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The Marstons: A California Family – Part 3
The Staid and Serious Horton House Gang
By Robin Lakin
November/December 2022
Employment and success often surge from who you know and where you come from.
Leaving Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin for health reasons, merchant George P. Marston and his 20-year-old son George W. boarded a train at the Rock Island Depot in Chicago bound for San Francisco. There they boarded the steamship Senator and headed south for San Diego in October 1870.
But where would the Marston men stay upon their arrival in San Diego? And how long before young George, a pre-med student at the University of Michigan, found an occupation in this new city? Fortunately for the Marstons, Alonzo E. Horton had opened San Diego’s first luxury hotel earlier that month. He had enlisted the design services of newcomer William Wallace Bowers, a rancher and eventual California politician with no architecture training.
Bowers, who had arrived in San Diego in 1869, just a year before the Marstons, recalled Horton’s vision for the hotel as a “plain house, two stories, with a hip roof and a 200-square-foot front.” Bowers’s inspiration was San Francisco’s Russ Hotel. The Horton House opened on October 1, 1870, and, like most of the entrepreneurial Horton’s projects, became very successful and a downtown landmark.
(left to right) Alonzo E. Horton, c. 1868. Courtesy San Diego Yesterday; Horton House, c. 1870s. Courtesy San Diego Yesterday; William Wallace Bowers, c. 1900. Courtesy History.House.gov; Jesse A. Shepherd. Courtesy San Diego Yesterday
The Messrs. Marston signed the Horton House guest registry on October 24, 1870. Alonzo Horton hired young George W. as a clerk on the very day of his arrival at the hotel. Horton, it seems, immediately knew he should hire the earnest young chap, whose duties included brushing the dust off guests’s clothing outdoors, as they stepped off the stage coach. This courtesy would signal the fine service they could expect at his hotel.
Bowers’s recorded recollections about the Horton House omit that he was Horton’s brother-in-law and a former resident of Ft. Atkinson. Yet Bowers revealed that the elder George Marston of Ft. Atkinson provided the San Diego hotel’s carpet in exchange for Wisconsin real estate lots. (A San Diego Union article, however, reported that the carpet was supplied by Mr. Bovey, also of Ft. Atkinson.)
Other fortuitous connections aided the band of newcomers. Born in Connecticut, Horton moved to Wisconsin for his health, followed by his parents and siblings, to Ft. Atkinson and the greater Jefferson County area. The Bowers and Marston families lived in the same area in the same time frame.
Jesse A. Shepherd, editor of the Wisconsin Chief (and not to be confused with Jesse Shepard, the renowned pianist, author, and sometime spiritualist who lived in the Villa Montezuma), appeared in Ft. Atkinson newspaper advertisements with George P. Marston. He too left the state for health reasons, arriving in San Diego in 1870 with his wife, Fidelia Kinney, who was Horton’s cousin. Horton hired Shepherd as his bookkeeper and business manager. Shepherd also joined forces with Horton and George P. Marston to take over operation of the San Diego Bulletin.
Bowers presented Shepherd with a leather-bound journal for Christmas in 1871. Throughout the following year, Shepherd recorded an important daily chronicle of San Diego before the 1880s boom, one of the very few first-hand accounts of life here at that time. Read highlights of this journal in an article by San Diego historian Richard Crawford.
The timing of Horton’s 1867 arrival in San Diego, followed by Bowers in 1869, and Shepherd and the Marstons in 1870 along with their Ft. Atkinson connections suggest that employment with Horton was pre-arranged, on a “who you know” basis. All were astute choices on Horton’s part.
George W. Marston was easily Horton’s wisest and best hire, a Ft. Atkinson lad who went on to guide, shape, and enrich San Diego as he became a visionary leader and a philanthropist.
Read the rest of the ongoing The Marstons: A California Story History Series.
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