The Elizabeth Bacon Family House

Article written by Timothy Babalis and Nicole Martin

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One winter in the late 1800s, a group of young hikers came down to Bear Valley from San Francisco to visit the volcanic rock spires known as the Old Pinnacles. Poor rainy weather forced the group to abandon their plans. They found refuge at “Grandma Shell Bacon’s place.” As her granddaughter, Juanita Burtman Hinman, later recounted, “Grandma Shell Bacon and her big family took them in, fed them a hot supper and bedded them down for the night.”¹ Grateful for the hospitality, the hikers later pooled their funds and bought a silver butter knife, which they sent to Grandma Bacon as a token of their appreciation.²

Photograph of Elizabeth Quigley Shell Bacon, thought to have been taken at the time of her marriage to Myron Bacon in 1855.

Grace Butterfield Robinson album

Elizabeth Quigley Shell Bacon, “Grandma Bacon,” lived a full and eventful life of pioneering that reflected the typical American homesteading experience in many ways. As historian Richard White explains, homesteads were “gifts of the state, which had acquired the lands that went into them from Indians by treaty, conquest, or fraud.” While a “gift,” they required hard labor and economic striving to be successful.³

Elizabeth and her family certainly benefited from U.S. government support, but she also worked hard and strove mightily. She moved multiple times while seeking to make a comfortable home in the Pacific West, survived two husbands, bore seven children, and like most homesteading women, was simultaneously a businesswoman and homemaker. What makes her story stand out is her involvement in turning what would become Pinnacles National Park into a local natural attraction and the hospitality she showed early visitors, such as the hikers who gifted her the butter knife.

The Long Route to Bear Valley

Born in 1827 in Illinois, Elizabeth married her first husband, Philip Shell in 1846 at the age of nineteen. Five years later they joined a wagon train bound for Oregon Territory, where they raised dairy cattle in the Willamette Valley. When Philip died in an accident in 1855, Elizabeth moved with her three young children to the mining district in northern California’s Scotts Valley to be close to family relatives. She met and married Myron Bacon, who had made a considerable fortune in the California Gold Rush.

In 1856, Elizabeth and Myron moved to the young agricultural community of San Leandro in the Santa Clara Valley just south of San Francisco. They lived and farmed there for ten years as part of a prosperous rural community until they learned that their title to the land was fraudulent as part of a speculative land scheme.⁴ Rather than pay a second time, they packed up and moved farther south, searching for a remote location where there would be less competition for land and little risk of fraud. An eight-month-pregnant Elizabeth and her family, plus a small herd of dairy cows, horses, and pigs, landed in the interior mountains of central coastal California in 1866.

Pinnacles High Peaks at Sunset, Pinnacles National Park

NPS Photo

When they arrived at Bear Valley, they came upon a landscape that wilderness had largely overtaken. While the region encompasses the traditional homeland of the Chalon Indians, Spanish missionaries had confined most of the Chalon to the mission system by 1810. When Elizabeth’s oldest son, John Shell, arrived ahead of the family to stake a claim and build a simple log cabin in 1865, he was one of the first permanent Anglo-American settlers in a region that had seen very few people over the previous half century.⁵

Building a Home

The Bacon house today. Elizabeth raised her large family here, then left the house to her youngest son and his wife. NPS acquired the house in 2006 and is working to restore it.

NPS photo

Elizabeth spent the remainder of her life making rugged Bear Valley a comfortable home for herself and her extensive family. As early claimants, the Bacons were lucky to possess valley bottomlands and became wealthy on abundant yields of grain. They helped the community form a common school district and build a one-room schoolhouse. One of Elizabeth’s sons served as a beloved teacher at the schoolhouse for over twenty years, educating two generations of Bear Valley residents.

In 1879, Elizabeth divorced Myron on grounds of abandonment. This development, rather than undermining the home they had built, demonstrated Elizabeth’s resilience. She remained at the original Bacon homestead in Bear Valley, becoming the matriarch of a growing family that dispersed throughout the valley. Her home also served as a productive farm and successful business. The agricultural census taken the year of her divorce claimed that Elizabeth lived with one of her sons and owned 8 horses, 5 milk cows, 6 beef cattle, 17 swine, and 50 poultry. She had also manufactured 600 pounds of butter, collected 170 dozen eggs, and gathered 100 pounds of honey and 10 pounds of wax from wild bees.⁶

Hospitality Among Towering Rock Spires

Bacon Boys in front of Bear Gulch Caves in 1888

Photo courtesy of Deborah Melendy Norman.

The Bacon family house, which was built sometime in the late 1860s to replace the original claim cabin, stood as the last house on the road to the fantastical rock formations that defined the area. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Pinnacles were beginning to attract outdoor enthusiasts from urban areas to the north. Elizabeth became acquainted with these adventurers and took pride in making sure they were well provided. Her sons often acted as guides, showing the visitors around the unique natural landscape.

The challenges of settling and raising a family in the difficult Bear Valley environment had taught Elizabeth the necessity of relying on others for survival, and this lesson had translated into looking after strangers. This was why Elizabeth cherished the simple butter knife gift from the hikers: it represented gratitude for hospitality, kindness, and generosity shown to strangers. As her granddaughter observed, “Grandma Shell Bacon and her family were that kind of folks. Besides, they loved company.”⁷

The small ranch house where Elizabeth hosted her adventuresome guests that rainy winter still stands and is now preserved as a historic structure by the National Park Service. Elizabeth deeded the house and property to her youngest son in 1897 after he married. While he made improvements to the house, it remains the original structure that Elizabeth had made home for so many people, both family and strangers.

Home and Homelands Exhibition

This project was made possible through the National Park Service in part by a grant from the National Park Foundation.

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¹ Juanita Burton Hinman, “The Trail Back,” handwritten manuscript, September, 1979 (scanned copy courtesy of Deborah Melendy Norman).

² Unless otherwise cited, information for this article is compiled from unpublished family accounts by Timothy Babalis, Pinnacles National Park. These include: Edith Bacon Schmidt, “The History of Bear Valley and Residents,” typed manuscript of lecture given before the San Benito County Historical Society in Bear Valley, August 28, 1963 (Clippings File, San Benito County Historical Society, Hollister, CA); Deborah Melendy Norman, “The Shells, Quigleys, and Bacons: From Calhoun County, Illinois, to California,” unpublished manuscript, August, 2005; Hinman, “The Trail Back.”

³ Richard White, This Republic for Which It Stands: The United States During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 146-48.

⁴ For more on the politics of land ownership in early California, see Tamara Venit Shelton, A Squatter’s Republic: Land and the Politics of Monopoly in California, 1850-1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013).

⁵ Timothy Babalis, The Heart of the Gabilans: An Administrative History of Pinnacles National Monument, National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior (2009), 4, 8.

⁶ Ben Bacon Ranch Historic District, Pinnacles National Monument, National Park Service, Cultural Landscapes Inventory (2009), 34-5.

⁷ Hinman, “The Trail Back.”