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The Mark Hopkins Mansion


Author
Becky Alexander

Decade

1870s 1880s 1890s 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s


Tags

Architecture 
Ghost Music
Mark Hopkins 
Natural Disasters



A reclusive interior designer with a taste for opulence and a love of pipe organs, Edward Searles is one of the less remembered yet arguably more pivotal figures in the history of SFAI. Searles was the widower of the widow of Mark Hopkins, one of “The Big Four” transcontinental railroad magnates, and it was, in a sense, his mildly philanthropic inclinations in combination with his desire to get out of town and return home to Methuen, Massachusetts, that allowed SFAI to become what it is today, at least from a real estate perspective.

Edward Francis (“Frank”) Searles started out as the interior designer for widow Mary Hopkins, but ended up as much more, although the exact nature of the relationship between the forty-year-old Searles and the sixty-two-year-old Mary was always the subject of rumor and speculation, even after—maybe particularly after—the two were married in 1887. (Years later, a judge would ask Searles whether he had married for love or for money and he would answer, “both.”)

Mark Hopkins had died in 1878, leaving Mary a massive fortune, a prominent spot in the gossip columns, and the task of overseeing the completion of her pet project, their extravagant mansion at the top of San Francisco’s Nob Hill—the “hill of palaces,” as Robert Louis Stevenson dubbed it—where fellow railroad barons Charles Crocker, Leland Stanford, and Collis Huntington had built a cluster of competing mansions that towered over the city as monuments to their success.

Whatever else their married life might have lacked, it certainly benefited from a shared love of home construction and decoration. Together they finished work on the Nob Hill mansion and on Mary’s mansion in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and then built another on Block Island, Rhode Island. Meanwhile, Searles expanded his own childhood home in Methuen, Massachusetts.

When Mary died in 1891, she left everything to her husband, explicitly striking her adopted son Timothy Hopkins from the will. Unsurprisingly given the quantity of money involved, an ugly, high-profile court case ensued. Searles claimed that Timothy was left out of the will because Mary learned that he [Timothy] had hired private detectives to follow Searles; Timothy countered that Mary herself had hired them, suspecting her husband of having affairs. Searles was grilled on the nature of his marriage and the role that money might have played in his agreeing to it. It also came out that Mary was enamored of spiritualism and given to making important life choices based on dubious advice from the spirit world through the Ouija board–like practices of “table tipping” and “slate writing.” The case was eventually settled out of court, with Timothy receiving $3.2 million in stocks, cash, and land, and Searles keeping the rest. Timothy also got the contents of the Nob Hill mansion, but Searles kept the building. He soon left town, however, passing the mansion along to the University of California to be used as a school under the auspices of the San Francisco Art Association (SFAA). This is where the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) comes in: the SFAA was the earliest incarnation of SFAI.


Portrait of Mary Sherwood Hopkins, c. 1850.


The gift of the mansion was a real reversal of fortunes for the SFAA, allowing it to jettison its Pine Street location in a downtown area that Canadian artist Emily Carr, in her autobiography Growing Pains (1946), described as “a squalid district” in a building that “smelled of rats.” In Carr’s account, a classmate named Adda felt the mansion had fallen “straight from heaven,” but Carr was less enthusiastic about the move, telling her friend:

“It is the space and freedom we have here in this old School. We can splash and experiment all we like. Nobody grumbles at us. Our work is not hampered by bullying, ‘Don’t, don’t.’ We sharpen charcoal, toss bread crusts. Nobody calls us pigs even if they think we are. Art students are a little like pigs, aren’t they, Adda? They’d far rather root in the earth and mud than eat the daintiest chef-made swill out of china bowls.”1

The mansion was everything that Pine Street was not. According to Carr,

“The mantels, banisters and newel posts of the mansion were all elaborately carved. There were all sorts of cunningly devised secret places in the mansion, places in which to hide money or jewels. (Mrs. Hopkins could not have had much faith in banks.) In the dining room you pressed a certain wooden grape in a carved bunch over the mantle and out sprang a little drawer. In the library you squeezed the eye of a carved lion and out shot a cabinet. A towel rack in the bathroom pulled right out and behind it was an iron safe. There were panels that slid and disclosed little rooms between walls. We delighted in going round squeezing and poking to see what would happen next.”2


Interior of the mansion.


