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fter the Southern Pacific Railroad split the Merriman ranch, SarahWinchester sold it in a few pieces.The Merrimans remained at the old house until 1907, when Winchester agreed to buy a lot and build them a new home in PaloAlto.Winchester believed that land near Stanford would only increase in value, and Palo Alto’s accessibility by rail to San Francisco thirty miles to the north made it a highly desirable location. She had already made a tidy profit buying and selling a half dozen town lots there.When she bought a lot for Belle a short walk from Daisy and Fred’s Waverley Street home on the new Melville Avenue, she knew what she was doing. The builder’s detailed list of amenities for Belle’s house is among Frank Leib’s papers. Plans for the house called for a seven-room frame cottage, with a roof of redwood shingles and dormer windows on the north side. Special colonial-styled doors were requested, with “slash grain sanded pine casings.” Belle made some special requests for the interior. She wanted the attic to be finished into a twelve-by-twelve-foot room, with a dormer window. She ordered a cooling cupboard in the pantry and a china closet “to be the same as in Mr. Marriott’s house,” or copied from her daughter’s dining room.A double fireplace would throw heat from living to dining room, and in the back of the house a small toilet room was built.Belle’s house cost $5,000,and was one of hundreds under construction in 1907, the year after San Francisco’s devastation. Builder J. F. Parkinson promised to complete the project within sixty days.1 That the work was complete within two months of signing a contract testifies to the quick pace of construction in the town. Belle moved into the house just as her husband’s health disintegrated. Louis was in and out of hospitals and sanitariums between 1900 and 1908. He is so rarely mentioned in relation to his family, it is unclear whether any ties between them remained. If he lived at the Melville Chapter 9 Health and Welfare p 166 A 167 / Health and Welfare Avenue house, it was only very briefly. On October 30, 1908, he was checked into O’Connor Sanitarium, a hospital in San José, with pneumonia , and died fifteen days later. The seventy-three-year-old had chronic kidney disease along with the pneumonia.Belle did not act as informant for Louis’s death record; instead, their son,Willie Merriman, signed the document.The remains were handled by a San José undertaker,cremated and inurned at Cypress Lawn Cemetery in Colma.A death notice never appeared in the newspaper, and if there was a service for Louis, there is no record of it. Daisy had distanced herself from her father years before. Willie alone is linked with Louis; he had stayed close to his ailing father as his health declined. Willie had married at about the same time that Daisy had, but with little fanfare. He and his wife lived in Pacific Grove, and Willie worked as a teamster, hauling goods from the coast to the valley . He maintained a good rapport with his mother and aunt, and helped them from time to time. Belle created quite a life for herself in Palo Alto.An ardent progressive reformer,she sought public notice at least as much as her sister shunned it.Belle worked for humane causes,including racial equity,child welfare, and animal rights. Since her girlhood days when the cause of abolition caught her attention, she had lobbied for rights for black people.When the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People came to Palo Alto, Belle Merriman was its first white member. Winchester’s feelings about racial equity are more difficult to determine. There is no record of her employing anyone of African American heritage after she left New Haven. In California, adhering to local custom, she paid Asian employees less than white workers. She employed more Asians, however, than did others of her race and class. When she supplied housing to employees,the white workers were given houses, and the Asians were loaned them.2 This practice may not be the insult that it appears, however. Exclusion laws in California disallowed property ownership by Asians to the middle of the 1920s. Letters between Belle and Sarah have never been located.They may not even...

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