Tag Archives: Mission Inn

Navel Gazing

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In the spring of 1875, Eliza Tibbets carefully unwrapped the root balls of two seedling orange tree grafts she had received in the mail (via ship, train and stagecoach) from Washington D.C. Following the instructions of her friend, the USDA botanist William Saunders, she planted them in her yard in Riverside.

Eliza Tibbets back East.
Eliza and Luther in California

A few years earlier, Eliza and her (common-law) third husband, Luther Tibbets, had decided to close the dry goods store and leave Fredericskburg, VA. Both had been married before, with children; they were Swedenborgians, rapidly converting to Spiritualism, and ardent abolitionists and supporters of Reconstruction. [They have been described as “carpetbaggers.”] This didn’t make them popular in Fredericksburg, especially when Eliza’s son, James Simmons, fathered a little girl, Nicey, with a freedwoman. The whole family decided to leave town, Nicey included, and re-start life by pioneering in the genteel, free-thinking, arts-and-culture, gentleman-farming colony being planned on the romantic-sounding Santa Ana River, a town called Riverside.

The settlement corporation’s brilliant scheme, hatched just after the Civil War in 1866, was to develop mulberry plantations, seed them with millions of silkworm eggs, and build up a sericulture in Southern California. This collapsed when the French worm-handler on the project, M. Prevost, the only one who knew silk, dropped dead in 1870. The land, if not the worms, was saved when statesman John W. North stepped in and took over the scheme. North had already founded Northfield, MN; and the University of Minnesota; so as freelance Founders go, he topped the A-list.

Read more about North, a powerhouse among pioneers.
William Saunders, Superintendent of the USDA’s Experimental Propagation Gardens in Washington

With the failure of silk in mind, Eliza stopped in Washington and asked Saunders to recommend a crop that would thrive in that climate. It was one of the very first real chances the USDA got to serve its purpose since Pres. Lincoln founded it: to help Homesteaders select crops, and aid them in developing scientific American agriculture across the range of our nation’s climates and soil types. It must be said, Mr. Saunders knocked it out of the park in recommending navel oranges to Eliza. The trees derive from a sterile spontaneous mutation, that just growed, from a rootstock in Bahia, Brazil. Mr. Saunders propagated samples of this unique variety, nurturing Eliza’s cuttings in the Smithsonian’s greenhouses on the National Mall.

Eliza knew she had to get the roots established in the hot hardpack, and since Riverside was so recently settled, it hadn’t yet finalized its irrigation system; she had to be as frugal as possible with water. So, the legend goes, Eliza saved up her dishwater each day and tossed it on the saplings. They grew in the California sunshine so quickly, and bore fruit so delicious, that all her neighbors asked her for cuttings. She obliged, not charging for the cuttings because, she reasoned, the U.S. government developed these on behalf of the whole people. 15 years later, there were half a million “Washington navel” trees in California, a quarter of a million of them within the Riverside city limits. Not only had the colony found its cash crop, the city had become the center of one of the wealthiest agricultural belts in the world, shipping sweet, seedless navels by the freight-car load. The colonist-neighbors of Riverside were millionaires!

Not the Tibbetses. Somehow — does it really matter how? — the family went bust in 1888. That same year, Nicey, who had grown up as Riverside’s first African-American citizen, died in a tragic drowning. [I like to imagine the little girl with a shovel and pail, helping her grandmother plant those first trees; or maybe helping her lug the basin of dishwater over to dump on the new “orchard.”]

The trees, which everybody in town seems to have always recognized are sacred, have been moved several times. In 1907 they were transplanted to the grounds of the Mission Inn — then still a little adobe guesthouse called the Glenwood Inn. For that re-planting, the spade was manned by Pres. Theodore Roosevelt, Himself. Sadly this tree doesn’t survive.

The sole surviving tree, the official Patent Washington Navel Orange, was moved to the completely unremarkable corner of Magnolia and Arlington, where it has been cared for by the UC Riverside.

Last year, the threat of the invasive Asian citrus psyllid forced them to erect a high-tech sun-permeable, insect-resistant screen. You really can’t see the tree at all, but it is clear that it is still being taken seriously as a scientific specimen.

Eliza was a colorful woman who epitomizes the legend of California as the “Land of Fruits and Nuts.” She certainly was eccentric, in her Queen Victoria drag. Riverside accepted her as a founding mother, and even supported her macabre career as a medium and seance-organizer, but was skeptical of her modern, un-churched mode of co-habiting, her progressive ideas, and her mixed-race family. She is remembered in the center of Riverside by a flamboyant bronze, “The Sower’s Dream,” by sculptor Guy Angelo Wilson. It is beautifully located, in an orange grove on the pedestrian mall outside the Mission Inn.