In the years that followed, Searles maintained an interest in the new occupants of the mansion, gifting them with—according to the June 1902 issue of the Mark Hopkins Institute Review of Art—“a large number of busts, bas-reliefs and life-size statues, replicas of the work of the most famous sculptors,” as well as building out the ground floor to create a Mary Frances Searles Gallery and turning the stables into “a three-story edifice heated with a furnace and having all the appliances and conveniences of a modern school of art.” Searles’s attorney, Horace Platt, was elected president of the SFAA board of directors in 1896 and, according to the memoirs of board member Edward Bosqui, proceeded to rule the SFAA with an iron fist, silencing all opposition with the implied threat of cutting off Searles’s annual $5,000 contributions and ongoing building renovations. Bosqui subsequently resigned in protest. (He would not be the last person to be put off by Searles’s particular style of controlling philanthropy.)


Drawing class at the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art.


The Mark Hopkins Institute of Art survived San Francisco’s devastating 1906 earthquake, but was not so lucky in the ensuing fires. The following report was given to the Art Association’s board of directors at their temporary, post-earthquake location (once again on Pine Street):

To the President and Board of Directors,

Gentlemen,

The earthquake occurred on the early morning of April, 18th. Mr. J. R. Martin, Assistant Secretary, and Janitors, Beidler, Holmes and Scott were sleeping in the main building of the institute at the time. Shortly after the cessation of the violence of the shock Mr. Martin and the janitors made an inspection of the premises and found that the buildings and contents were intact and uninjured. Subsequently during the morning when the fires broke out in the various parts of the city no special uneasiness was felt because of their distance and the isolated situation of the Institute. As the day advanced, however, and night fell, Mr. Martin took the precaution of extracting some of the more valuable pictures from their frames, ready for instant removal while others were conveyed to a place of greater safety. Early the following morning (Thursday, the 19th) fire began approaching the Institute from two directions; from Powell street by way of Pine, and from Chinatown by way of Sacramento street. The Pine street fire finally reached Mason street opposite the School building which then ignited and burned to the ground. An engine drawing water from the reservoirs on the grounds, however, succeeded in confining the flames to the School saving the adjacent Mary Frances Searle Gallery. When, however, the block on the West side of Mason street from Pine to California began burning, the gallery suddenly blazed at the turrets and cornice and the destruction of the entire building quickly followed. As soon as it was seen that it was impossible to save the Institute, the employees, under Mr. Martin’s direction began removing the contents of the museum. In this they were most ably assisted by a number of University students and a detachment of sailors and marines from the U.S. Cutter “Bear,” the lieutenant of which impressed into the service every one in the vicinity.

The paintings were cut from the frames and conveyed to places of presumable safety. Some few were stored in the basement of the Flood residence, which building being of stone and detached offered seeming security, but was nevertheless subsequently destroyed and with it all the paintings, together with books and furniture which had been piled upon the lawn. A quantity of pictures were taken by the students to the University of California and some were carried by J.A. Davis, the clerk of the School, to his house in a remote part of the city, and there were saved. Some statuary and other articles were also recovered after the fire in the immediate vicinity of the Institute practically uninjured.


Report to the board of directors on the destruction of the Mark Hopkins mansion.


Post-fire ruins of the mansion.


The Art Association quickly constructed a temporary building on the site of the destroyed mansion and continued to operate there through the early 1920s; it sold the property and put the proceeds toward a new building on Russian Hill. The temporary SFAA building was torn down and the property became, and remains, the Mark Hopkins Hotel.


Commemorative plaque at the Mark Hopkins Hotel.


Frank Searles died in 1920. His death and the dispersal of his fortune unleashed a controversy strangely parallel to the one that had landed him with the fortune in the first place. Searles’s will left a modest $250,000 to a nephew, Victor Searles, with the bulk going to his “personal secretary,” Arthur Walker, who had lived with him in San Francisco and moved with him to Massachusetts. Victor contested the will, hinting that he was prepared to reveal evidence of Searles’s likely homosexuality, if needed, to win his case. As Mary had been before him, Searles was accused of senility and susceptibility to undue influence in the writing of his will, and, also like Mary, he had something of an heir apparent who was, surprisingly, left with almost nothing, a young man named Angelo Ellison whom Searles had taken under his wing late in life, showering him with gifts and signing letters to him with “Dad.” Ellison was enlisted by Victor to join the lawsuit.

In the end, Walker settled, Victor walked away with $4.5 million, and Angelo got nothing. Later in life, Angelo (who from all available evidence appears to be by far the most good-natured and well-adjusted character in this story) was philosophical about the loss: “Maybe it was for the best because I’m all right; I have good health, and I watched them put a man on the moon! Maybe if I had gotten some of those millions of dollars I might have become an alcoholic, or a drug addict.”3

Walker got the fortune but never made use of it—he died five months after the suit was settled. Nearly a year after that, an anonymous “old friend” of the late Searles wrote a letter to the Essex County district attorney suggesting that the true cause of Searles’s death might have been arsenic poisoning. The body was exhumed and an autopsy was performed, but no evidence of foul play was found.


Angelo Ellison with Edward Searles, c. 1917.


