Sarah Bixby Smith

Life

Sarah Hathaway Bixby Smith was born at Rancho San Justo near San Juan Bautista, California, in 1871. Her parents were Llewellyn Bixby, a rancher, and Mary Hathaway Bixby. Llewellyn Bixby was a sheepman, and with other members of his family had come to California in 1852, driving sheep and cattle from the East. Llewellyn, together with his brother Jotham and three cousins (John William Bixby, Thomas Flint, and Benjamin Flint), formed the Flint-Bixby Company in 1855 to buy land to run their livestock. By the mid-1880s they had amassed large landholdings: in addition to Rancho San Justo were Rancho Los Cerritos and Rancho Los Alamitos in Long Beach, California (both now run as museums), Rancho San Juan Cajón de Santa Ana, and part of Rancho de los Palos Verdes.

Sarah spent her childhood on the San Justo, Los Cerritos, and Los Alamitos ranches; the book she later wrote about her childhood, Adobe Days, has been called "deservedly a classic of California autobiography. Bixby Smith captures perfectly that intersection of civilization and frontier, New Englandism and Spanish Southwest, which turn-of-the-century California defined as its own special heritage." Smith earned her bachelor's degree from Wellesley College in 1894 and became a writer and advocate for women's independence and higher education.

Smith was married and divorced twice. In 1896, she married Arthur Maxson Smith. With her inherited wealth, Smith financed Arthur’s graduate divinity school studies at the University of Chicago and Harvard on his way to becoming a Unitarian minister. In 1900, they moved to Hawaii for two years when Arthur was appointed the head of Honolulu’s Oahu College and Punahou School. They returned to the mainland as a result of Arthur's liaisons with Oahu College students and moved to Claremont, California, where Arthur taught philosophy at Pomona College from 1904 to 1909. They commissioned architect Arthur B. Benton to build them a 14-room mansion on 20 acres directly across the street from the campus.

In 1909, when Smith discovered that her husband had been having an affair with the children's au pair, she helped him to get a new position in northern California at the First Unitarian Church in Berkeley. Arthur was also having a long-term affair with a Pomona College student named Alice Giffen, whom he later married. Smith got definitive evidence of this affair after hiring a private detective in 1915.

Smith's own life was complicated by getting romantically involved with Paul Jordan Smith, a married minister at her husband's new church, who was also a graduate student in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley. She collaborated with him on a manifesto extolling an elevated and spiritual feminism; entitled The Soul of Woman, An Interpretation of the Philosophy of Feminism, it was published under his name in 1916. It was around that time that Paul assumed the hyphenated Jordan-Smith as his last name, in part to disguise his liaison with Smith, which he feared might damage his academic career (as indeed it may have: the English Department faculty voted not to renew his fellowship.)

After Smith's 1916 divorce from Arthur and marriage the same year to Paul, the couple moved with her children to her mansion in Claremont, which had in the meantime been turned into a school for boys by a Dr. W. E. Garrison. In 1917, the school's lease ended and they began renovating the house back into a private residence, which they named Erewhon on completion. Around this time, they met and subsequently became friends with one of Smith's cousins, the photographer Edward Weston, who made a photographic portrait of her around 1919. There are also a number of Weston photographs of bathers shot around Erewhon's indoor pool. Later, the couple moved to a mansion on Los Feliz Boulevard in Los Angeles, where their dinner parties were famous for bringing members of the city's bohemian circles together with the ruling oligarchy. Eventually, Paul left Smith and they got divorced.

From her marriage to Arthur Maxson Smith, she had five children: Maxson, Bradford, Rodger, Llewellyn and Janet. She died of a trichinosis infection in Long Beach, California, on September 13, 1935, at the age of 64. At the time of her death, she was working on a book about the history of southern California.

Career

Smith's books include A Little Girl of Old California (a memoir of her girlhood, ca. 1920), Wind Upon my Face (1930), and The Bending Tree (1933). Her volumes of poetry include My Sage-brush Garden (1924), Pasear (1926), and Poems: Selected for Americanization Classes (1929). Smith is perhaps best known for her two highly personal memoirs of California history: Adobe Days (1925) and Milestones in Los Angeles: being a brief narrative of Los Angeles through five decades (ca. 1933). Adobe Days uses details of Smith's childhood on the family sheep ranches to tell the intertwined stories of the pioneering Bixby family as it rose to prominence in California and the development of Los Angeles from its frontier-town days to the end of the 19th century.

Smith was involved with women's groups and served at various times as president of the Friday Morning Club and vice-president of the American Association of University Women. She was also a trustee of Scripps College and a member of the Claremont School Board and the Historical Society of Southern California board. In the early 1930s, she was a delegate to the Pacific Relations Conference in Shanghai.

Smith was an amateur painter of landscapes and portraits in a realist style that hearkens back to the mid-nineteenth century. Her paintings prompted Paul Jordan-Smith's Disumbrationism hoax.

Smith's correspondence, along with photographs, press clippings, and other documents, are in the Charles E. Young Research Library Department of Special Collections at the University of California, Los Angeles. Rancho Los Cerritos (now run as a museum) houses the Sarah Bixby Smith Manuscript Collection and has four of her oil paintings on display.

Books