by Edward Ball
Flora Muybridge appears to have been living with her baby, Florado, in a San Francisco boardinghouse belonging to a Mrs. Mary Goss. She fell ill, and, quickly and cruelly, life closed in around her. In early July 1875, Flora suffered what a reporter called “a stroke of paralysis,” and she landed in St. Mary’s Hospital. The paralysis turned out to be an invention of an excited press, which still despised her as an errant wife: she actually had some kind of influenza. After two weeks (“She never rallied from her illness”), Flora died at 5:00 p.m. on July 18, 1875.5 One newspaper, dancing somewhat over her body, ran the headline DEATH RELIEVES MRS. FLORA MUYBRIDGE FROM A LIFE OF SIN AND SHAME and added, “Her sad fate was in keeping with her checkered career.” She was twenty-four.
A French family living on Mission Street took in Florado Muybridge, fifteen months old. The family cared for the baby when his mother fell sick, and, according to one paper, it was believed that they would adopt him. Flora was buried on July 20 in a cemetery just west of the city.
Life around the master’s house at the Hacienda Serigiers, a coffee plantation in central Guatemala, with the señor’s family in promenade (Illustration Credit c17.5)
Muybridge, Planting the Seed at Las Nubes, Guatemala, 1875. Muybridge photographed people only in clusters, including workers clearing a tract to plant more coffee. (Illustration Credit c17.6)
Muybridge, Plaza of Antigua, 1875. Maya Indians trading on market day at the center of the city of Antigua (Illustration Credit c17.7)
Muybridge photographed St. Vincent’s Orphanage in the town of San Rafael, north of San Francisco. The picture of boys in the yard—in military formation, with a band playing—suggests something of the setting in which the photographer left Florado to be raised. (Illustration Credit c17.8)
In November 1875, Muybridge came back from Central America with 250 new photographs.6 He had been gone nine months—the fever around the murder had cooled, but he would be followed by it.
The photographer put his life back together, renting new rooms at 163 Clay Street and hiring a new art dealer, Morse’s Gallery. Muybridge resented his former art dealer, William Rulofson, for the insult of testifying that the photographer was insane. Muybridge fired him, and the two men became enemies, with Rulofson afterward sniping at Muybridge in the newspapers.
When he arrived back in San Francisco, Muybridge learned that Flora had died and that his son, Florado, was in the hands of a family from France. He visited the boy’s caregivers and was told that they had just placed the child in an orphanage run by the Catholic Church. Muybridge evidently didn’t want his son. He thought Florado wasn’t his to care for, because he wasn’t his son in the first place. Some months later, Muybridge retrieved Florado and put him in San Francisco’s Protestant Orphan House. Florado was three years old when his father put him on the shelf.7 Muybridge visited the boy at the orphanage, but did not make an effort to raise him. For years he paid the bills sent by the orphanage for expenses to take care of Florado, but he couldn’t face the child. When Florado was about age nine, the two saw each other for the last time. On that occasion, the photographer gave his son a gold watch and a framed portrait of himself, and said good-bye. Florado Muybridge grew up to become a ranch hand and a gardener in towns around central California. It was said by people who knew him that Florado took pride in his father, whom he didn’t really know, and that he told anyone who would listen that he was the son of the famous photographer.
A murder victim, a dead wife, an abandoned son. He purchased a little freedom at high cost. And now the way forward, as far as Muybridge could see, looked clear.
THE HORSE LOVERS
The house took up much of the block, and when the huge new mansion was done, Governor Stanford brought in his old friend Muybridge to take pictures of it. Did the richest man in the West think twice before employing a killer? The Octopus might have, had he lived somewhere else in America, but in California Muybridge’s social capital went up, not down, after the trial. By the code of Western justice, the verdict of the individual and the law of the gun, Muybridge had avenged himself and gotten away with it, and an atmosphere of dark supremacy hung around him. In summer 1876, Stanford hired the photographer again, with no regrets.
