JAMES WALDRON GILLESPIE’S
EL FUREIDÎS
“L
ike a beautiful mirage that might be dispelled by a whim of
the wind, appears El Fuerides,” wrote one admirer in 1915.
Another waxed poetic over its “pools that in silence lie, dark mirrors of
the sky, till in their depths the moon shall find her image, by and by.”
When the Garden Club of America held its annual meeting in
Santa Barbara in 1926, its reporter wrote, “What can we say of the
Gillespie garden which has been described in every illustrated garden
magazine in the country for years?!” Somehow she managed to find a
word or two to describe her visit to the estate, which was “all the more
charming for being a bit neglected.”
Succumbing to the romance of the place, the Garden devotee
wrote, “The great fountain crowded into the courtyard is just the place
for veiled women to fill their jars…. The gardens are all terraced, a
series of parterres, some nearly all pool.… always with water – that
is the feature of this romantic place – water sometimes spurting and
playing with old stone basins, sometimes in still, unruffled pools.”
Dozens of articles extolling the beauty and romance of
El Fureidîs
swept the national media from the moment of its inception. Loosely
translated from the Arabic as “Place of Many Delights,” the estate was
open to the public, and a visit to its pools, fountains, and trails became
a favorite excursion for locals and tourists alike. The villa and romantic
gardens became as well-known nationally as the California missions
and Yosemite National Park.
A GENTLEMAN OF LEISURE
E
l
Fureidîs
was the vision of New Yorker James Waldron Gillespie,
who purchased the property at 631 Parra Grande Road circa
1890. Gillespie had inherited the fortune begun by his farmer
grandfather, who had the presence of mind to buy up real estate
along upper Broadway in New York City. His father, a professor of
civil engineering at Union College in New York, added a tidy sum
to the estate by developing a formula for the curvature of rail tracks.
James Waldron had no such aspirations.
Mary Wigmore, whose mother was his cousin and had grown up
with Gillespie, remembers being a bit frightened by his intensity. “He
was a small man,” she said in a February 16, 1982, interview, “who
talked constantly and asked questions like he was testing to see how
intelligent you were; he was always looking through you with his beady
little eyes.”
Mary’s mother said Gillespie was a terror as a child. Family
stories say young Gillespie used to greet his mother’s tea guests with
a parrot on his shoulder. After chatting politely with the ladies, he’d
invariably set the parrot on the ground, where it would race to bite
delicate ankles, setting off a flurry of shrieks and devolving the refined
gathering into chaos.
“When he was little, he had plenty of money and was always
dressed to the nines,” related Mary, “and he would go out and see some
child who looked poorly dressed or was cold. He would give them all
his clothes, so he had to be refurbished all the time.”
Once, well-known author Stewart Edward White was visiting, and
Gillespie said to him, “Now, Stewart, I’ve got a new picture I want you
to look at. I want you to tell me what you think, but you have to back
up a little bit and get it in perspective.” Focused on the task, White
obligingly backed up, directly into a little lake. “He enjoyed doing that
sort of thing immensely,” said Mary.
Gillespie’s house was just one feature in an elaborate water garden that was open
to visitors and as famous as Yosemite National Park and the California missions
(Courtesy Santa Barbara Historical Museum – SBHM)
summer
|
fall
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