Please click the links below for the Stonebrook Court presentation
on-line.
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Lantarnam Hall, named after the town of Llantarnam, Wales,
was designed by Bay Area architect John Powers for Percy Morgan,
a highly influential Stanford University trustee descended from
Welsh immigrants, and his wife Daisy, and completed in 1916. Percy
Morgan and his wife purchased 132 acres in Los Altos Hills for
a country retreat and built a manor patterned after Speke Hall
in England.
Subsequent owners included flamboyant restaurateurs Gerald and
Gypsy Buys, whose bid to make the house a private club was denied.
In the 1950's John Carter Ford purchased the house, neglected
and abandoned, for use as a day school. In 1999 the house became
a private residence again.
John Ralston, program director of Los Altos Hills Historical
Society, will tell about the life of Percy Morgan (1862-1920),
businessman and Stanford University trustee, who helped restructure
the university's financial system, and how and why he built the
mansion. John will also tell about the famous - and infamous -
persons who have occupied the house since.
John
Ralston is a third-generation San Franciscan, the great grandson
of Henry Russell Ralston, a Scottish ironworker who arrived in
San Francisco with his brother, the first John Ralston, around
1865, and who with the first John established the Ralston Iron
Works on Howard Street about 1870.
The current John was born on May 10, 1942, and as it was just
after the United States entered World War II there was a shortage
of necessities, including taxicabs. No cab came to the family's
Larkin Street address when John's mother went into labor, and
John's uncle was called in the middle of the night to take his
mother and panic-stricken father to St. Mary's hospital. John's
uncle tore over in his vintage 1940 Buick, the party was hustled
aboard, and the Buick tore off, but too late. Sixty-five years
later, John basks in the satisfaction of knowing that while many
San Franciscans boast of being born in such-and-such a neighborhood,
he was born in several! Appropriately, May 10th was Mother's Day.
Like his father, uncle, aunt, and two older brothers, John attended
the old Lowell on Hayes Street, and he majored in history at the
University of California, Berkeley, with an emphasis on Russia
and the Soviet Union. The circumstances of his birth having indelibly
impressed upon John a love for and fascination with his native
city, he began researching San Francisco's history independently
after graduating. Two literary sparks that ignited his research
were the late William Bronson's The Earth Shook, the Sky Burned
about the great Earthquake and Fire of 1906, and Boss Ruef's San
Francisco, by the late Walton Bean, distinguished professor of
history at the University of California, Berkeley, and a foremost
authority on California. In the latter work John first encountered
the great editor Fremont Older (1856-1935), and the more he read
about this incredible individual and the times in which he lived
- and influenced - the more John was determined to produce a biography
worthy of Older.
John and his wife Lana, have formed the Ralston Independent
Works (the name commemorates Great-Grandfather Henry's and
Great-Uncle John's venture), with several aims: publishing "This
date in San Francisco", a book that will have an entry
for every date of the calendar year, and will be available in
2010.
An Authentic Hero, the biography of Fremont Older; is almost
finished. In October 2003 John and Lana presented a mixed-media
program on the Billings-Mooney case to the San Francisco
History Association. In June 2004 John gave a program on Fremont
Older at the San Francisco Museum and Historical Society's
monthly meeting, and in September, 2007, a program "Character
References: Famous San Francisco Men and Women".
John and Lana also collaborate on the Encyclopedia
of San Francisco website, to help stimulate interest in the
SFMHS's monumental plans for a Museum of the City of San Francisco
in the Old Mint on Fifth Street. Please visit Ralston
Independent Works web site to get familiar with their work.
