LeBaron: A retreat for each era, Lytton Springs’ evolution marks Sonoma County history

When the Yellow Jackets came to town, all of Healdsburg took note. These colorful young fellows, in their gray uniforms with gold braid, brass buttons and “natty caps with … a yellow plume standing up front like an exclamation point” were “cavalry unmounted.”

That's the way Dr. William Shipley, born in Healdsburg in 1872, remembered them in his 1938 reminiscences for the Healdsburg Tribune (compiled in 1965 as “Tales of Sonoma County.”)

These were the boys from Lytton Springs Military Academy in the 1890s. They got lots of attention from the North County citizenry, wearing their “huge sabers of the Civil War period” which, according to Dr. Shipley, were quite a load to pack “for the smaller boys…and almost dragged on the ground.”

The Yellow Jackets are a colorful part of the history package that is Lytton, which, since 1904 has been the property of the Salvation Army, caring - in turn - for orphans and adults from the city streets desperately in need of care.

Lytton is for sale. I read it in the newspaper. The 564 acres that comprise the Salvation Army's establishment on Highway 101 north of Healdsburg is on the market. ($24 million and it's yours!)

The news set me to thinking about how we learn our history in these packages or pockets surrounding landmarks that have survived.

The structures at Lytton, including a 1919 Mission-style building that replaced a resort hotel built in the 1870s, are still in place, leaking history from every arch and cupola.

William Litton built that resort, starting construction with the news that the San Francisco and North Pacific railroad was coming through.

He had purchased a chunk of the Sotoyome land grant in 1860 that stretched from Healdsburg to Geyserville and from the Russian River to Dry Creek, a purchase that speaks volumes of the opportunities afforded wealthy men, like sea captains, in the earliest days of statehood.

Capt. William Litton was just one of several ship's captains in Sonoma County history. (Others included three of General Vallejo's in-laws Capt Henry Fitch on the Sotoyome grant, Capt. John Wilson at Los Guilucos and Capt. John Cooper, El Molino).

These entrepreneurial mariners were first in line when Mexico lost California and they had the wherewithal to take advantage of the wide-open spaces available.

Litton was double lucky. Not only did he get a railroad but he had natural springs bubbling up, “both sweet and soda” waters, treasured as “ fine seltzer” with prescribed curative and healthful properties.

Lytton Springs (Apparently the I was changed to Y by a property records official's error) had rooms for 150 vacationers eager to “take the train to take the waters,” European-style.

But Capt. Litton died in a fatal fall from a buggy in 1887 and his heirs leased the hotel to a consortium of wealthy San Francisco families who sent their sons to become “Yellow Jackets” at the Lytton Military Academy, which lasted only until the early 1890s, when Capt. Litton's widow, in a lawsuit with the railroad owner, lost the Litton Station property.

It was a sanitarium, very briefly, at the turn of the 20th century. The owner was Dr. Wilfred Burke, who soon moved his health center to Mark West Springs Road in Santa Rosa where he was very successful until he was convicted of putting dynamite under a cottage containing his mistress and her child. But that's another story for another day.

When Dr. Burke's successors in the Lyttton Medical and Surgical Sanitarium, went into receivership, the San Francisco businessmen who owned the property apparently donated it to the Salvation Army.

That was, we are obliged to observe, Lytton's salvation.

53 years of caring

Thus began more than a century of good works at Lytton Springs - 53 years of caring for “lost” children and 58 more giving “lost” adults another chance.

In 1905, the Army's Golden Gate Orphanage in the East Bay was closed in favor of Lytton's 630 acres of green fields, oak trees and natural springs plus a resort hotel for living quarters. Now we would say it was a “no-brainer.”

The first superintendents, a dynamic duo of Major Wilfred Bourne and his wife, Alice - “Mother Bourne” to “her” children - arrived with their first 16 charges in 1905. By 1958 more than 11,000 children without parents, or whose parents couldn't care for them, had grown up at Lytton.

The stories from the Salvation Army's century-plus at Lytton Springs are heartwarming, albeit with sad times.

I first became aware of this chapter of Sonoma County history when I was reading old newspapers about the impact of the Spanish flu of 1918 on this area.