The High Life and Low Times of a 19th Century Victorian Mansion
By John Patrick Sheehy & Katherine Rinehart
In 1967, attendees of Petaluma’s second annual Beauty Conference were treated to a bus tour around town, looking for areas in need of a facelift. The major blemishes they identified were dozens of abandoned chicken houses, decrepit remains of Petaluma’s heyday as Egg Basket of the World.1
But old chicken shacks weren’t the only eyesores marring the city’s good looks. The west side was pockmarked with timeworn Victorians, many of them carved into apartments during the Depression and World War II.
Following the tour, the city’s Beautification Committee, appointed by Mayor Helen Putnam to help spruce up the town, began a vigorous campaign to burn down the dilapidated chicken houses. By Christmas, 25 had been torched.2
The committee then turned its attention to the aging Victorians.
Facing decades of deferred maintenance, many Victorian landlords found it stylish—and less costly—to encase the houses in stucco, aluminum, or asbestos siding. Others merely covered up the polychromatic palettes of their ornamental houses with a single color of paint, commonly white with green trim.
During Petaluma’s suburban housing boom in the fifties and sixties, developers began bulldozing the Victorians and replacing them with modern ranch style homes. With their open floor plans and long, close-to-the-ground profiles, ranch houses offered a more informal and casual living style than the ornate, multi-floored Victorians, which struck many people as creepy and old-fashioned.
That was, until the sixties counterculture rediscovered their beauty.
Among the most striking visual icons of San Francisco’s legendary “Summer of Love” in 1967 were the old Victorians. A band of artists known as “the colorist movement” proudly reasserted their ornamentation and design in a dazzling array of hues as “Painted Ladies,” rekindling a love of Victorian architecture.3
That love soon spread to Petaluma. In February 1968, a group of local women, inspired by Mayor Putnam’s call to beauty, formed an advocacy group for the preservation and restoration of Victorians. They called themselves the Heritage Homes Club.4
The club held its second meeting at the Victorian home of their newly elected president, Shirley Butti.5 A fourth-generation Petaluman, Butti and her husband Plinio were in the process of restoring the long neglected Queen Anne mansion they had purchased at 11 Hill Drive. Locally known as “The Spooky House,” it was originally built in 1886 for Michigan lumber baron Melvin Clark and his wife Emily6
The Clarks began wintering in Petaluma in 1874, after Mrs. Clark’s father and stepmother, Edward and Sarah Ann Jewell, moved out from Michigan with their four children for Edward’s health. The Jewells apparently chose Petaluma because a nearby relative, Omar Jewell, owned a 680-acre dairy ranch in Olema.7
Melvin Clark operated a large wholesale grocery business in Grand Rapids with his brother. Planning to escape to Petaluma during Michigan’s snowy winters, Clark and his wife purchased a large Victorian for the family at the northwest corner of Liberty Street and Western Avenue.8
For reasons unknown, they sold the house after a year, and returned with the Jewells to Grand Rapids, where Melvin Clark ventured into the lumber business, soon becoming one of the largest lumber barons in the county, with thousands of acres of timber and mineral land, and a series of mills in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and the Puget Sound area.9
After Edward Jewell’s health took a turn for the worse in 1880, he returned with his family to Petaluma. The Clarks also returned, purchasing house on D Street.10 In 1885, they decided to build their own home, purchasing John McGrath’s 87-acre ranch extending across Petaluma’s west hills from Western Avenue to near Hayes Lane. The next year they erected a 14-room, three-story Victorian mansion—the future “Spooky House”—at the top of Western Avenue overlooking Petaluma.11
The house’s two and half storeys had irregular roof forms, with windowed gablets and two corner towners. The upper story was clad in fish scale shingles, and the lower in shiplap siding. The windows were long and tall, with colored squares of “flash glass” around the upper sashes. The veranda over the entrance included a small impediment with the letter “C” for Clark.
The features were similar to other Queen Anne Victorians designed that same year in town by a young local architect named Ed Hedges, the A.L Whitney home on Sixth Street and the David Tibbitts home on Post Street, which indicate that Hedges may have been the architect.12
For 14 years, the Clark family wintered at the ranch, while the Jewells lived there year round, growing oats and barley.13 After Edward Jewell’s death in 1900, his widow and children relocated to Oakland, and the Clarks’ visits from Grand Rapids became less frequent.14 In 1905, they sold the mansion and ranch to the Hillside Land Company, a local development group headed by Alexander B. Hill.15
A scion of William Hill, one of Petaluma’s early bankers, “Allie” Hill joined his father’s banking firm in 1886. After his father’s death in 1902, he inherited a great fortune that reputedly made him the wealthiest man in Sonoma County. He also faced a period of personal turmoil, when in 1903, his wife Hattie, daughter of Hiram Fairbanks, another wealthy local banker, and the mother of his three children, divorced him in a very public court case.
