This quaint little Victorian cottage seems like the perfect place to wax poetic. The home does not lack for carefully crafted antique details — starting with the fish-scale shingles on the front gable, the elaborate brass front doorknob, and the door hardware throughout the home. The owner calls the home “blue-collar Victorian,” but the original owners were fairly highbrow.
About 1890, Albert W. and Caroline G. Potter built this home and spent the rest of their lives here. They came here from Madison, Wisconsin, where Albert had been a successful attorney. The Potters were not related to Milo Potter, the man who built the Potter Hotel in 1902.
The existing records don’t say why the couple moved to Santa Barbara, but I suspect they came here for the same reasons that I moved here from Chicago: December, January, and February.
This area of De la Vina Street is a fairly sedate one-way street now, but back in the 1890s, it was much busier. De la Vina Street was the main route north out of Santa Barbara because State Street ended at Constance Avenue. The home’s residents could sit in rocking chairs on the front porch and watch carriages and wagons heading up and down the dirt road.
As I was researching the Potters, I was initially surprised that they had settled here. The couple had traveled up and down California in the 1880s, then returned to Wisconsin where Albert published a critical book titled The Plain Truth about California. Here’s an example of the book’s tone: “A summer in California is a long and tedious season; day follows day, week follows week, and month follows month of monotonous sunshine … tiresome beyond human ability to describe.”
Oh, well! Somebody has to live here, right, Albert?
The Poets Arrive
Somehow, Albert swallowed his pride a few years later and moved here. Not long after, he was writing articles and poems praising our fair city. “Santa Barbara can not only be made a fine city that will compare with the best of its class but the exertions of its people if properly directed can make it the acknowledged Queen of this coast … it has an incomparable climate” (Santa Barbara Morning Press, May 23, 1893).
Later, Albert penned the following poem (Santa Barbara Morning Press, January 1, 1902):
Santa Barbara, Crown Jewel of the West,
The only place where comfort and rest
Can be found for the weak and weary,
When life is worn, and all things seem dreary.
Where winter and summer are ever the same,
And no difference is known excepting in name.
Come away from the lands of heat and cold
Don’t barter your lives for silver and gold.
His wife Caroline was also inclined to be poetic, writing for the Los Angeles Times, December 12, 1893:
Long years ago, so runs the ancient story,
Two bells were sent from Spain to that far clime,
New found, beyond the sea, that to God’s glory
And in His house, together they might chime.
And to this day one bell is safely swinging
Within its sheltering tower, where, clear and free,
It hallows each day with its mellow ringing.
The other bell, the mate, was lost at sea.
And when in gentle chimes the bell is pealing,
The people listen; for they say they hear
An echo from the distant ocean stealing –
It is the lost one’s answer, faint, yet clear.
A Surprise Gift
Not long ago, a descendant of a former owner showed up at the home with a file of documents related to the home’s history — the dream of every vintage homeowner. They also shared a photograph of the home from about 1910. The photo appears to show Caroline G. Potter with her daughter Helen J. Potter, who lived in the home until her death in 1939.
Please do not disturb the residents of this home.
Betsy J. Green is a Santa Barbara historian, and author of Discovering the History of Your House and Your Neighborhood, Santa Monica Press, 2002. Her website is betsyjgreen.com.
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