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Matters Historical: From San Francisco to Europe to Menlo Park

Cocaine was part of the picture for Fred and Louise Sharon

LEFT: Frederick William Sharon, a cocaine addict,  died at the age of 56 while in the process of developing Sharon Heights above Menlo Park. RIGHT:  The guesthouse on Frederick Sharon's Menlo Heights property.  The planned estate house was never built. (Courtesy of MS&SB Collection)
LEFT: Frederick William Sharon, a cocaine addict, died at the age of 56 while in the process of developing Sharon Heights above Menlo Park. RIGHT: The guesthouse on Frederick Sharon’s Menlo Heights property. The planned estate house was never built. (Courtesy of MS&SB Collection)


When it came to being unscrupulous, few were as practiced as Frederick Sharon, son of Nevada Sen. William Sharon, also a prominent resident of San Francisco.

The senator wanted the best for his boy, who was born in 1859.  Young Frederick received his early education at Benicia Military Academy before going off to Harvard.

And then, in 1884, after careful family negotiations, Frederick married into one of the more profitable matrimonial alliances of the era.  He wedded the daughter of San Francisco financier Lloyd Tevis, president of Wells Fargo & Company.  The bride, once divorced and the mother of three children, had been married to John Witherspoon Breckinridge, son of a former U.S. vice president.

In a flash, after the nuptials, Fred and Louise, leaving the children behind, headed for a new life together in Paris.  And there they resided for almost two decades, returning to America only on rare occasions.  They became parents of a son in 1885.  At the age of 11, the child became ill and passed away.

Devastated by the death, Fred and Louise, major players in Paris society, became exhausted with the constant whirl.  In their effort to keep up, they turned to cocaine, better society’s drug of choice during the 19th century.  While Louise soon recognized the dangers of the drug and managed to shake the habit, Fred,  neither as determined nor as wise, never did.  He became increasingly thin and sickly.

Louise devoted herself to protecting the family fortune, no matter what the cost.  When her son, John Cabell Breckinridge, flaunted her authority by marrying against Louise’s explicit wishes, she acted.  Enraged, she had the healthy young man committed to a mental sanitarium and saw to it that he was declared “hopelessly insane.”

By the beginning of the 20th century, the Sharon family had become one of the leading owners of San Francisco real estate.  Upon receiving news of major losses, including the burning of the Sharon-owned Palace Hotel, following the earthquake of 1906, Fred and Louise finally returned to California.  New York architect George Kelham was hired to redesign and rebuild the hotel.

During their European sojourn, San Francisco swells had established what was now almost a tradition.  That is, in addition to their city houses, they had acquired sprawling Peninsula estates.  Fred would not be satisfied with anything less.

Besides his work on the Palace, architect Kelham was commissioned to plan and construct the ultimate country estate on 600 acres in the heights above Menlo Park on land that Fred had inherited from the senator.  Kelham began by constructing the guesthouse that Fred described as a 32-room cottage.

Guest rooms were meticulously decorated with tapestries and other art treasures that had been accumulated by Fred and Louise in Europe.  As the rest of the estate was being assembled, they lived in the guesthouse, waited upon by a staff of eight servants.  Dinners there, traditionally strictly formal, featured at least eight courses, sometimes 12.

Gardens were breathtaking and they should have been.  The Sharons hired 32 full time gardeners.  Graveled roads, aggregating 15 miles, crisscrossed the estate.

The Menlo Park property, never completed, provided Fred and Louise scant satisfaction.  Barely had the guesthouse been finished than, losing his battle with cocaine, Fred died.  He was 56 years old.

Back in 1880, Sen. Sharon had arranged a marriage for his daughter Florence Emily to an English nobleman, Sir Thomas George Femor Hesketh.  Following the nuptials, Sir Thomas took Florence off to Britain, where “Lady Florence” became the mistress of several sprawling estates.

When Sir Thomas’s and Florence’s son had turned 18 and a search commenced to find a suitable wife, the boy’s mother opened negotiations with her sister-in-law, the devious Louise Tevis Breckenridge Sharon.  Following protracted negotiations and the finances of both families carefully scrutinized, Louise Sharon sent her own daughter, Florence Louisa Breckenridge  to wed her step-cousin in England.

Thus, in this rather convoluted union, which caused a flurry of social excitement along the Peninsula, the bride’s stepfather (Frederick William Sharon), was the bridegroom’s mother’s (Florence Emily Sharon) brother.  The bride’s new mother-in-law (Lady Florence Emily Sharon Hesketh) was also the bride’s step-aunt.  This bizarre matrimonial alliance had been concluded over the vehement objections of the young California bride.  Reports are that she gradually fell into serious depression and took to bed.

Louise Tevis Breckinridge Sharon lived until 1938.  She divided her time between her estates in France and visiting family in Britain.  Upon her passing, the remainder of the once vast Sharon Heights estate went to the Hesketh family.  This they sold it in 1950.  Buyers assumed incorrectly that the 32-room guesthouse had actually been the Sharon mansion.

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