A year later, in a surprising turn of events, Hill married Hattie’s sister Elizabeth, and soon after moved into the 8,500 square foot Victorian mansion of his in-laws, the Fairbanks, at 758 D Street.16
In the fall of 1904, he assisted his widowed mother, Josie Hill, in erecting the Hill Opera House on Keller and Washington streets—site of today’s Phoenix Theater—as a tribute to his father.17
A few months later, Hill and his partners purchased the Clark Ranch, and set about subdividing it into small lots for into small lots for “hillside villas, to be anchored by street named Hill Boulevard that stretched from Western Avenue to D Street. 18Hill selected a spot at the top of Bassett Street upon which to build a mansion for himself and his new bride.19
Directly behind the Clark Mansion, Hill opened a quarry to provide crushed rock for the development’s roads and sidewalks. He left the mansion itself vacant, renting out a small white house beside it to the quarry’s foreman, German immigrant Louis Neilsen and his family.20
Aside from its unfortunate fate of residing upon a formation of valuable basalt, the mansion’s abandonment may have also been related to changing tastes. The egg boom overtaking Petaluma at the turn of the century gave rise to a professional class of doctors, lawyers, and merchants, who had little interest in the stylistic excesses of the Victorian era.
While Queen Anne style houses still held some appeal—especially those designed with large rooms and round turrets—buyers were drawn to the new Tudor and Colonial Revival homes, as well as the Craftsman and Shingle Style houses of the Arts & Crafts movement, with their emphasis on natural woodwork, large rooms in a horizontal orientation, and logical floor plans.
Sales for Hillside Tract were slow to manifest. Lots in the flats along Webster Street quickly sold out, but those on the hillside failed to attract buyers, despite Hill’s significant investment in roads and water and sewer mains. A discouraged Hill never built his dream mansion, instead remaining at his in-laws’ mansion on D Street.
Finally, in 1919, Hill asked the city council to abandon the proposed street layout for the hillside they had approved earlier, and allow him to reconfigure the area into 5-acre farms, which, given the egg boom, were in high demand.21 He sold the Clark Mansion and 20 adjoining acres to the Neilsens for $10,350 ($163,000 in today’s currency).22
Three years later, Hill died, leaving an estate of $22 million in today’s currency. The remaining undeveloped parts of the Hillside Tract development were sold off to speculators.23
It wasn’t until after World War II that his vision for the development became a reality. With Petaluma’s egg boom in decline following the rise of factory farms in the Central Valley, the city began transforming into a housing suburb of San Francisco. One of the first suburban tracts built after the war was on Melvin Street (named for one of Neilsen’s sons), between Dana and English streets, by Blackwell Brothers in 1947.24
After purchasing the abandoned Clark Mansion in 1920, Louis and Hilma Neilsen set about restoring it with the help of their four sons. To help pay the mortgage, they converted the upstairs into a five-room apartment rental, and sold dairy cows, hens, kale for chicken feed, and goldfish they raised in a pond that had formed in the abandoned quarry. Hilma Neilsen also took in young children for day care.
