The Big Yellow Blues, Part 1

By David Petry

Like a taxi waiting for its next fare, The Big Yellow House stands vacant on the side of the 101 Freeway in Summerland. A favorite stop since the early 1970s as travelers passed north and south, the restaurant served straightforward American fare, at times in dishes and platters family style. Mashed potatoes and turkey, pot roast and corn on the cob, big bowls of salad. Tureens of minestrone or chowder. Baskets of steaming rolls begging for butter and jam. Generous slices of fresh-baked pie with a dollop of ice cream melting on top.

I remember climbing on the scale that stood in the front entry. Maybe I was ten; it was before weight became a category of discrimination. Climb up and the dial swung to the price of my meal. Three dollars? Four? And then eat in a house where my grandmother could as easily emerge from the kitchen as a waitress, but with a view of the islands, patient as geology, past the scurry of cars on the freeway.

Now, the empty windows reflect a blue Pacific dotted with oil rigs and laced with steamy white clouds. Press a face to the glass and the emptiness expands and deepens, empty hallways and empty rooms that go all the way through to dirty windows on the other side. On the web, on some sites, it can appear the place is still open. On others, where the reviews read like loving memorials, hope crackles – “Opening next December.” “A new restaurant in March.”

But the familiar property fell into foreclosure last year as a high-end restaurant plan for the site faltered and in October, First Regional Bank of Los Angeles foreclosed and took ownership. The bank is courting buyers, even as they establish a price, the process complicated by the history both of the structure and of the restaurant it came to house.

Inklings

Before it was The Big Yellow House, just like the food the restaurant eventually served, the structure was a family home. It was originally built in 1890 as a one-story rental with a small basement by the founder of Summerland, Henry Lafayette Williams. Williams had his fingers in many pots, and of all the pots, the rental market was possibly the smallest. He had a vision.

Williams, born in Massillon, Ohio in 1841, always pressed the envelope. Finishing school prior to the start of the Civil War, he entered government service during the war and remained there working as an accountant. Sent to manage an audit of the Customs offices in New York, Williams turned up illicit practices at high levels of the government. Rather than cover it up or shift the blame to lower-level bureaucrats, Williams chose to publish his complete findings. On the advice of his friend, President Ulysses S. Grant, Williams moved his family to Arizona to avoid retribution.

For the next fifteen years, Williams managed the Office of the Treasury in Tucson, Arizona. In 1882, ready to move on, he took his family to Santa Barbara, setting them up in a home at the corner of Sola and De La Vina Streets across from today’s historic Upham Hotel. Williams then continued working in Tuscon, visiting Santa Barbara as often as he could.

On his visits to Santa Barbara, Williams took long horseback rides looking for a suitable piece of land for a ranch and family homestead. Heading east over the hills past Montecito, Williams entered the Ortega Rancho and fell in love with the land. This was one of the few large parcels of coastal land close to town in the early 1880s. At the time, the Rancho stretched from the high tide line along the Pacific Ocean to what is now Sheffield Drive on the west, east almost to Toro Canyon Road, and north to East Valley Road. A spread of 1,050 acres.

In 1883, Williams retired from his position in Tuscon and moved to Santa Barbara. The same year, he purchased Ortega Rancho from Burkill Jacques for $17,000 – just over $16 an acre. Jacques had tried unsuccessfully to run sheep on the land with his brother-in-law, the later to be famous horticulturalist, Ralph Kinton Stevens. It was when Stevens and Jacques dissolved their sheep operation that Stevens acquired his productive Tanglewood estate in Montecito, now known as Lotusland.

Williams completed his two-story family home on the western edge of the Jacques property in 1884 in the valley east of today’s Sheffield Drive. The ranch came with 70 head of cattle and about 500 pigs. To that, Williams added sheep and began farming barley, corn, beans, flax, and Egyptian wheat. This occupied Williams for a couple of years, but while he rode the ranch, he was germinating a much larger vision.

Williams wife, Sarah ‘Katie’ Williams, was an avid believer in Spiritualism. Williams had his doubts about the pursuit until a medium friend of his wife’s asked him to write a note and then seal it in an envelope. The medium read him out the note verbatim without opening the envelope. Supposedly based on this incident, Williams was a whole-hearted convert. Now, riding his ranch, Williams saw the possibility of a colony of Spiritualists located in the gentle vale rising from the broad beach below Ortega Hill.

One other thing he saw on his ranch, were the glistening black seeps of tar along the beaches and bluffs, and in the canyons and declivities. The value of petroleum was not what it would be when automobiles snaked up the coast in the early 1900s, but it was used for the manufacture of things like cleansers and soap, and for tarring roads.

He began to see a great convergence of forces – a community of Spiritualists and the spirits they would summon, the potential for oil to help fund the community, the coming of the Southern Pacific Railroad, and the superb climate.

Fall, Winter, Spring, Summerland

Speculation is that the name for Williams’ new community came from a Spiritualist book by Andrew Jackson Davis, Events in the Life of a Seer. In the book, Davis calls the home of departed spirits “Summerland.”

Davis was the father of Spiritualism. He was a Mesmerist, faith healer and clairvoyant from Poughkeepsie, New York. In 1847 he dictated a book, The Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelations, and a Voice to Mankind, while in a trance state. In it, he argued for a Harmonial Philosophy that was based on the ideas of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) and the teachings of Franz Mesmer (1734–1815).

Swedenborg claimed to communicate with spirits while awake and claimed that they informed him that there is a hierarchy of heavens and hells in the afterlife, much like Dante’s Inferno. He also wrote that spirits act as intermediaries between God and humans. Mesmer’s technique, later known as hypnotism, was used to induce trances. In these Mesmer trances, subjects reported the ability to contact supernatural beings.