The statue is perfectly, extravagantly, bizarre, a figurative fantasy of Eliza’s gifts, rather than her realistic effigy. Spiritualist, progressive, matrist, pioneer, Lady Bountiful, Pomona, Mother Africa, Good Witch, Mr. Wilson’s vision of Eliza Tibbets’s inner beauty is an exceptionally sensitive tribute to her civic legacy.

Take A View Of the Mission Inn, Riverside

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Damon is booked to sing at a wedding at the Mission Inn, so Janet and I get to tag along. Patient Reader gets a View of Southern California hospitality. Hotelier Frank Miller believed that hospitality tradition began with the Franciscans at the old Missions. He identified with the Franciscans strongly; not only do artistic representations of Franciscans appear all over the hotel, but at the end of his life he had himself memorialized — as “The Master” — in a stained glass window, dressed in a friar’s robe. (But he also displayed old salvaged Spanish cannons in the courtyard, marked “cobre de Mexico y Peru,” so there you go.)

  • Our visit coincided with the Martin Luther King, Jr.’ Holdiay, so it was good to be greeted by this bust of Civil Rights legend Booker T. Washington in the forecourt.
  • Since 1900, arriving visitors have been greeted by Napoleon and Josephine.
  • Miller liked macaws; their images are all over.
  • Napoleon, so called
  • because of his French blue-and-gold coat.

California invented the Mission Inn, which invented California. Frank Miller built this legendary hostelry as simultaneously a California cultural attraction, and a slick promotion of that very attraction: California itself. It is a place where visitors — Californians, East Coasters, and international tourists alike — have come for over 100 years, to experience and live what Carey McWilliams called the “Spanish Fantasy Past.”Richard Nixon married Pat Ryan at the Mission Inn; Ronald and Nancy Reagan honeymooned here. We’re talking Old California.

  • The plaque identifies this Spanish bell from 1274 as the” oldest in Christendom.” The double-crossed yoke became the emblem of the hotel, and of the City of Riverside.

In 1880 Miller purchased his father’s modest 12-room adobe roominghouse, and grew the place up as his fortune, and the city, and the history of the state — which in Frank’s mind were the same thing — allowed. The Inn sprang from the same soil, and was patronized by the same pioneers, the same farmers, the same railroad millionaires, the same Ramona fans and Land of Sunshine and Sunset magazine subscribers, who peopled the region and nurtured Riverside’s billion-dollar navel orange industry.

Our view of the pool and jacuzzi patio.

For the current hotel, the original adobe’s footprint was subsumed as the swank swimming pool in the courtyard. Around it, Myron Hunt built a Gilded Age resort and pleasure ground, adapting local California vernacular architecture (mainly the missions themselves, but also the rancho adobes) into an opium-eater’s vision of what a Californio don, had he been educated in the arts, might want to present of 500 years of his Moorish-Iberian-Mexican-American civilization, if he had the money.

  • The Spanish river-of-life graces the doors
  • The place is lousy with della Robbia.
  • William Keith’s “California Alps”
  • “Charge Up San Juan Hill” by V.V. Vereshchagin

With Damon working and Janet retired I was free to wander and sample the refreshments. There must be a dozen bars, lounges and restaurants on site. My favorite (and most topical) was the “Presidential Lounge.”

  • Grasping the orb…hmmm…

Decades of campaign fund-raising swings through Riverside led to this satisfyingly kitschy Commander-in-Chief-themed bar. It features portraits of all the weary chief executives who, just like One is doing now, have bent their elbows and wet their lips there while thanking God for their safe arrival at the Mission Inn. As I explored I kept running into the beautiful bride, being hustled around by her maids and handlers.

  • The exclusive luxury suites on “Writers’ Row”
  • The penthouse suite; I peeked in.

For thirty years the antiquarian Miller added to his art collection. A bit-player version of William Randolph Hearst, he nonetheless had a strong eye for what would work in his place: he haunted the auction houses and antiques warehouses for Spanish, Mexican and Chinese plunder. He loved bells, emblems of Franciscan California, and collected 800 of them, many hanging around the place.

  • Campanario modeled after San Gabriel’s
  • The bell of the U.S.S. Pres. Arthur
  • The huge bell of Nanjing, whose temple was toppled in the Boxer Rebellion.

Of all the artwork, the most precious may be 19th century paintings of the California Missions by Henry Chapman Ford. These were influential in publicizing the ruined state of California’s heritage, leading to the whole “Mission Revival.” Many of these were lost for years, and were found in a leaky, moldy attic somewhere in the hotel. They have since been restored and are sprinkled around the hotel. I found many, including a splendid view of San Gabriel with a Tongva kiij in the foreground. I never found the picture of Mission San Fernando, but I sure had fun trying.