Frank Searles’s legacy is mostly one of mansions, pipe organs, and unasked-for improvements to his hometown of Methuen, Massachusetts. The buildings he left behind reflected his various eccentricities: his Anglophilia, his controlling temperament, and his compulsion to continue building at all cost. As Angelo put it, “Mr. Searles never really finished anything he did; he was always changing or adding something.” He would walk around his properties with a cane and “when he wanted something done he would make a plan with his cane, right on the ground, and draw just what he wanted. He would say, ‘You make it like this, here; and do it like that, over there!’ He never made the whole design at one time. When the men were finished he would come back and look at it and say it was all right, and make another plan so they could continue.”4

Searles was fixated on privacy, building large walls around his properties. When land he owned was bisected by a public road, he bought the road as well, and built a new one around the whole thing. He liked to travel but always returned home, slowly reshaping the town of Methuen to his liking with gifts the town couldn’t refuse (churches, a school, new coats of paint for old buildings in a color of his choosing), and bought up riverside property so that it couldn’t be developed. He loved pipe organs, so he started his own pipe organ factory in town, and built a personal concert hall to house the pipe organ of his dreams.


“Great Organ” of the Boston Music Hall.


Most of Searles’s mansions are still standing and in use (as private homes, schools, rental venues), but a few have burnt down: the Hopkins mansion of course, and the “dream house” that Searles and Mary built together on a small island off the coast of Rhode Island. Named “White Hall,” it was an enormous hilltop mansion with an exact but smaller replica of itself serving as a beachside bathhouse below. The property fell victim to a mysterious fire in 1963 and the spot is now a parking lot. Searles’s Methuen organ factory met the same fate after it was abandoned in 1942. Ray Fremmer, a kid growing up in Methuen at the time, writes:

“After the building had been shut up for years, a friend and I, at the age when boys don’t realize the penalties to be experienced for entering private property, skipped school one day and cautiously climbed into what to us was a deserted medieval palace. Sawdust, woodshavings, and spiderwebs covered more prize trash than we had ever before seen. We were in ecstasy over the fortune of junk within our grasp. We found old calendars on the walls, amazing little parts of organs, a pair of old spectacles, a board made of many different kinds of wood advertising organ casements, busts of Mozart, Chopin and Beethoven in the organ testing room, an old bellows used to melt the lead for the organ pipes, three murals painted on wood so worm eaten as to make them seem six hundred years old, hundreds of organ pipes that made deep and high sounds when we blew into them, a funny old hat with a pin on it that read ‘1909,’ and a million and one other things, worthless to many, treasured by small boys. In the attic we were frightened by the dark corners and the startled pigeons, yet we dared to explore every room and the contents of each mysterious box. We looked down on the street from a high attic window and wondered if anyone would discover us in our castle of musty halls and treasure laden rooms. For many days we stealthily visited our child’s wonderland, each visit more exciting than the last. Then, one night as I lay in my bed dreaming of finding things which only a small boy’s mind could conceive, I restlessly turned onto my left side facing the window and vaguely noticed a distinct red glow in the eastern sky, I quickly dressed and ran to where I could look across the river into a miniature valley where the building stood, now a gigantic mass of flames and falling timbers. Thus the fate was sealed for one of the town’s old buildings and the basis of more than one of my imaginative dreams.”5

Although also damaged by the fire, Searles’s private concert hall survived. He had it built specifically to house the Boston Music Hall’s “Great Organ” after organ music had fallen out of fashion and the instrument had been dismantled, stored, put up for auction, and snapped up by Searles. The concert hall has the Latin cross design of a cathedral, an inlaid marble floor, and an enormous, sixty-five-foot-high vaulted ceiling. A sound emitted in the hall, when empty, continues to reverberate for four seconds. The hall changed hands a few times after his death but is currently still in use, and is open for public concerts. Here is one from August 5, 2020. The first piece is dedicated to Edward F. Searles, Esq.; August 6, 2020, marks the hundredth anniversary of his death.

 BA 


Notes


1 Emily Carr, Growing Pains: The Autobiography of Emily Carr (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin & Company, 1946), 63–64.

2 Ibid.

3 Andrew Ellison, The Unheard Witness: Reminiscences Gathered on Visits to His Home in Bronxville, New York ([Bronxville, NY?]: [1987?]), 36, 
https://archive.org/details/unheardwitnessre00elli/mode/2up

4 Ibid, 42.

5 Ray Fremmer, The Life Story of Edward F. Searles: Compiled by Ray Fremmer from the Unabridged Handwritten Manuscript of 1948 ([Methuen, MA?]: [1948?]), 41–42,
https://archive.org/details/lifestoryofedwar00frem/page/n1/mode/2up


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