, Dept. of Anthropology, University of Nevada Reno, Archaeology on Spring Street: Discrimination, Ordnance 32, and the Overseas Chinese in Aurora, Nevada:

Smith, Grant H.1998.  The History of the Comstock Lode. Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geologyin association with the University of Nevada Press, Reno, NV

Stewart, Robert E. 2004 Aurora: Nevada’s Ghost City of the Dawn. Nevada Publications, LasVegas.

Rosemary Dobbins Lloyd

Papa Nelson Trowbridge had a sister, Mary Eloise Trowbridge,

who married a man named Dobbins.  He was a Presbyterian minister, and they lived in various places around California and ended up back in the bay area, where they were a socially prominent family.

Among their many children were Hugh Trowbridge Dobbins (1866-1943) and Rosemary Dobbins (1869-1959).  Rosemary attended Cal in 1888!  Earliest I've found yet of the women in our family who attended Cal.

Hugh became a Presbyterian minister like his father, and in 1895, at age 29, married Roberta Tomlin Lloyd,

daughter of Lewis Marshall Lloyd,

a Missouri state senator, Confederate army captain and prisoner of war, turned Los Angeles land baron and inventor.  The wedding made the society news, and Rosemary was one of the bridesmaids.  At the time of the wedding the Lloyds lived at the corner of Oxford and Rose in Berkeley, I'm guess at this house:

But wait, there's more!  Eighteen years later, Rosemary, who had remained single and been an active and prominent society woman in the bay area, married Lewis Marshall Lloyd himself, her brother's father-in-law.  He was 77 and she was 44 at the time of the wedding, and his first wife had died two years before.  Lewis and Rosemary lived in Los Angeles, and after his death nine years later she returned to Berkeley.  Here is Rosemary in later years:

  This story is interesting for its own sake, but it also connects to my immediate family.  Rosemary was the older cousin with whom my grandmother Elliot lived when she was a student at Cal.

From Elliot's affidavit:

I entered the University of California in the Fall semester, 1927, majoring in English as my father had intended that I should become an English teacher. In October of that year my mother died suddenly, two weeks before the anticipated birth of a child. Since my step-father was ill at the time, I took charge of the household and funeral arrangements, and for the rest of the semester cared for the family while continuing my studies at the University of California. At the end of the semester my stepfather secured a housekeeper and I moved to live with a distant cousin, Mrs. Rosemary Lloyd, in Berkeley. I lived with her for the next three years while my brother and sister remained with my stepfather.  

It's interesting that Elliot refers to her as a distant cousin.  She was the first cousin of Elliot's mother, so Elliot's first cousin once removed.  But I suppose if they weren't close it could feel like a distant relative.  I imagine that Elliot felt very much like the poor churchmouse relation. 

From notes that I took during a conversation with Elliot when I was in high school:

[After high school] Elliot went to live with Aunt Rosemary, her mother’s cousin on the Trowbridge side, who had married a wealthy man, who died.  Elliot lived with the maid.  It was a big house, with silver at the place settings and so on.  Elliot “learned by stumbling.”  After her mother died Elliot moved back to take care of [siblings] Ruth and Wallace.  It was evident that [stepfather] Frank was madly looking for a new wife.  She went back to live with Rosemary again.

Note that the chronology is unclear -- did she go to live with Rosemary when she started college, or only after her mother died?   

Rosemary's house in Berkeley was 2844 Garber Path (phone directory) or 2845 Garber Path (census), just across the street.  I'm inclined to trust the former.

The overall impression is that Elliot was very uncomfortable there.  I recall a story Elliot told me about being obliged to share a room, and indeed a bed, with a maid, and how much she resented it.  It's unclear if this was at Rosemary's house or some other house where she worked, since the affidavit says: "I spent my next three summers doing domestic work by which I was able to earn enough to continue college."  (But if she spent that three years living with Rosemary, it seems unlikely that she would have physically moved out to go do domestic work for the summers. Hence it seems likely that she shared a bed with the maid at Rosemary's house.)

The census shows a Helen Perry, age 23, living at Rosemary's house at the same time as Elliot.   Was this the maid? She is listed as a "guest" while Elliot is listed as "cousin."  Like Elliot, she is listed as in school, and not employed.  Could she have been working for Rosemary to work her way through school?  Could Rosemary have been too polite or embarassed to admit it to the census taker?  Further sleuthing on Helen Perry shows she came from a family of farmers, and didn't finish college until age 33 while still single, presumably because she was supporting herself.  Since she wasn't a relative, this definitely sounds like someone Rosemary would have hired as an employee, not taken in socially as a "guest."  Perhaps the situation at Rosemary's house was rather fluid and undefined, with both Elliot and Helen expected to do domestic work in exchange for their board?  Perhaps the domestic work Elliot did was actually for Rosemary, for pay, during the summers, and Elliot herself was too embarassed to say so directly?