Owning a true vision is a blessing and a curse. I have to remind myself of this every day. It has been more then three years since I have seen my grandson, Tyler Hunt, who will carry on this vision he will inherit.
Lawrence Chazen is a Trustee for the Big Sur Land Trust. He was my father’s private lender and formed a partnerships with Christine and Garth Benton a month after our father formed a partnership with his two daughters. Vic did not know about Chazen being behind the opening of the first Rosamond Gallery in Carmel. Chazen was a friend of Garth. Upon learning Garth was an artist. Vic Presco suggested they introduce Rosamond to him. That is Chazen looking into the lens at the reopening of the Rosamond gallery after Christine died. The black balloons are – tasteless! If I was there, I would have popped them. On the right is Rosamond’s painting of our black maid ‘Lena and Her Sisters’.
I am the Benton and Fremont Family Historian. There is not one else. My niece, Drew Benton, is an artist who is immersed in the gift she inherited from both her parents. Thanks to Jessie Benton, we have Yosemite National Park.
Cristine and I lived with Zorthian sisters in San Francisco. Betty is the founder of the Santa Ynez Land Trust, which eventually became the Land Trust for Santa Barbara County.
https://rosamondpress.com/2015/04/23/tale-of-two-wineries/
The greatest artist to come out of Nebraska – by far – is Gutzon Borglum, who created Mount Rushmore National Monument. Gutzon and his family lived in Omaha and Fremont City. When they moved to Los Angeles, my kindred, Jessie Benton-Fremont, became his patron. She sent Gutzon to famous art schools in Europe. Gutzon did a bust of Jessie, and a portrait of John Fremont.
Charles Lummis the editor of ‘The Land of Sunshine’ and ‘Out West’ was a great promoter of Gutzon and the Fremonts. There is a good chance my grandfather, Royal Rosamond, knew Lummis because he published his poems and stories in Out West. Lummis’ stone house is a National Treasure and perhaps was a model for the house I envisioned for the George Sterling park. Add to this the parks Joaquin Miller and his daughter established in the Oakland Hills, then what we have is a Family Tree that has preserved beauty.
Jon Presco
Copyright 2015
http://www.bigsurlandtrust.org/about-us.htm
http://www.bigsurlandtrust.org/our-founders.htm
1978 The Big Sur Land Trust was founded when fewer than a dozen families came together to ensure that Big Sur’s beauty and quality of life would be preserved for later generations. Around kitchen tables and over potluck dinners, they decided that a land trust should be established to preserve the unique culture and environment of their community.
http://www.bigsurlandtrust.org/board-of-trustees.htm
The Woman Who Inspired the Saving of Yosemite Valley & the Mariposa Grove
(Editor’s Note: In an earlier Sierra Heritage, we presented the story, First Woman in the White House, on Jessie Benton Fremont’s incredible effort to help her husband’s presidential campaign. For years, author Craig MacDonald has been investigating how and who Jessie brought together in the first effort to save Yosemite, before John Muir arrived on the scene. We present this story in honor of this remarkable woman, who passed away 110 years ago this year. You can read more about her husband, John Charles Fremont, on page 12 in Along the Route of Hwy 99.)
Jessie Benton Fremont fell in love with Yosemite the very first time she saw it in the late 1850s. She had recently moved to California from back East and was totally awestruck with the unparalleled beautiful grandeur of the place. But she also was gravely concerned by what was starting to happen to this most spectacular scenery.
The wife of explorer John Charles Fremont envisioned settlers homesteading, orchards being planted, cattle and sheep overgrazing, loggers sawing down giant sequoias and wildlife being killed for food, fun and fortune. Jessie was determined to preserve and protect Yosemite and she did something about it. She gathered friends and others together in her homes at Bear Valley, near Mariposa (1858-59), and Black Point (1860-61), overlooking the Golden Gate in San Francisco.
