On a quiet hill overlooking citrus groves in San Marino, California, a small marble mausoleum stands almost hidden behind the rose garden of the Huntington Library. Visitors often discover it by accident: a circular colonnade designed by architect John Russell Pope, who would later use a similar design for the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D. C. Inside rest Henry E.
Huntington and his wife, Arabella, names now printed on gates and galleries throughout the 200-acre estate known as the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. The institution attracts roughly 750,000 visitors each year. What most visitors do not know is that the land beneath the mausoleum changed owners and names at least four times in less than a century and a half. In 1913, a decade after Henry Huntington bought the property, one of those buried names resurfaced against his wishes.
Long before the Huntington name appeared anywhere on this land, the Tongva people lived across the San Gabriel Valley in villages along streams and seasonal waterways. They gathered acorns from oak groves and traded along routes they had used for thousands of years before any Spanish arrival. Missionaries established Mission San Gabriel Arcángel a few miles south in 1771. Tongva people drawn into its orbit became known to newcomers as “Gabrieleños,” a name imposed on them rather than chosen.
Their descendants today use several names, including Gabrieleño, Tongva, and Kizh, a reminder that even the naming of peoples carries complex history. When Mexico secularized the California missions in 1834, mission grazing lands were divided and distributed as private ranchos. The parcel that would one day become the Huntington estate was called Rancho San Pascual, originally granted to a retired Spanish soldier named Juan Marín. Family tradition holds that the grant was requested at the urging of his wife, Eulalia Pérez, who had worked for years as keeper of the mission keys and was said to have lived to the age of 143, dying at the mission in 1878.
After Marín’s death in 1838, the rancho passed through a succession of owners, including a physician named John S. Griffin. Amid chaos and litigation, the land changed hands repeatedly as California became an American territory. The mission system itself had relied on Tongva labor for over 60 years before secularization dismantled it.
Converts lived and worked within the mission’s orbit, tending cattle and vineyards under a system historians now describe as closer to forced labor than spiritual community. The population declined sharply over those decades due to introduced diseases and the disruption of village life along the streams. When secularization finally came in 1834, land was supposed to partially return to the Indigenous communities that had worked it, under an ejido system modeled on Mexican communal grants. In practice, most mission property was instead sold or granted to influential individuals with connections.
Tongva families who had lived across the valley for millennia were left with little claim to any of it. By 1859, much of the old rancho belonged to Benjamin Davis Wilson, a former fur trapper who had crossed into California via the southern route in 1841, become a Mexican citizen, served as Los Angeles’s first mayor under American rule, and later sat in the state senate. Wilson was both a builder and a politician. He financed and helped survey the first toll road up the mountain that now bears his name, and he was among the first Americans in the region to plant commercial vineyards on a large scale.
Wilson built an estate around a natural lake on his property and called it “Lake Vineyard,” a name still present today in the lake at Pasadena’s Lacy Park. He had several daughters, and through two of them the later history of the property runs. His daughter María de Jesús Wilson, known within the family as “Sue,” was born in 1844 to Wilson and his first wife, Ramona Yorba. Sue carried Mexican-era land history in her lineage before she married and faced bankruptcy.
When she married a Maryland-born businessman named James De Barth Shorb in 1867, her father gave the young couple 600 adjoining acres to the east. Shorb named his new estate “San Marino” after his grandfather’s estate in Maryland. According to family accounts, he chose the name because the acreage matched that of the small Italian republic of the same name. Wilson’s younger daughter, Ruth, later married lawyer George Smith Patton.
This meant that the man ultimately appointed to settle his sister-in-law’s financial affairs was already a family member before the crisis ever began. Shorb matched the name he chose with real ambition. In partnership with his father-in-law, he built the San Gabriel Wine Company into one of the largest wine-producing operations in Southern California during the 1880s, shipping barrels east by rail and establishing himself as a leading regional vintner. For a decade, the rancho appeared regularly in Los Angeles society pages.
Shorb moved easily among the railroad men, bankers, and politicians of the era, serving on boards, pursuing water rights, and backing irrigation and land companies throughout the San Gabriel Valley. His surviving papers document mining claims, irrigation districts, and water disputes extending far beyond the rancho itself. Then phylloxera reached his vines. The same root louse that had devastated wine regions across Europe swept through his plantings with brutal efficiency.
