Frances “Fanny” Van de Grift Osbourne Stevenson did not live a conventional life. Today she seems especially modern for a woman born in 1840. And when the high temperatures of a Santa Clara Valley autumn make you want to cool off in a swimming pool, you may want to thank her for being such an innovator.
Fanny was born in Indiana. The writer Robert Louis Stevenson was from Scotland. The two met in France in 1876, where she was studying art to escape her unfaithful husband, Sam Osbourne of San Francisco. Stevenson and Fanny fell in love and when she returned to California, he followed her in 1879.
They reconnected in Monterey, where she had once again retreated. Stevenson convinced her to leave her husband and marry him, though she still had a child at home and divorce was very uncommon then.
Stevenson was 29 and not yet famous. Fanny was 40. They married in San Francisco in 1880. With Fanny at his side, he wrote some of his best-known works including “Treasure Island” and “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” Seeking a healthier climate for his lungs, they settled in Samoa where he died in 1894 at the age of just 44.
The couple had never been good with money. But after Stevenson’s death, Fanny got help investing her husband’s royalties and her outlook improved. She built a house on San Francisco’s Russian Hill and while that was under construction, visited the Redwood Retreat Inn, a bohemian resort in the foothills of the Santa Clara Valley, just above Gilroy. Fanny fell in love with its beauty and in 1899 bought 120 acres from the resort’s owner, Charles Sanders, for a ranch of her own next door. She called it Vanumanutagi, Samoan for “vale of the signing birds.”
On a research project for the Robert Louis Stevenson Club, a friend and I sorted through a collection of early 20th century photographs of Vanumanutagi in the archives of the City of Monterey Library, taken by Fanny’s nephew, Louis Sanchez. We were especially intrigued by photos that showed guests at Fanny’s ranch enjoying a modern-looking swimming pool with changing rooms at one end and a fireplace at the other. I suspected the pool belonged to the resort next door.
The Redwood Retreat property is still in the hands of the descendants of its original homesteaders and realtor Linda Pond, its fourth-generation owner, knows its history. “Yes, the Redwood Retreat had a pool, the first in Northern California,” she said. “But Fanny had the second. She liked ours so much, my great-grandfather Charles and my great-uncle built it for her.” Family lore has it that Fanny often walked her property in her bare feet, wearing a flowing tropical dress and smoking a corn cob pipe.
If you are counting pools, historians believe the first in-ground pool in the state was in Los Angeles. Redwood Retreat lays claim to the second – the first in Northern California. Fanny Stevenson’s pool, built about 1902, was the first in-ground swimming pool at a private residence in the Santa Clara Valley, definitely making her an early influencer.
We don’t have a photo of her swimming there. All the photos show only her family in the pool. Fanny was 62 years old then and may have sought privacy. But it is nice to picture her there, after all the struggles of her life: a woman born into the restrictions of her era, who so often cast them off. We can see her jumping with abandon into her very own pool, just as we do today, floating about and looking up at the clouds and dreaming in the California sunshine.
Robin Chapman is a longtime journalist and the author of three books about California published by The History Press. Thanks to the Robert Louis Stevenson Club of Monterey for their help in researching this article.
