William Bowers Bourn II, builder of Filoli

Twenty-one year old William refused to take “no” for an answer. He reorganized the company, raised new capital (in part, from his mother who mortgaged her Napa Valley property Madrono). His answer to the lack of gold, was to dig deeper. He hired his cousin George Starr and together they met numerous challenges at the mine. They made improvement after improvement to processes for obtaining gold from quartz rock. Over the next 40 years, until Bourn finally sold all his interest in the mine in 1929, the Empire Mine would continue to provide the bulk of the Bourn family’s income. Now a state park, by the time the Empire Mine closed in 1956, the mine would earn the reputation as “one of the largest, richest and longest-operating (1850-1956) gold mines in California, producing more than eight billion dollars in gold by today’s standards.”

Simultaneous to his investments in gold mines, Bourn invested in many other companies, especially those that sought to provide the growing city of San Francisco with gas, electricity and water. He knew that ultimately the companies providing these utilities would have to merge. In 1905, as president of the San Francisco Gas and Electric Company, Bourn worked with Eugene de Sabla and Frank Drum of the California Electric Company to merge their companies into the Pacific Gas and Electric Company. He also continued to invest in the privately held Spring Valley Water Company. He believed that eventually the massive infrastructure and property owned by Spring Valley Water Company would be needed by the city of San Francisco to supply water to its residents. A sale of the company was attempted the year after Bourn assumed a controlling interest and was named president in 1908, but the city did not end up buying the water company until 1929.

By 1910, Bourn had obtained the financial security that had been so elusive in the years following his father’s untimely death. Now his last remaining challenge was to help launch his only child into adulthood. In the last quarter of the 19th century, many Americans, like Bourn, became very rich. Old New York society, however, was unwelcoming to the nouveau riche. As a result, to obtain social status, many young American heiresses traded “dollars for British titles.” By marrying British royalty, the young women provided much-needed wealth to keep the large estates running, while their British husbands provided the new brides with social status and a royal title. William and Agnes Bourn’s only daughter Maud did not marry royalty, but her father ensured that she was treated as if she did.

In March of 1910, Maud, who was then 26, married Arthur Rose Vincent at St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church in San Mateo. The wedding reception was held at Skyfarm (current site of Nueva School), which the Bourns had rented so he could keep a closer eye on Spring Valley Water Company business and be closer to the social whirl of the Burlingame Country Club. Maud had met Arthur Vincent, an Irish lawyer, in 1906 on board a ship while crossing the Atlantic on one of the Bourn family’s numerous “Grand Tours” to Europe and Egypt. In 1909, the year prior to their marriage, Vincent had been serving as a judge for His Majesty’s Court in Zanzibar, off the east coast of Africa. Bourn did not want his only child living in Zanzibar. So when the couple returned from their long honeymoon abroad, they learned that Bourn had purchased the Muckross Estate in County Kerry, Ireland, to be the newlyweds’ home. Built in the 1840s, the estate consisted of 11,000 acres and a 100-room Elizabethan mansion. Bourn also promised the couple a yearly expense account of $25,000, in addition to paying the estimated annual cost of running the estate ($65,000). Unlike many other American heiresses who married British nobility, Muckross wasn’t in England and it did not come with a title of “Lady” for Maud, but it would have to do. In 1911, Maud was presented to the Court of St. James, an indication of the elevated social status she had recently obtained.

Like many other second generation wealthy Californians (such as the Kohls, the Carolans and the Crockers), Bourn began purchasing property for a grand home on the Peninsula in 1914. As he had with several other building projects (e.g. his San Francisco home on 2550 Webster Street, his cottage at the Empire Mine and the clubhouse for the Pacific-Union Club) Bourn turned to his friend, Willis Polk, as his architect. The Bourns’ Peninsula home, which they called Filoli (Fight, Love, Live), was completed in September 1917. Polk went way over budget in completing the home and his drinking began to interfere with his work. Thus, in 1918, Bourn hired the architect Arthur Brown Jr. to complete the home with the building of the carriage house. Another old friend of Bourn’s, Bruce Porter, and Bella Worn completed the gardens.

Bourn turned 60 in 1917. He and his wife Agnes thoroughly enjoyed living and entertaining at Filoli for five full years. However, in 1921, the man who had met so many challenges in his life, including bringing his father’s gold mine back to life and helping create a modern city in San Francisco with beautiful architecture and ample supplies of gas, electricity and water, finally met a challenge he could not overcome. In the summer of that year, at the age of 64, he suffered a debilitating stroke. For the next 15 years, William continued to suffer a series of strokes. In preparation for the inevitable, he began putting his financial house in order and started selling off his far-flung assets. As it turned out, he need not have worried about Maud and Agnes; they both predeceased him. William Bowers Bourn II died July 5, 1936. He was buried at the family plot at Filoli, near his daughter and wife and a son who died in infancy. At his death, the newspaper San Francisco Argonaut noted that “his career was a record of the building of the West, coinciding in its successive phases with the change of San Francisco from a mining center to a metropolis ... . In his passing, California has lost one of the foremost of her builder sons.”

Joanne Garrison is a board member of the Burlingame Historical Society and the author of “Burlingame Centennial: 1908-2008.” The society operates a museum at the Burlingame Train Station. It is open to the public on the first Sunday of every month from 1 p.m.-4 p.m. Filoli is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year and will hold a gala party Saturday, Aug. 12. Go to www.filoli.org for ticket info.