The wine company struggled through a decade of failed harvests before closing for good in 1892. The buildings that once processed his grapes were sold and converted into a felt factory in 1903. The last original winery structures stood until 1987, when they were finally demolished. Almost no physical trace of the operation remains today, aside from two street names in neighboring Alhambra: Shorb Street and Vine Street.
Shorb never financially recovered from the collapse. When he died in 1896, the Los Angeles Times described him as a prominent figure in Southern California life, and his funeral at Mission San Gabriel drew a guest list that, according to one account, read like a who’s who of regional business. He was buried at the mission cemetery, a few miles from the rancho that still bore his name. He left his widow drowning in debt, with creditors pursuing wealth that had largely evaporated in withered vines.
Sue Shorb fought to keep the property, but the Farmers and Merchants Bank foreclosed after what Huntington family historians later described as a public trial. It was the kind of proceeding Los Angeles society followed in newspapers as earlier generations might have followed a family fortune’s public collapse. Gilded Age newspapers treated the financial ruin of prominent families as entertainment, publishing column after column about foreclosure suits, contested wills, and courtroom testimony from people whose names had recently filled society pages for entirely different reasons. The bank was owned by Isaias W.
Hellman, one of the most powerful bankers in 19th-century Los Angeles. During the worst of the crisis, George Smith Patton, husband of Sue’s sister Ruth, was appointed receiver for the intertwined Wilson and Shorb properties. He moved his entire family to the neighboring Lake Vineyard estate to manage the collapse up close. A family member was overseeing his family’s ruin, not a stranger sent to pick through the wreckage.
Patton’s young son, called “Georgie,” grew up on the ranch watching the slow legal death of the neighboring property, playing on land that was effectively under receivership while his aunt lost her home a short distance away. That boy would grow up to lead American armored divisions across Europe in World War II as General George S. Patton Jr. But in the 1890s, he was just a child living next to a bankruptcy the whole valley could read about at breakfast.
Henry E. Huntington entered the story a few years later, not as a mourner. He was the nephew of railroad magnate Collis P. Huntington, and his first marriage already tied him closely to that side of the family.
In 1873, he married his cousin Mary Alice Prentice in Otsego County, New York. The couple stayed together for more than three decades while Henry climbed through his uncle’s railroad empire, managing operations in West Virginia first, then moving to San Francisco in 1892 to serve as vice president of the Southern Pacific Railroad. By the turn of the century, he was building his own fortune. In 1901, he co-founded the Pacific Electric Railway, financed in part by Isaias W.
Hellman, the same banker whose institution had foreclosed on Sue Shorb’s ranch only a few years earlier. The red interurban cars of the Pacific Electric would shape Los Angeles’s growth for the next half century, with tracks extending more than a thousand miles across the basin by 1914. For a time, this made Huntington the largest private landowner in California. He did more than lay rail lines.
In 1905, he joined two partners to develop the Oak Knoll residential district just west of his new ranch. The next year, he helped organize an association that built a road up Mount Rubidoux in Riverside, later donating the hill to the city as a public park. These were the same instincts for large, lasting civic initiatives that would eventually turn his private estate into a public trust. While exploring the region for the railway, Huntington wandered onto the old Shorb ranch and admired the land, the citrus groves, and the view of the San Gabriel Mountains rising behind it.
Within a single year, between 1902 and 1903, he moved from San Francisco to Los Angeles and bought the 600-acre property outright. He did not preserve what he found there. In 1906, he demolished Shorb’s three-story Victorian mansion, the house Sue Shorb had fought to keep and lost, and commissioned Los Angeles architects Myron Hunt and Elmer Grey to build an entirely new residence on the same site. The structure was low, symmetrical, in a restrained Beaux-Arts style, with ochre stucco facades and formal terraces overlooking gardens rather than the fruit orchards Shorb had watched from his own veranda.
The house now serves as the Huntington Art Gallery. Its rooms display British portrait paintings in the spaces where the Shorb family had slept and eaten during the Gilded Age. Huntington did not stop at demolition. A handwritten note from Huntington to George Patton, who was managing the property for him at the time, survives.
In it, Huntington stated that he did not prefer the name “San Marino” and wanted to rename the ranch “Los Robles” instead. For several years, his official personal papers carried that new name rather than the old one. The name associated with a very public bankruptcy, a widow’s lost home, and a decade of failed harvests was something Huntington wanted entirely separated from the property, along with the debts and the memory of the family that had built it. In that same year, 1906, a second erasure hit closer to home.
