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before actually purchasing it, as their son George W. Coates was born there on April 15,
1857. The deed was dated December 22, 1858, with the Coates family paying seventy-five
cents per acre. Despite Montecito being so grizzly-infested that bounties were still being
offered for the animals as late as 1869, the Coates family made a shrewd investment in their
farmland. By 1867, Montecito land prices had risen to fifty dollars an acre.
Catherine Coates was widowed, but married again to a George Ferrier and lived to
the ripe old age of 99. Her son George Coates held various jobs, including a stint as a
stagecoach driver on the run from Mattei’s Tavern in Los Olivos across Santa Ynez Valley,
up over old San Marcos Road to Santa Barbara. He was a rancher, stone and cement mason,
and is credited with installing some of the first sewers in Santa Barbara. George lived in
the area until the last nine months of his life, when he moved to his son’s home in Walnut
Creek, dying there on May 11, 1955 at the age of 98.
The Crocker-Sperry Era
Rancho Las Fuentes entered its “Crocker-Sperry” era when San Francisco banker and
real estate investor William Henry Crocker (1861-1937) bought the land from the Coates
estate in 1887. Crocker’s involvement in the Santa Barbara area seems to have begun in the
1880s, when he operated an asphalt mine in Carpinteria. His wife, Ethel, was the daughter
of Austin and Caroline Sperry, Stockton millionaires whose fortune had been made in
flour production. In 1890, Ethel’s mother, Caroline E. Sperry, was added to the Montecito
property’s deed, and the ranch was thus known as the Crocker-Sperry Ranch.
Ethel Sperry Crocker (1863-1934) was a dedicated Francophile, bolstered by her younger
sister Elizabeth “Helen” Sperry’s marriage to Prince Louis Leopold Marie André Poniatowski,
(from left): Countess Tyszkiewicz, Prince Casimir Poniatowski, Marysia Puacz and Princess Poniatowski
(née Anne de Carenan Chinay) at Rancho Las Fuentes. Marysia Puacz, sister-in-law of Madame Ganna
Walska, also moved to Montecito in 1947, where she lived with her family at Lotusland for ten years
(private collection).