She and her guests regularly discussed how to save Yosemite at afternoon teas and Sunday dinners. Jessie wrote a friend describing her one-three hour teas as “delightful and chatty.” Everyone at her teas and dinners had something to contribute. Among her guests were writers like Bret Harte, Herman Melville, Richard Henry Dana, Jr. and famous New York editor Horace Greeley.
Other friends, who enjoyed her hospitality, took prominent roles in the first effort to save Yosemite, including orator/writer/minister Thomas Starr King, photographer Carleton Watkins, businessman Israel Ward Raymond and geologists Josiah D. Whitney and William Ashburner. Mountaineer Galen Clark also visited with her on occasion. Effervescent Jessie inspired and encouraged her distinguished pals to lobby Congress, the media and acquaintances on the immediate need to preserve Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoias, before it was too late.
Jessie loved working behind the scenes, never desiring any credit for her role in orchestrating the first effort to save Yosemite. She preferred bringing people together, introducing them and planting her brilliant ideas in the minds of influential men. An excited Thomas Starr King wrote Randolph Ryers, on October 29, 1860: “I am going to dine today at Mrs. Fremont’s (Black Point) with Colonel Baker, the new Republican Senator from Oregon.” Baker was a good friend of Abraham Lincoln and helped spread the gospel for saving Yosemite Valley. He was just one of the politicians she invited to her friendly gatherings.
“Jessie’s role was that of a catalyst and muse, prodding and encouraging (them) to write and speak,” wrote John Henneberger of the National Park Service.
Her houseguests appreciated her advice and passion. Jessie knew what she was talking about. She was taught how to bring “the right” people together and lobby Congress and even Presidents by her father, Thomas Hart Benton, once the most powerful U.S. Senator in Washington.
According to my aunt Lillian, her father, Royal Rosamond, taught Earle Stanley Gardener the rudiments of writing. In a taped interview Lillian told me she would fall asleep in the Rosamond home in Ventura to the sound of Roy and Earl pecking away on the Royal typewriter. Gardener is the creator of Perry Mason, an old television series about an attorney who never fails to win a case.
According to my mother, Rosemary, Royal used to sail out to the Channel Islands with his friend, Dashiell Hammett, and camp overnight. I found old photographs of my grandmother and Roy camping on one of these islands, and will post them later.
Above is a photograph of Henry Meade Bland, the Poet Laureate of Santa Clara County, with Joaquin Miller ‘The Poet of the Sierras’. Miller would come down from his poet and artist’s retreat called ‘The Heights’ and carry my father on his lap as he rode with my grandmother on the trolley to catch a ferry to San Francisco. My German kinfolk owned a orchard in the city of Fruit Vale that later became incorporated into the city of Oakland where I was born. I assume they sold their fruit to the canneries located in what is now called Jingletown, a community of Bohemians and Artists.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jingletown
Meade wrote a piece about George James in the same edition of Out West magazine that Royal Rosamond’s story ‘Camping on Ananapa’ is found. Below is Meade’s history written by Eugene T. Sawyers who was titled ‘The King of Dime Novelists’. Eugene authored the Nick Carter series. Hammett was titled “The dean of the hard-boiled’ school of detective fiction”. Royal wrote several love stories for early California Romance magazines. Rosamond’s poems are found next to George Sterling’s and Joaquin Millers. I have yet to find a mystery or detective story authored by my grandfather.
http://www.sierraheritage.com/magazines/sierra-heritage/?article_id=44
https://rosamondpress.com/2013/08/23/camping-on-anacapa-by-roy-reuben-rosamond/
https://rosamondpress.com/2013/08/23/artistic-development-of-gutzon-borglum/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_Islands_National_Park
Channel Islands National Park is a United States national park that consists of five of the eight Channel Islands off the coast of the U.S. state of California, in the Pacific Ocean. Although the islands are close to the shore of densely populated Southern California, their isolation has left them relatively undeveloped. The park covers 249,561 acres (100,994 ha) of which 79,019 acres (31,978 ha) are owned by the federal government.[1] The Nature Conservancy owns and manages 76% of Santa Cruz Island, the largest island in the park.[3
Rosamond Press 
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