In March, a San Francisco judge granted Mary Alice Huntington’s divorce petition on grounds of desertion, ending 33 years of marriage. According to press coverage of the case, Mary Alice sailed to Japan with their younger daughter on the very day the decree was issued, leaving Henry free from the marriage that had carried him from a candy stand in Oneonta to the vice presidency of the Pacific Railroad. The separation did not last long. In 1913, the land Huntington had spent a decade consolidating under his own management was legally incorporated as a city.
The residents who filed the paperwork chose to call it San Marino. That was the name Shorb had given it decades earlier, and the name Huntington had taken pains to erase from his official records. A map of the new city from that year, still preserved in the library’s photographic collections, shows Huntington’s ranch carrying both names side by side: Los Robles and San Marino. Public record sided with the bankrupt family over the surviving millionaire.
Whatever Huntington’s private preferences, the name carrying the memory of the foreclosure trial and the collapse of the vineyards returned to official use in the same year he might have expected it to disappear for good. Sue Shorb was still alive to see it. She lived until 1917, four years after the founding of the city that put her late husband’s name back on the map, on land neither of them owned any longer. She was close enough to the old ranch to have every opportunity to hear about it.
That same year brought a second reversal, this one personal rather than geographic. In July 1913, Henry Huntington married Arabella Duval Huntington in Paris. She was the widow of his uncle Collis P. Huntington, and the woman he had known for more than two decades as an aunt by marriage.
According to many biographical accounts, the marriage shocked social circles in San Francisco and New York alike. The kinship by marriage was close enough to attract the kind of quiet, persistent scrutiny such unions invite. It was more innuendo than outright accusation in the coverage of the period, but it was unmistakable nonetheless. Arabella brought with her an art collection she had assembled over decades of purchases in Europe, works she and Collis had gathered for their Fifth Avenue mansion in New York.
That collection would eventually form a cornerstone of the Huntington estate’s art holdings in California, alongside his books and manuscripts. Her son Archer, formally adopted by Collis years earlier, reportedly never accepted his mother’s marriage to the man who had been his adoptive uncle. Archer spent his life immersed in Spanish culture, and in 1904 he founded the Hispanic Society of America in New York, still one of the most important collections of Spanish art, manuscripts, and rare books outside Spain. While Archer built an institution in Manhattan devoted to preserving Spanish culture, his stepfather was quietly erasing the last visible trace of California’s Spanish and Mexican heritage from a 600-acre estate 3,000 miles away.
Archer served on the library’s board of trustees for 26 years after its founding, but according to the institution’s own historians, he never attended a single meeting in San Marino. Henry had already stepped further into his uncle’s world than marriage alone suggests. He took over Collis’s leadership role at the Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company in Virginia after the old man’s death in 1900. By 1913, he had inherited not only a widow but an entire second sphere of business commitments that had belonged to someone else entirely.
Two erasures, then, and both were reversed or complicated within the same twelve months. The name Huntington tried to retire came back as a municipal decree. The family relationship he might have preferred to keep quiet became instead a legal marriage registered in a foreign capital and covered, however discreetly, in the American press. Arabella herself remains one of the most enigmatic figures of the Gilded Age.
Her early life is deliberately obscure even in archival records. Accounts of her origins conflict between Virginia and Alabama, describe an early marriage to a man named John Archer Worsham, and trace her journey to New York, where she became involved with Collis Huntington years before their 1884 marriage following his first wife’s death. She became one of the most active American art collectors of her era, working with dealers across Europe to assemble paintings, decorative arts, and rare books at a level rivaling established museums. By the time she married Henry in 1913, she had spent decades building relationships with the same London and Paris dealers he would later rely on.
When she married Henry in 1913, her collection did not merely supplement his; it doubled it. The years that followed saw the San Marino ranch transformed from a primarily citrus-growing operation into something resembling what visitors see today. The couple split their time between California, New York, and a residence outside Paris called Château Beauregard. Henry’s passion for rare books and manuscripts had been growing for years, but it accelerated sharply after his second marriage and his retirement from railroad management around 1910.
By 1917, he had spent more than $6 million acquiring books. That same year, he purchased the entire Bridgewater Library from the Earl of Ellesmere in England, a single transaction that brought one of the most important surviving Canterbury Tales manuscripts, along with a vast collection of English literary and historical material the aristocratic family had kept for generations. A Gutenberg Bible, one of the few copies surviving intact, entered the collection around the same period. In 1921, he paid $728,000 for Thomas Gainsborough’s “The Blue Boy,” a sum that made headlines on its own.