In the mid-20s, they began subdividing their 20 acres into lots for sale, extending from the road to the mansion they now called Hill Drive, presumably in honor of Alexander Hill, down to Webster Street and across to Dana Street.25
After Louis Neilsen died in 1929, Hilma divided the downstairs of the Clark Mansion into two apartment units, living in one of the units until her death in 1943. Her sons Carl and Leo lived in the other unit. Her son Melvin, who became a doctor in town, built a house for his family at the top of Dana Street in 1941.26
In the mid-50s, the family sold the house to Aloysius W. Boron and his wife. By that time it was well known as “The Spooky House,” which the Borons attempted to lay to rest, saying the ghosts were now guardian angels of the place. 27
Carl Neilsen claimed the rumor stemmed from the ghostly rattling of chains in the quarry, which lulled him to sleep at night as a boy.28 Eleanor Welch Ameral, who lived in the upstairs apartment in the 1940s, said the rumor started when Melvin Neilsen began studying late nights in the attic, leaving a light shining through the colored glass window, while the rest of the house was dark.29
In 1963, Shirley and Plinio Butti purchased the Clark Mansion for $13,000, or $116,000 in today’s currency, and reunited it into a single home. By that time, the mansion’s lot had been reduced to one-third of an acre, leaving it cheek-by-jowl with other homes on Hill Drive and Melvin Street.30
Shirley, a homemaker who would later open an antique store on Kentucky Street, and Plinio, a lumberman who soon became foreman of the Petaluma Co-operative Creamery, restored the exterior of the house in an array of colors, as well as the upstairs, where they lived with their three sons. They put off restoring the downstairs, which Shirley used for storing her vast collection of antiques.31
In the spring of 1968, Shirley Butti assumed leadership of the Heritage Homes Club. A year later, one of Petaluma’s most prominent Queen Anne style homes, the Healey Mansion at the corner of Washington and Keokuk streets, designed by J. Cather Newsom, was torn down and replaced with a gas station. Built in 1903 by Petaluma merchant and city councilman Dennis J. Healey, it was converted in 1919 into a funeral parlor, which it remained until its destruction.32
The demolition of the Healey Mansion became a rallying cry that ignited the local preservation movement, eventually transforming Butti’s club into Heritage Homes of Petaluma. Over subsequent decades the organization helped to bring a number of Victorians—and their pretty colors—back to life, documenting and branding homes of historical significance with “Heritage Home” brass plaques, issuing preservation recognition awards, and hosting home tours.33
The Buttis’ restoration of the Clark Mansion came to a halt after Plinio died in 1981. In 1987, Shirley moved into the house of her recently deceased mother on Eighth Street, and ten years later into a local senior living center. For 30 years the Clark Mansion sat vacant, except for Shirley’s antiques. After her death in 2018, her family sold the house for $949,550 to Karen Maxwell of San Francisco, who has since begun its next restoration.34
Shirley’s antiques collection was another matter. While she was alive, she guarded it closely, not allowing anyone to touch it. Despite fears of being cursed for doing so, her family sold the collection in bulk to J.W. McGrath Auctions of Sebastopol. Within weeks of moving the collection to their store and warehouse, the McGrath Auctions building caught fire and burned down.35
The Spooky House had spoken.
*****
Thanks to Ken Butti, Shirley Neilsen Blum, and Amy Hogan for their assistance with the research for this story.
A version of this story appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier.
Footnotes:
[1] Petaluma Argus-Courier: “Beautification Plan Will Not Up Taxes,” September 28, 1967; “Assessor Clouds Issue on Chicken Houses,” October 23, 1967.
[2] “Cleaning Up Area Must Come First,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, December 18, 1967.
[3]Victoria Maw, “Restoration of San Francisco’s Victorian ‘Painted Lady’ Houses,” The Financial Times, October 11, 2013; “Rainbow Victorians and The Colorist Era,” S.F. Heritage, April 17, 2020. https://www.sfheritage.org/features/colorfully-painted-victorians/
[4] “Heritage Homes Meeting Friday,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, July 11, 1968.
[5] “So They Tell Me Column,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, April 1, 1968.
[6] Emails from Ken Butti to John Sheehy, August 2021; Petaluma Argus-Courier: “Lillian Tobin Claimed by Death,” February 9, 1950; “So They Tell Me Column,” June 4, 1958; “Obituaries: Lillian Helman Tobin,” October 20, 1977; “Obituaries: Plinio Butti,” April 22, 1981.
[7] Petaluma Weekly Argus, “Farms in Marin County,” November 17, 1873; “Frightful Accident,” July 16, 1875; “From Michigan,” December 1, 1876; Findagrave.com: Omar Jewell died January 1, 1875 at age 53, buried at Cypress Hill.
[8] Petaluma Weekly Argus: “Real Estate Sale,” August 14, 1874; “Petaluma Cheese Factory” February 27, 1874; “Petaluma Cheese,” June 19, 1874; “From Michigan,” December 1, 1876.
[9] Petaluma Weekly Argus: “Local Brevities,” February 25, 1875, April 9, 1875; “M.J. Clark is Summoned,” November 26, 1909; Ernest B. Fisher, Grand Rapids and Kent County, Volume 2 (Robert O. Law Company, 1918), pp. 84-85; Biography of Melvin J. Clark, http://www.migenweb.org/kent/white1924/personal/clarkmj.html
[10] “Personal,” Petaluma Argus, June 11, 1880; “Real Estate Transactions,” Petaluma Courier, February 22, 1888; “M.J. Clark is Summoned,” Petaluma Argus, November 26, 1909. Note: they sold the house at 920 D Street to Catherine Farley Brown in 1888, who then built the current Queen Anne Victorian on the property in 1893.