Leland and Jenny Stanford had been living in a rented house on California Street, a few numbers down the slope from the tract at the top of the hill where their fifty-thousand-square-foot crib was ready to be occupied. Twenty-plus years in the state made them old-timers, but this was the first time they’d lived in the real city. The Central Pacific had moved its headquarters from Sacramento to San Francisco, getting out of a town with cows in the street to the little metropolis on the Pacific. The Stanford family followed the company and decided to build a house to match their self-regard: they moved into the rental to watch their fifty-room place come together. (The newspapers vied for superlatives: “the Stanfords’ palace,” “the great villa,” “a mansion with no equal.”) The house was finished in summer 1876, a brown cube the scale of a public building, all wood, but covered with stucco etched to look like stone. It stood at the top of the highest hill, with views of the city and Bay to the south, east, and north.
One morning, as a crew skittered like ants over the building, Stanford invited a reporter to talk, gestured up at the men on scaffolding, and extemporized about what it all might mean. He pointed to a corner of the mansion and said, “When it is finished, I shall hope to sit upon yonder balcony and look down upon the city embracing in itself and its suburbs one million people. I shall look out through the Golden Gate and I shall see fleets of ocean steamers bearing the trade of India, the commerce of Asia, the traffic of the islands of the ocean.”1 Stanford did not separate his personal comfort from the public good. The master’s view from his bedroom on the one hand, a churning port economy on the other.
In July they moved in. The Stanford family, at this point, comprised Leland and his mother, his wife, Jenny, and her mother (the two older women, widowed and in their seventies, had both been brought west from Albany), Jenny’s sister, Anna Lathrop, and six-year-old Leland Stanford Jr. Seven or eight servants moved in, the on-site half of the staff, while another seven or eight came from their dank rented rooms elsewhere to clean and do the Stanfords’ bidding during the day.
Entrance hall of the Stanford mansion, San Francisco, photographed by Muybridge in 1877 (Illustration Credit c18.1)
The library on the first floor of the house (Illustration Credit c18.2)
Three years had passed since Muybridge had made the stop-motion photographs of Occident. Returning from Guatemala, Muybridge threw off the name “Eduardo Santiago” and returned to Stanford’s orbit. In 1877 the photographer took a wagon up California Street to make the first pictures. He photographed the new house from the outside, shooting upward from a low point to make it loom like a pyramid at Giza, and then room by room, touring it with the lens.
He took his camera through the front door into the big center hall, onto which all the main-floor rooms opened with sliding double doors.2 The first room on the left was the India Room, upholstered in black satin, with Indian embroideries adorning the walls. Everything smelled new, with paint and varnish and clean rugs. Next on the left came the library, its paneled walls flanked with books. If he was at home during the day, Leland spent his time here. Following that was the billiard room, in which most furnishings and the walls were fitted out in brown leather. Then came a sitting room, the busiest in the house, because the family gathered there at night. Upholstered in purple and gold velvet, it had a south-facing bay window overlooking the city, a piano, rocking chairs, reading tables, a flower stand, and a sofa. The servants brought in birds from the second-floor aviary to serenade the Stanfords here in nightly roundelays. Muybridge photographed everything.
At the end of the hall was the conservatory, which connected the rooms at the back of the house. It had windows with big views and a fountain in the middle. From it a door led into the dining room, at the right rear of the h
ouse, where the table could seat thirty-six. From the dining room you walked into the music and art gallery, which had three walls hung with pictures, and statuary on plinths. The fourth wall of the gallery was taken up by an orchestrion, the sound system of the day, an automatic music-making machine, six feet wide, that reached twelve feet up, floor to ceiling. Stuffed with organ pipes and percussion devices, the orchestrion ran on electricity, the new power source that only a few houses in the city had installed. When switched on, it imitated the sounds of a wind orchestra, playing selections from operas and symphonies that had been programmed into a set of changeable, revolving cylinders. Stanford had a love for gadgets, especially ones that seemed to be alive—his automatons, and now his orchestrion. Elsewhere in the gallery stood several leafy plants, and on their branches sat brightly colored birds, mechanical animals that came to life and sang at the flick of a switch.