The painting remains one of the most famous works in American museum collections. A few years later, shortly before his death in 1927, he added Thomas Lawrence’s portrait of a young girl known as “Pinkie,” painted in 1794, and hung the two paintings facing each other across the gallery. The figures were painted by different artists nearly a quarter century apart, in different countries, and had no relationship in life. The pairing was pure arrangement, not history, yet it worked so well that generations of visitors assumed the two were destined to be together forever.
Acquisitions of this scale turned the San Marino estate from a wealthy man’s private residence into something close to a research institution in embryo. The citrus groves, once Shorb’s livelihood and then Huntington’s hobby, increasingly shared the land with structures built to house paper and parchment rather than fruit. In 1919, Henry and Arabella signed a contract that formally began converting their private estate into a nonprofit educational trust, a legal step that would ultimately place the library, the art collection, and the land itself outside the ownership of any single family. In 1922, Huntington signed a deed transferring his books, manuscripts, art, and the San Marino ranch itself to the library’s board of trustees, ensuring that whatever happened to the family, the institution would outlast them.
The man who once tried to erase a bankrupt family’s name from his official records spent the last years of his life building a legal structure to guarantee that his own name and collection would remain intact regardless of what happened to his heirs. Shorb’s ambitions were built on land and vines, vulnerable to a louse smaller than a grain of rice. Huntington’s ambitions were built on trust documents and museum charters, tools explicitly designed to withstand market crashes, family scandals, and death itself. He arranged an endowment to fund the institution forever, a step Shorb, burdened by mortgages on even his vines, lacked the liquidity to contemplate.
Arabella did not live to see the institution fully realized. She died in 1924 and was buried on the grounds she had helped transform, on a hilltop overlooking the groves, a spot she reportedly chose herself. Henry outlived her by three years, dying in May 1927 after an illness and a journey east for surgery, at age 77. For the mausoleum that would hold them together, Huntington chose John Russell Pope, one of the most sought-after American architects of the time, who designed a circular structure with white and gray marble columns in the classical Greek temple style.
The dome and colonnades were intended, according to the architect’s logic, to present a harmonious facade from every angle. Pope would use closely related design ideas just over a decade later for the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D. C. Early photographs of the mausoleum site from around 1921 show a flat empty space lined with trees, where Arabella chose to be buried.
A vacant plot waiting for a building that would not exist for several more years. Construction of the mausoleum began around 1926 and was completed in 1929, two years after Huntington’s death. The estate opened to the public in 1928, a year neither Henry nor Arabella lived to see. Nor did James De Barth Shorb, who had died more than three decades earlier, or his widow Sue, who died 11 years before the public opening, knowing nothing of what would eventually stand on the land they lost, or that their family name would end up outlasting the name Huntington tried to substitute for it.
What makes this story worth telling now is not a hidden vault or a sealed record, but something closer to a quiet irony the Huntington archivists have never tried to conceal. The institution Henry Huntington built, partly to erase the memory of a bankrupt family’s failure, now preserves in its manuscript vaults the fullest and most durable record of that family’s rise and fall. The papers of James De Barth Shorb are held at the Huntington Library today, along with the Benjamin Davis Wilson collection and the Patton family papers, indexed, preserved, and available to any researcher who asks. A single research call away from the same reading rooms where scholars study Huntington’s own correspondence.
The land itself carries the same layered character. Beneath the rose garden and the mausoleum lawn lie the compressed remains of a Victorian foundation torn out in 1906. Beneath that foundation sits topsoil where grew the grapevines destroyed by an insect too small to see without a lens. Beneath those vines was Benjamin Wilson’s Lake Vineyard estate, carved from a Mexican land grant that had in turn replaced mission grazing lands, which were taken from Tongva villages that predate every deed in every archive for this valley by thousands of years.
Six claims to the same land within roughly a century and a half, each confident in its time that it would be the last word on who owned the ground. None of the people who held any of those claims considered themselves temporary. Eulalia Pérez did not expect the mission she served for decades to be dismantled within her lifetime. Shorb did not build a wine company designed to last one generation.
Huntington did not build a Beaux-Arts mansion or write a memo to rename his ranch expecting either action to be quietly overturned by city clerk paperwork a few years later. Permanence on this particular piece of land consistently proved to be a working assumption rather than a fact. And the people who could afford marble were no more successful at securing it than the people who could only afford grapevines. Not every erasure is reversed on the same timeline.
