OpenStreetMap (new tab)

Google Map (new tab)

Google Streetview (new tab)

Overview

The flamboyant banker William Chapman Ralston resided at this house from about 1868 until his death in 1875. After he drowned in the San Francisco Bay under odd circumstances, his business associate William Sharon obtained the house and grounds. After its use by Sharon's family, the house would go on to serve other uses, including as a girl's school, sanitarium, and the College of Notre Dame.

Building History

In 1862, the banker William Chapman Ralston (1826-1875) purchased the redwood villa and 40-acre property of a Corsican, Count Leonetto Cipriani (1812-1888), who served as the the Kingdom of Sardinia's Consul in San Francisco, CA, between 1852-1855. He lived in Cipriani's prefabricated dwelling for about six years before demolishing it and planning a larger and more grand spot for entertaining. An article in the San Francisco Examiner of 1880 said of Ralston's lavish entertaining: “Frequently every week, and probably at no time less than once a month, Mr. Ralston’s special train rushed himself and his parties of friends, numbering from scores to hundreds, and occasionally even thousands, to Belmont. Folding-doors enable the dining room to be made into one so large that a hundred guests can be comfortably seated in it at one time.” The Examinerwriter continued: "Hardly a person of distinction ever arrived on the Coast who had not provided himself with letters to the great operator. Mr. Ralston accepted the situation and bore its honors bravely and with a bounteousness of hospitality that knew no limit. In the days of the glory that was to have so pathetic an ending he royally entertained dignitaries not from all parts of America only, but from all countries of all the world, and Russ and Moslem, Briton and Gaul, Austrian and Prussian, and the uniquely titled ones of every considerable Asiatic realm, have by turn stretched their variously clad legs under the hospitable mahogany of the now Sharon house in Canada del Diablo, or have shaken then in the dance on the polished surfaces of its great and splendid ball-room.” (See “Wedded,” San Francisco Examiner, 12/24/1880, p. 1.)

Ralston made his fortune during the Comstock Lode, loaning money to Nevada mine operators. More often than not, the miners fell behind in their payments, enabling Ralston's Bank of California (formed in 1864) to repossess mine property. Historian Gray Brechin has noted, the banker spread his Comstock spoils widely: "Ralston converted his Comstock capital into coastal transport, insurance, telegraph lines, currency speculation, woolen and silk mills, canal companies, hydraulic mines, political and judicial bribery, Alaskan furs, gas works, refineries, and hazardous real estate schemes." (See Gray Brechin, "Bank of California and William Ralston, accessed 08/20/2013.) He also borrowed heavily to keep this empire of investments running.

Ralston conceived of building projects on a grand scale, and spent lavishly on his personal accommodations. He remodeled and expanded the former Cipirani Villa into the grand 80-room Ralston Hall (completed in 1868) and paid an astronomical sum to make the Palace Hotel #1 (finished in 1875) the finest in the West. Like the miners to whom he loaned money, Ralston overextended himself on debts. Brechin observed: "Pyramid schemes based on the fantasy of perpetual growth are notoriously flimsy and grow more so as the economy slows down." (See Gray Brechin, "Bank of California and William Ralston, accessed 08/20/2013.) Growth and confidence in the San Francisco economy had cooled after the Depression of 1873, fueled by railroad over-speculation and the collapse in demand for silver, and he finally lost his considerable fortune during a run on the Bank of California on 08/26/1875. One day later, he died swimming in the San Francisco Bay under questionable circumstances.

Lawyer William Sharon (1821-1885), Ralston's one-time Bank of California agent in the Nevada silver country and later his business partner, bought some of his assets, including the Belmont house and the Palace Hotel. Sharon and his family displaced Ralston in the dwelling, living there into the late 1870s. Another owner, Mrs. Alpheus Bull, converted the house into Radcliffe Hall, a girls' school, and after this, it functioned as an 80-room sanitarium operated by Dr. Alden M. Gardner. In 1923, the Sisters of Notre Dame, based in San Jose, CA, started the College of Notre Dame for women in Ralston Hall.

Building Notes

The writer for the San Francisco Examiner rapturously described the Ralston House #2 in all its complexity and lavishness: In 1868, the then structure was entirely razed, and the present residence partially built and subsequently frequently added to. As it was built at different times, on different levels of a swiftly rising mountain, and religiously according to so many different styles of architecture and of no architecture as had come to the knowledge of the most learned architects, the final result is picturesque and indescribable in the extreme. The material of the exterior is wood painted white. Looked down upon from the mountain, the side of which it occupies, it is a huge collection of the tin, and the slated, and the shingled, the steep-pitched, the cottage, and the barely-slanting roofs of house after house, and of square bowers all inbuilt or still outflanking. Looked up at from below, as soon as the visitor has emerged in the smooth drive up to it from beneath the long line of completely overarching trees, it is a lofty white palace of irregular buildings, the main one five stories in height. In the labyrinth of winding stairs, of carefully gardened terraces and of pebbly and tortuous avenues outside one is just as apt to get irretrievably lost, and to doubt whether he is in the cellarage or about to fall over the dizzy battlements as on the inside he would be as to what foot level of ground floor he had climbed to. The house alone, as it now stands, is reckoned to have cost Mr. Ralston more than [hundreds of thousands of dollars], and with the gas works of a capacity sufficient to light a moderate town, and by means of which the house is illuminated, and with the water works which abundantly supply the house with the purest of water, the total cost is alleged to have been over a million and a quarter. The extensive greeneries clinging to the sides of the hills, the great stables of rough masonry at their base, the cool fernery with its dripping and rumbling waterfall, and its cavernous grottoes are the other buildings of the grounds.” (See “Wedded,” San Francisco Examiner, 12/24/1880, p. 1.)