De Sabla left his mark even after a short stay

We also still have PG&E.

The de Sabla family traced its roots to French royalty that had to flee Paris at the fall of the Bastille in 1789. Eugene’s great uncle became involved with de Lesseps and the plan for a Panama Canal, and became a director of the Panama Railroad.

That’s how Eugene happened to be born in Panama City in 1865, although his father owned plantations in Columbia and Guatemala. The family moved to San Francisco in 1870 when Eugene, Sr. started an import export business here. The family lost its fortune in an economic panic of 1893, but by then Eugene, Jr. was poised to recoup the family riches.

Eugene was working on developing hydroelectric power in the Sierra Nevada. In 1894 he was building power plants in Nevada and Yuba Counties and he teamed up with John Martin, who sold generators. The two of them formed the California Gas and Electric Company. At that time there were many pioneers of electric energy racing to get inexpensive power from the streams of the mountains down to the vast markets of the Bay Area. By 1901 California Gas and Electric served Sacramento and had crossed the Carquinez Straights to Oakland. They bought out and consolidated with other companies like those that served Fresno and Oakland. By 1905, they served 22 counties, and they merged with San Francisco Gas and Electric. In the process, they changed the name of their company to Pacific Gas and Electric, and Eugene de Sabla became its first president.

In 1906, de Sabla purchased 30 acres and the old Howard home, El Cerrito, in San Mateo, from his friend and neighbor Henry Bowie. Bowie had built Severn Lodge on an adjoining piece of the original estate. De Sabla had the old house moved to another site and began work on a new 35 room mansion also to be called El Cerrito for the location, a "little mound.” The new structure was completed in 1909, and de Sabla inaugurated it with an extravagant debutant ball for his daughter, Vera. Tiny electric lights illuminated the gardens and fountains for the affair and impressed local socialites.

Bowie had already landscaped most of the grounds of the estate long before he sold it to de Sabla. The friends shared an enthusiasm for the new fad of Japanese gardens. Even before the house was completed, de Sabla hired Makoto Hagiwara, the master who had created the Japanese Tea Garden for the 1894 Midwinter Fair, to do a private garden on a little less than half an acre. Hagiwara created a miniature landscape with a stream, waterfall, lake, stone bridge and tiny mountain along with the plantings. It was a jewel of rural retreat.

De Sabla sold El Cerrito in 1919 after he had moved on to New York. His mansion was razed in the 1940s and the land subdivided. That’s when the road and the apartment house name came in. The de Sabla Garden was saved and incorporated into a more modest modern home.

It’s on the National Register of Historic Places. It was Hagiwara, not de Sabla, that earned it that honor.

Rediscovering the Peninsula appears in the Monday edition of the Daily Journal. For more information on this or related topics, visit the San Mateo County History Museum, 750 Middlefield Road, Redwood City.<