Shorb’s name returned within a decade, restored by city clerk paperwork over a rich man’s objection. The Tongva claim to the same valley has had over a century and a half more to resurface, and it has not, at least not in any legal sense. The Gabrieleño Tongva nation still lacks federal recognition today, despite a documented petition before the Department of the Interior and repeated bills introduced in Congress requesting that status. The state of California itself lists over 100 federally recognized tribes within its borders.
The people whose villages once lined the streams through what became Wilson’s Lake Vineyard, then Shorb’s San Marino, then Huntington’s Los Robles, then San Marino again, are not formally among them. Some names reclaim their papers from city hall within years. Others still wait, generations later, for anyone with the authority to put them back on the record at all. Stand today at the mausoleum on the hill where this story began and look past the orange trees toward the San Gabriel Mountains, the same view that first caught Henry Huntington’s attention when he wandered the ranch as a railroad man exploring the region in 1902.
The gardens are immaculate and orderly. The library holds a Gutenberg Bible and a Chaucer manuscript rescued from an English earl’s estate. Docents point out the mausoleum’s resemblance to a future national monument, and visitors photograph the marble columns without necessarily knowing what Victorian house once stood a few hundred feet away, or what name the ranch carried before Huntington briefly and unsuccessfully tried to make everyone forget it. That name returned anyway in 1913, stamped on a city charter Huntington could not contest.
In the same year, he quietly married his uncle’s widow in a foreign capital, while his first wife’s divorce and departure to Japan was still fresh in memory. Some attempts at erasure fail. The land remembers what paperwork tried to forget. And in San Marino, California, it is still known by the name a bankrupt winemaker gave it over 150 years ago, preserved today, ironically, in the archives of the family that tried so hard to erase it.
The route near the old citrus groves follows where surveyors once marked the edge of Rancho San Pascual. A stretch of grass near the nursery sits over what was part of Wilson’s original lakebed. The gallery now displaying “Pinkie” and “Blue Boy” occupies the same space as a Victorian reception room where a ruined winemaker’s children once played before the auctioneer’s gavel closed that chapter forever. None of this is marked by any plaque explaining it to visitors passing by on any given afternoon.
The gardens simply grow over everything, layer upon layer, patient and indifferent to whichever family name is on the deed in that decade. Henry Huntington was not usually impeded in putting his name on the map. Huntington Beach, Huntington Park, Huntington Drive, Lake Huntington, Huntington Hospital in Pasadena, and a middle school in San Marino itself all bear his name today. A cluster of civic designations showing how much a man with enough railroad money could reshape place names in Southern California when he set his mind to it.
“Los Robles” was the only name he failed to switch. On the one property he actually lived on, the land that already belonged, in the public imagination, to another man’s ruins. Every other renaming succeeded because no competing name survived beneath it. This one failed because that name already existed.
None of this survival required a sealed vault or a government file. It required only ordinary, unglamorous American property records: deeds, mortgage files, incorporation papers, letters from a receiver to his brother-in-law, a widow’s handwriting on a note about signage. Every document making this story tellable exists today in public archives, most of them within the very institution built partly to outlast those events. The Wilson family papers, the Shorb family papers, the Patton family papers, and Henry Huntington’s personal correspondence all occupy shelves a short walk apart in the same reading room, available to anyone who fills out a request form.
A researcher can, within a single afternoon, read George Patton’s letters describing his sister-in-law’s ruin, then walk across the grounds to stand at the marble mausoleum built by the man who bought that ruined land at auction. The distance between those two experiences is a few hundred yards. The distance in time is less than three decades. Increasingly, one does not even need to make that walk.
Institutions like the Huntington and its partner archives have spent the last two decades digitizing photographs of the mausoleum under construction, pictures of the Shorb family on the veranda of their ranch house, maps of the emerging city of San Marino, and correspondence from the Wilson, Shorb, and Patton family papers, placing them in public digital repositories that anyone with an internet connection can view for free. A 1926 photograph of the empty tree-lined square where Arabella’s mausoleum would eventually rise is available online today alongside shots of cars parked outside it a decade later. The entire sequence of erasure and reconstruction is available to browse in a few minutes from anywhere on earth. Almost nothing in this story was ever actually hidden.
It simply required someone to walk from one building to another and ask. And now, it does not even require that.