LeBaron: A retreat for each era, Lytton Springs’ evolution marks Sonoma County history

When the Yellow Jackets came to town, all of Healdsburg took note. These colorful young fellows, in their gray uniforms with gold braid, brass buttons and “natty caps with … a yellow plume standing up front like an exclamation point” were “cavalry unmounted.”

That's the way Dr. William Shipley, born in Healdsburg in 1872, remembered them in his 1938 reminiscences for the Healdsburg Tribune (compiled in 1965 as “Tales of Sonoma County.”)

These were the boys from Lytton Springs Military Academy in the 1890s. They got lots of attention from the North County citizenry, wearing their “huge sabers of the Civil War period” which, according to Dr. Shipley, were quite a load to pack “for the smaller boys…and almost dragged on the ground.”

The Yellow Jackets are a colorful part of the history package that is Lytton, which, since 1904 has been the property of the Salvation Army, caring - in turn - for orphans and adults from the city streets desperately in need of care.

Lytton is for sale. I read it in the newspaper. The 564 acres that comprise the Salvation Army's establishment on Highway 101 north of Healdsburg is on the market. ($24 million and it's yours!)

The news set me to thinking about how we learn our history in these packages or pockets surrounding landmarks that have survived.

The structures at Lytton, including a 1919 Mission-style building that replaced a resort hotel built in the 1870s, are still in place, leaking history from every arch and cupola.

William Litton built that resort, starting construction with the news that the San Francisco and North Pacific railroad was coming through.

He had purchased a chunk of the Sotoyome land grant in 1860 that stretched from Healdsburg to Geyserville and from the Russian River to Dry Creek, a purchase that speaks volumes of the opportunities afforded wealthy men, like sea captains, in the earliest days of statehood.

Capt. William Litton was just one of several ship's captains in Sonoma County history. (Others included three of General Vallejo's in-laws Capt Henry Fitch on the Sotoyome grant, Capt. John Wilson at Los Guilucos and Capt. John Cooper, El Molino).

These entrepreneurial mariners were first in line when Mexico lost California and they had the wherewithal to take advantage of the wide-open spaces available.

Litton was double lucky. Not only did he get a railroad but he had natural springs bubbling up, “both sweet and soda” waters, treasured as “ fine seltzer” with prescribed curative and healthful properties.

Lytton Springs (Apparently the I was changed to Y by a property records official's error) had rooms for 150 vacationers eager to “take the train to take the waters,” European-style.

But Capt. Litton died in a fatal fall from a buggy in 1887 and his heirs leased the hotel to a consortium of wealthy San Francisco families who sent their sons to become “Yellow Jackets” at the Lytton Military Academy, which lasted only until the early 1890s, when Capt. Litton's widow, in a lawsuit with the railroad owner, lost the Litton Station property.

It was a sanitarium, very briefly, at the turn of the 20th century. The owner was Dr. Wilfred Burke, who soon moved his health center to Mark West Springs Road in Santa Rosa where he was very successful until he was convicted of putting dynamite under a cottage containing his mistress and her child. But that's another story for another day.

When Dr. Burke's successors in the Lyttton Medical and Surgical Sanitarium, went into receivership, the San Francisco businessmen who owned the property apparently donated it to the Salvation Army.

That was, we are obliged to observe, Lytton's salvation.

53 years of caring

Thus began more than a century of good works at Lytton Springs - 53 years of caring for “lost” children and 58 more giving “lost” adults another chance.

In 1905, the Army's Golden Gate Orphanage in the East Bay was closed in favor of Lytton's 630 acres of green fields, oak trees and natural springs plus a resort hotel for living quarters. Now we would say it was a “no-brainer.”

The first superintendents, a dynamic duo of Major Wilfred Bourne and his wife, Alice - “Mother Bourne” to “her” children - arrived with their first 16 charges in 1905. By 1958 more than 11,000 children without parents, or whose parents couldn't care for them, had grown up at Lytton.

The stories from the Salvation Army's century-plus at Lytton Springs are heartwarming, albeit with sad times.

I first became aware of this chapter of Sonoma County history when I was reading old newspapers about the impact of the Spanish flu of 1918 on this area.

Since the epidemic often hit hardest where people lived in close quarters - camps of World War I soldiers taking the brunt of the disease - it was no surprise to find that where it hit hardest first was the Industrial Farm and Orphanage at Lytton. Once the epidemic arrived, an average of 75 per day of the 250 children living there fell ill. In all, 175 youngsters sickened. Resident Helen Groul, age 10, was the first death from the flu recorded in the county.