Next to the music and art gallery, entered through double doors, was the Pompeian Room, which the Stanfords used to receive guests (and where Muybridge, four years later, would introduce his projection device). In the center of the room stood a round table whose top consisted of a slab of onyx, which had been cut from a pillar at St. Peter’s, in Vatican City. Unlike the rest of the room and the rest of the house, this table was not an imitation of something far away, not ersatz, but an authentic object. Jenny Stanford liked to impress visitors with its story. A pillar at St. Peter’s had been discovered to have a fault, she said, and it had to be replaced. Removed from the cathedral, the column was cut into slabs, and one of them came into the hands of the Stanfords for a fee transferred to Vatican coffers—they made it into a card table.
Muybridge’s pictures are empty of people—the dwelling seems to have no inhabitants. The house and the family were all about display and excess, and the photographer knew that mere people could not compete with the prodigious interiors, the rooms like tombs full of money.
According to one of Stanford’s secretaries, Frank Shay, Muybridge and Stanford could not stay away from one another. “They would sit together sometimes for several hours, talking and discussing,” Shay said.3 It wasn’t that the photographer and the capitalist had much in common. In temperament and behavior, the two men were divided as by a river. Muybridge was a man who had rebounded from his crime into a new bohemian style. He was an artistique au possible, a London paper said, with a loosely tied neck ribbon, a velvet coat, and gray felt sombrero. These “might be called Californian, were they not the true artistic style of the London and Paris ateliers.”4 As for Stanford, he was painfully well groomed, vested in wool, with a silk hat at the ready and an ivory-headed, gold-inlaid cane.
Still, they became friends—again. The rail man largely ran the economy of the West, and his time was not a currency Stanford liked to give away. Nevertheless, when Muybridge felt like it, he would stop by the Central Pacific offices and see Stanford “at any time,” according to Frank Shay, who saw it happen day after day.
As a thank-you gift to Jenny and Leland for taking him back into their circle, Muybridge chose sixty-three of his photographs of the mansion and bound them in two identical volumes, inscribed with the title “Leland Stanford’s Residence Album.” Jenny added notes to her copy, describing the colors of the rooms, which could not be told from the black and white images. After the earthquake of 1906 destroyed the house, it was this album that people curious about the mansion would refer to, because it was the only thing left of it.
Wirt Pendegast, the man who had gotten Muybridge off on the murder charge, died in March 1876, at age thirty-four. (Despite his youth, the papers ignored the custom of stating the cause of death. Had it been a suicide? It’s impossible to say.) Judge Thomas Stoney, who had prosecuted Muybridge, gave the eulogy. “His mind was of the very brightest order,” Stoney said from the pulpit. “His oratory was splendid. His person was handsome, and his manners were charming.”5 His eulogist lathered on the praise, even about the time Pendegast had opposed him. “In the courtroom, during the trial of Edward Muybridge, with the evidence overwhelmingly establishing the guilt of his client, and with the law confronting him on every side, relying solely on his own resources, Pendegast extorted from the jury a verdict of ‘Not guilty!’ Not by perverting the facts, nor by distorting the law, but by raising the minds of the twelve men whom he addressed above the influence of the law and the facts.”
Muybridge sent condolences to the widow of the lawyer who had kept him from the gallows, enclosing for Pendegast’s wife an album of photographs. She had written to thank him, and Muybridge replied:
My Dear Madam,
It is I who should and do thank you for permitting me to offer you so slight an acknowledgment of my lasting appreciation of the noble and disinterested generosity shown me by your late husband, when I, bowed down by grief and crushed with broken pride, so sadly needed the support and friendship I received from him. He was the best and dearest friend I ever had.6
If Muybridge felt cool toward his son, whom he had put in an orphanage, it sounds as though he wept when he heard of the death of Pendegast.