Spiritualism developed as a monotheistic religion with the belief that the dead can be spoken with by gifted or trained mediums. There was an obvious attraction to Spiritualism for the families of the deceased, especially during the Civil War and World War I. Spiritualists also believed that spirits are capable of growth, ascending through spheres or planes in the afterlife and that they can provide knowledge about God, moral and ethical issues, and about the afterlife to the living.

The primary movement was focused in the United States. According to a New York Times article in 1897, there were at least eight million followers at that time, many of its adherents in upper and middle class families. The corresponding movement in continental Europe and Latin America was known as Spiritism.

Mary Todd Lincoln organized séances in the White House to communicate with her deceased son. President Abraham Lincoln attended. In Santa Barbara, town leaders William Welles Hollister, John Peck Stearns, and Charles Pierce, among others, attended séances.

Davis’ Principles of Nature became the Spiritualist canon and was likely Katie Williams’ introduction to the faith.

On Rails

The convergence of forces that Williams had foreseen came quickly. On October 11, 1887, Southern Pacific railroad reached Summerland from the south and opened a small flag stop on the eastern side of Ortega Hill. The stop was named Fenton after the recently-deceased and widely-popular New York congressman, governor, senator, and chairman of the 1878 United States Commission of the International Monetary Conference, Reuben Fenton.

Through the remainder of the year, Southern Pacific coolies chipped away a shelf for the rail line across the seaward face of Ortega Hill. The next year, when the line reached Santa Barbara, the Fenton flag stop was renamed Ortega and then eventually, Summerland.

Not satisfied to have the train through his town run from afar, Williams sought a street rail franchise from the county that would enable him to build tracks from his nascent Summerland through Montecito and into downtown Santa Barbara. He won the franchise from the county, but he set aside the rail plans to focus on the more important platting and advertising of his new townsite. He never picked them up again.

The Spirit Moves the Town

Williams launched Summerland in early 1888, platting a unique townsite, selling off the first lots, and creating a detailed advertising flyer on the new town for sale at 25 cents apiece.

Williams distributed his flyers to the East coast and the larger cities of the West and Midwest, hoping to attract Spiritualists from across the country. What made the Summerland townsite unique were the smaller lot sizes, just 25 by 60 feet, compared to standard town lot sizes of 40 by 160 feet. This layout was probably due to Williams’ initial vision of the town as the West coast center for Spiritualist conventions. He was expecting temporary gatherings of hundreds, possibly thousands, of Spiritualists from around the country, their tents and campfires easily accommodated by the long, narrow lots.

But Williams glossed over both the presumed temporary nature of the dwellings and the size of the lots in his pamphlet. It made his coastal California properties seem affordable and buyers snapped at the opportunity. When families arrived either to buy, or after already purchasing land by mail, and were upset by the confusion, Williams assured them they had made a good purchase. The climate was so equable they didn’t need all that room for a house, they could just erect a tent and live there year-round.

Some homesteaders and business people could see that the town was attracting residents and they bought small groups of lots in order to build more permanent structures. Deeds, when a lot was sold, were in keeping with the tenets of Spiritualism. Drinking or selling of alcoholic beverages was forbidden. And for a brief time, Spiritualism held absolute sway in the community.

The townsite of Summerland was officially established on December 18, 1888. By that date, over a tenth of the town lots had been sold, and sale of the lots continued at a rapid pace. Over 300 residents lived in the town within a year. Two thirds of the dwellings were, as Williams had predicted, tents.

Just a few months later, on May 12, 1889, Summerland was officially dedicated as a Spiritualist community. Over 500 people attended the event, many erecting tents for the occasion, and coming from all over the county, which then included all of San Buenaventura County, and up and down the western seaboard.

Back at the Ranch

In many ways, the dedication of Summerland as a Spiritualist community in 1888 was the crest of that particular wave. Williams’ inspiration to pursue and support Spiritualism, his wife Katie, passed away just four days after the dedication of the township, on December 22, 1888. Following the death of Katie, Williams had the care of two teenaged children, Henry Jr. or Harry, and Edith Bea. They continued to live in the family home on the western side of Ortega Ridge, over the hill from Summerland.

In addition to his roles as town-builder and farmer-rancher, Williams maintained his original home in Santa Barbara as a rental. It was here that his son Harry found Henry’s second wife.

Agnes Wigg Morgan had been raised in Montreal and wed William Morgan, who rose to the presidency of the Bank of Montreal. Agnes’ mother, Agnes Strickland, was the author of novels and biographies including The Queens of England and a collection of letters of Mary, Queen of Scots. Before Morgan’s untimely death, the couple had had six children, Caro, Nona, Emma, Daisy Ann, Worsley, and Rosa. After his death, she moved the family to Santa Barbara to be near her sister, Julia.

On their way west, the family lost their money to thieves on the train. So they lived with Julia for a time, then moved out on their own. Henry Lafayette Williams was their landlord. Harry, whose mother had died recently, rode his horse to visit often. According to Roy Lathim’s book, The Spirit of the Big Yellow House, “One day, as Agnes returned from the mineral baths at the site of the old Potter Hotel in Santa Barbara, young Harry came galloping up on his horse and said, ‘Oh, Mrs. Morgan, my father says he will marry you if I arrange it.’”

Williams had told Harry to arrange the marriage only in order to stop him pestering Williams about the idea. He went to apologize, but Harry turned out to be right. They were meant for each other. Their marriage, September 12, 1889 at the home of Mrs. Olive Smith, was “attended by every resident of Summerland.” And the population at the Williams’ homestead expanded by seven.

Story continued in Part 2.