Lytton Springs ghost

The story of a ghost in the “Big House,” as the children called the old hotel, was passed along to the grown-up residents of the Adult Rehabilitation Center in the 1960s and beyond.

When John Pruitt, an ARC graduate, researched and compiled a history of the institution in the 1990s, he traced various versions of the ghost story into the archives. There he found Rebecca Garcia, one of the first residents of the orphanage, who died of tuberculosis in 1910.

Rebecca's short life, as Pruitt learned, is much more than a spooky story. It is an illustration of the social malaise of the early 20th century that produced institutions like Lytton.

Rebecca was one of four children - three brothers and Rebecca - spotted by the amazing ”Mother Bourne” as she marched in a Salvation Army parade in Southern California.

The “ragamuffins,” as she described them, caught her eye and she dropped out of line to talk to them, asking if they had enough to eat. Robert, the oldest, admitted they had not. She took them to the nearest Army mission and fed them. And heard their story.

They were living in Yuma, Arizona when their mother was hit by a train and died. Their father brought them to San Bernardino, walking most of the way, where he remarried. His new wife had a family of her own and refused to let the Garcia children into her house. They were sleeping outside and close to starving.

Alice Bourne and Lytton saved them. They were the first family to live in the orphanage. Except for Rebecca's tragedy, the Garcia family is the quintessential Lytton success story.

Working as well diggers in their teens, the two oldest Garcia brothers started a contracting business to install supports for overpasses when the state began to build freeways. Robert, according to Pruitt, was “Lytton's first millionaire.”

Lytton success stories

There are plenty of other Lytton triumphs.

The late Frank Barrett, a Santa Rosa attorney, was one. Frank, whose father was “gone” and whose mother couldn't support him, lived at Lytton from the age of 8 to his high school graduation, worked his way through college and law school and became a partner in Santa Rosa's largest law firm. He understood the value of the Lytton program, serving on the Lytton advisory board, donating his time and supporting Lytton kids at Santa Rosa Junior College until his death the early 1980s.

Taylor taught music

The Lytton kids weren't nearly as colorful as Dr. Shipley's Yellow Jackets, but they became an important part of the county's 20th century, as I learned in the 1900s when I interviewed those who lived there, both as children and rehabilitating adults.

Frank Barrett was one. The late Bob Taylor was another. Bob was not an orphan. His father, Maj. Edwin Taylor, was Lytton's superintendent in the 1940s.

Bob spent a career as a teacher in Santa Rosa's junior high schools and, when he retired, spent several years in his father's footsteps, serving as director of Lytton's rehabilitation program. Bob not only taught music in the schools but put on a red coat and boots to bugle the “Call to Post” at the Sonoma County Fair race track each summer.

Music is a large part of the Salvation Army agenda and there was always a band at Lytton, Bob told me.

Children were “handed a horn as soon as they were big enough to hold it,” he said. In high school years, the kids attended Healdsburg High and were welcomed, counted on, by the legendary band director, Charles McCord.

“When the Lytton bus arrived, Charlie had his band,” Bob said.

The boys, who worked the Lytton farm before and after school, were also welcomed by the Healdsburg High athletic department. They were strong, scrappy and in excellent physical condition.

Bob Taylor would know about that. He went from the Healdsburg Greyhounds to the 1949-50 SRJC football team that won the state championship.

Orphanages depart

By the late 1950s, the time for orphanages had passed.

The state mandates for expanded staffs and eight-hour shifts made all but the very well-funded institutions difficult to maintain.

Foster homes were the new way to deal with parentless children and the term “orphan” has been relegated to Broadway musicals and the promise that “The sun comes out tomorrow.”

New institutions, like Social Advocates for Youth's Dream Center, are working hard to make this promise come true.

Still doing the good work for troubled adults, Lytton's main industry now is generated in the four buildings filled with second-hand goods donated to the Army, and a used car sales lot.

But it's interesting, isn't it - a kind of asterisk to denote social change - to wonder at what point in our progress toward who-knows-what that rehabilitation programs gave up the notion of farming's restorative power.

When did we decide that troubled people from big city streets don't aim to go “back to the land” anymore?

So Lytton is on the market, offered as a possible site for a subdivision, a winery or, heaven help us, a casino. We await the next news story.