The Stanfords funneled their money into land, houses, and horses. After moving into the new house, Leland and Jenny looked for a second place outside San Francisco, because they weren’t happy unless they were acquiring something. Stanford wanted a big tract for his horses, half of which were still in Sacramento, the other half in San Francisco at the Bay District track. They first bought a ranch at the southern end of the Bay, near the San Jose Mission, in 1874, but a year later told each other the place was too hot. They signed it over to Leland’s brother Josiah as a gift.7
The most important purchase the couple made—and the reason people remember the name “Stanford”—came in 1876, when they bought a 650-acre farm known as Mayfield Grange, thirty-five miles south of San Francisco, in an empty township called Menlo Park. The farm stood next to Central Pacific track, which meant an easy hourlong ride to and from the city.
The name of the summer home bothered Stanford. “Mayfield Grange” reminded him of the Grangers, the farmers’ movement that hated him. So he and Jenny looked around for something else. Two tall sequoias stood next to the railroad track as you came in, looking like a single tree with two trunks. Stanford thought “tall tree” suited the place, so he gave it the Spanish name “Palo Alto.”8
The Stanfords bought Palo Alto from the estate of George Gordon, a San Francisco developer who among various projects had built the English-style townhouses around South Park, one of which had housed Edward Muybridge. The new place had a huge clapboard house with turrets, bay windows, and a porch, but Stanford was keen on enlargement and would eventually double the size of it. Within two years, thirteen more land deals had multiplied the tract tenfold, and Palo Alto counted 6,967 acres. In most places this would have made a giant ranch, but by California standards it was merely large.
Mayfield Grange became the Palo Alto Stock Farm, “stock” pointing to the horses to which the place was devoted. Stanford thought his new ranch could be the showiest horse operation in the West, and he poured money into it, hiring a trainer named Charles Marvin to oversee operations.9 A giant stable went up, eight oval tracks went down, houses for dozens of workers with families appeared, plus dormitories for single men. From the Central Pacific rail yards, Stanford ordered a new train car built that would move his horses around. “Stanford’s equine palace car,” a paper called the animal parlor on wheels. Within a short time, Palo Alto had thirty employees, including drivers and jockeys, trainers, grooms, teamsters to haul feed, a horseshoe maker, wheelwrights, hostlers (with two different teams of handlers, for brood mares and for stallions), and a timekeeper. There was a designated man for “halter breaking and care of weanlings.”10 There were shops for harnesses, blacksmith furnaces, a dining hall, and a school for children of staff.
Collis Huntington, the financial hinge of the Central Pacific, mocked his partner’s strong feeling for horses, which he saw not as love, or even obsession, but me
rely as vain. Huntington worked ten-hour days in New York to keep loans flowing to the company, and he regarded Stanford as an idler. “Stanford will go to work for the railroad company as soon as the horse races are over,” Huntington wrote in a letter to Mark Hopkins. “Of course, I do not expect anything from him until then.”11 Stanford moved his horses down to Palo Alto and kept adding more.
He sent his trainer, Charles Marvin, to Kentucky to buy twenty brood mares from racing stock there, and on trips to the East Coast the rail president shopped for horses on his own. In fall 1876, on Long Island, he bought a trotter called Electioneer. Turf writers of the day said the horse was a bad purchase because he had gone lame at age three, but Stanford thought Electioneer looked like a good source of more trotters. The horse traveled by train across the country to Palo Alto, where he was turned loose among dozens of mares as a stud. Stanford eventually made Electioneer the most promiscuous of studs, and the stallion sired a hundred racers in five years.12
Paddocks at the Palo Alto Stock Farm, in the foreground, and the huge main barn, to the rear, photographed by Muybridge in 1881 (Illustration Credit c18.3)