One winter in the late 1800s, a party of young hikers came down from San Francisco to Bear Valley to see the volcanic spires called the Old Pinnacles. Rain wrecked their plans, and they took shelter at "Grandma Shell Bacon's place." As her granddaughter, Juanita Hinman, later remembered it, Grandma Bacon and her large family took them in, fed them a hot supper and gave them beds for the night. Afterward the grateful hikers pooled their money and sent her a silver butter knife.
Elizabeth Quigley Shell Bacon, probably photographed at her marriage to Myron Bacon in 1855. Grace Butterfield Robinson album
A homesteader's life
Elizabeth Quigley Shell Bacon — "Grandma Bacon" — lived a pioneer life that was in many ways typical of American homesteading. As the historian Richard White has pointed out, homesteads were a gift from the government, on land it had taken from Native peoples by treaty, conquest or fraud — and even so, they took hard work and constant striving to succeed.
Elizabeth benefited from government support, and she worked hard. She moved several times in search of a comfortable home in the Pacific West, outlived two husbands, bore seven children, and, like most homesteading women, was both homemaker and businesswoman. What sets her apart is her part in making what is now Pinnacles National Park a local attraction — and the welcome she gave its early visitors.
The long road to Bear Valley
| Year | |
|---|---|
| 1827 | born in Illinois |
| 1846 | marries Philip Shell, at 19 |
| Five years later | joins a wagon train to Oregon Territory; the couple raise dairy cattle in the Willamette Valley |
| 1855 | Philip dies in an accident. Elizabeth takes their three young children to the mining district of Scotts Valley in northern California, near relatives, and marries Myron Bacon, who had made a considerable fortune in the Gold Rush |
| 1856 | the Bacons move to the young farming community of San Leandro, and farm there for ten years — until they learn their title to the land is fraudulent, part of a speculative land scheme |
| 1865 | refusing to pay for the land twice, they look for somewhere remote, with less competition for land and less risk of fraud. Her eldest son, John Shell, goes ahead to stake a claim and build a log cabin in Bear Valley |
| 1866 | Elizabeth, eight months pregnant, arrives with the family and a small herd of dairy cows, horses and pigs, in the interior mountains of central coastal California |
The valley had largely returned to wilderness. It lies in the homeland of the Chalon Indians, but Spanish missionaries had confined most of the Chalon to the missions by 1810, and few people had lived there in the half-century since. John Shell was among the first permanent Anglo-American settlers.
The High Peaks at sunset, Pinnacles National Park. NPS photo
Building a home, and a community
As early claimants, the Bacons held valley bottomland and grew wealthy on big grain harvests. They helped the community form a school district and build a one-room schoolhouse, where one of Elizabeth's sons taught for more than twenty years — two generations of Bear Valley children.
In 1879, Elizabeth divorced Myron for abandonment. Far from undoing the home she had built, it showed her resilience: she stayed on the homestead as matriarch of a family spreading across the valley, and ran it as a working farm and business. That year's agricultural census recorded her living with one of her sons and owning:
| Livestock | Produce | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Horses | 8 | Butter | 600 pounds |
| Milk cows | 5 | Eggs | 170 dozen |
| Beef cattle | 6 | Wild honey | 100 pounds |
| Pigs | 17 | Beeswax | 10 pounds |
| Poultry | 50 |
The last house before the Pinnacles
The family house, built in the late 1860s to replace the claim cabin, was the last house on the road to the valley's extraordinary rock formations. By the end of the century the Pinnacles were drawing outdoor enthusiasts from the cities to the north. Elizabeth got to know them and made sure they were well looked after, and her sons often guided them around.
Settling a difficult valley had taught her that survival depended on others — and that lesson became care for strangers. That, the authors suggest, is why she treasured the hikers' simple butter knife: it stood for gratitude for kindness shown to people she didn't know. The Shell Bacons were that kind of family, her granddaughter recalled — and besides, they loved company.
The Bacon house today. NPS photo
Elizabeth deeded the house and land to her youngest son in 1897, after he married. He improved it, but it is still the house where she made a home for so many, family and strangers alike. The National Park Service acquired it in 2006 and is restoring it as a historic structure.
Sources
Based on "The Elizabeth Bacon Family House," by Timothy Babalis and Nicole Martin, part of the Home and Homelands exhibition, National Park Service, Pinnacles National Park, drawing on unpublished family accounts compiled by Timothy Babalis and on Juanita Hinman's manuscript "The Trail Back" (1979); supported by a grant from the National Park Foundation. Hinman's and Richard White's words are paraphrased. The granddaughter's surname appears as both "Burtman" and "Burton," so only "Hinman" is used. Rewritten in hubnx's own words.
In these publicationsPinnacles National ParkHome and Homelands Exhibition: Work
Licence: CC0 1.0 (public domain) · Adapted from www.nps.gov
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