[11] Petaluma Courier: Real Estate Transactions,” March 18, 1885; “Fine House,” March 13, 1886.
[12] Dan Petersen, Petaluma’s Architectural Heritage” (Santa Rosa, CA: Architectural Preservation Associates, 1978), p. 52; Information on Ed Hedges homes built in 1886 provided by Katherine Rinehart.
[13] Petaluma Courier: “Courierlets,” February 10, 1882, May 1, 1889 May 22, 1897, April 18, 1898.
[14] “M.J. Clark is Summoned,” Petaluma Argus, November 26, 1909; Petaluma Courier: “A Good Man Gone,” June 12, 1900; “Courierlets,” July 28, 1900; “About People,” February 19, 1897, April 23, 1902, May 15, 1902, November 4, 1904.
[15] “Hillside Villa,” Petaluma Courier, March 3, 1905; “Ties Are Severed,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, April 2, 1903.
[16] Santa Rosa Press Democrat: “Ties Are Severed,” April 2, 1903; “Betrothal Causes Surprise,” May 26, 1904. Note: Hill was living at his parents’ house at 106 7th Street until 1906, when he moved into the Fairbanks Mansion.
[17] “A.B. Hill is Taken by Death at His Home,” Petaluma Courier, June 14, 1922.
[18] “Clark Place Sold,” Petaluma Courier, February 11, 1905.
[19] “Hillside Tract to Aid Our Greater Petaluma,” Petaluma Argus, March 3, 1905.
[20] “Hillside Tract to Aid Our Greater Petaluma,” Petaluma Argus, March 3, 1905; 1910 U.S. Census, Petaluma, Louis William Neilsen; Interview with Shirley Neilsen Blum, August 27, 2021; “Hilma Marie Neilsen,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 11, 1943; Ad for L. Neilsen, chicken houses for sale, Petaluma Argus, June 9, 1909; Ad for L.W. Nielsen, hens and roosters for sale, inquire at hillside rock crusher, Petaluma Courier, May 11, 1912; Anna Keyes Neilsen, The Book of Anna, privately published memoir, 1999, pp. 31-35, courtesy of Shirley Neilsen Blum; Petition for Naturalization, U.S Department of Labor: Louis William Neilsen, no. 1502, November 13, 1928; Interview with Shirley Neilsen Blum, August 27, 2021.
[21] “To Abandon Hillside Tract,” Petaluma Argus, May 13, 1919; “The Action Will be Regretted,” Petaluma Argus, May 13, 1919; Ad by realtor D.W. Batchelor for Hill subdivision tracts, Petaluma Courier, August 8, 1919.
[22] Signed receipt for down payment and purchase terms, signed by realtor D.W. Bachelor, dated May 5, 1919; “Record of Survey: Being a Portion of the Lands of Jason Ferus Blum as Described by Deed Recorded Under Document No. 2002-101193, Sonoma County Records, 2017.
[23] “A.B. Hill is Taken by Death at His Home,” Petaluma Courier, June 14, 1922.
[24] “18 New Homes to Be Built In Petaluma,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 11, 1947.
[25] Ads placed by the Neilsens, Petaluma Courier: September 20, 1920, April 7, 1925, May 10, 1927, March 22, 1922, May 11, 1927.
[26] Interview with Shirly Neilsen Blum, August 27, 2021; Interview with Ken Butti, August 2021; Petaluma Argus-Courier: “Hilma Marie Neilsen,” October 11, 1943.
[27] “So They Tell Me Column,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 31, 1958.
[28] “So They Tell Me Column,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 4, 1958.
[29] Email to Katherine Rinehart from Eleanor Welch Ameral, July 28, 2008.
[30] Emails from Ken Butti to John Sheehy, August 2021.
[31] Emails from Ken Butti to John Sheehy, August 2021.
[32] Petaluma Courier: “Left for San Francisco,” June 4, 1903; “Certificate of Use of Fictitious Name,” June 14,1919.
[33] “Heritage Homes,” Petaluma Historical Library & Museum. https://www.petalumamuseum.com/heritage-homes/
[34] Interview with Ken Butti, August 2021.
[35] “Sebastopol Business Fire Causes Chaos, Damage,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, May 10, 2018; Emails from Ken Butti to John Sheehy, 2021.