Hannah Haviland was born in 1825 in western Connecticut, one of 12 children of William and Clara Stoddard. In 1844, Hannah’s older sister Elizabeth married Collis P. Huntington, of Oneonta, New York. When news of gold swept the country, Collis Huntington journeyed west to seek his fortune, establishing a general merchandise store in Sacramento.
In 1851, twenty-four-year-old Hannah accompanied her sister and brother-in-law to California. There, Hannah met her brother-in-law’s business partner, Daniel Hammond. Hannah and Daniel married the next year. Around this time, Daniel Hammond and Collis Huntington dissolved their business partnership, prompting Hammond to open his own hardware store, Hammond & Company. Hannah, Daniel, and their son Scott (born in 1854) lived in Sacramento through the 1860s.
A controversial railroad fortune
Collis Huntington joined with Mark Hopkins, Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker, and others to form the Central Pacific Railroad. They launched the western leg of the Transcontinental Railroad, building east from Sacramento and meeting the Union Pacific Railroad in Promontory Point, Utah, in 1869. Around that time, they also acquired the Southern Pacific Railroad.
Huntington, Hopkins, Stanford, and Crocker grew immensely wealthy and became known as “The Big Four.” The Southern Pacific Railroad, reviled as “The Octopus,” became a dominant power in California’s economy and politics. Reaction to Southern Pacific helped drive political and economic reforms during the Progressive Era. The Octopus became the title of an influential 1901 novel by UC graduate Frank Norris, who crossed paths with Alexis F. Lange, a former English professor who helmed UC Berkeley’s School of Education when it occupied Haviland Hall.
A family affair
Hannah, her siblings, her husband, and her son were deeply involved in the business affairs of Collis Huntington’s growing empire. Hannah’s sister Elizabeth hosted the founding meeting of the Central Pacific in her living room in Sacramento. Collis Huntington later hired Hannah’s husband—Collis’s former business partner—Daniel. But Daniel suddenly died in 1868 at age 43. Two years later, the Hammonds’ 16-year-old son, Scott, drowned while working on a Huntington railroad project in West Virginia. Hannah was devastated.
By 1872, she had recovered enough to marry John T. Haviland. Haviland was a native of Elmira, New York, and like the Hammonds had settled in Sacramento. By 1859, Haviland had become a prominent manufacturer of matches. He sold the business in 1860, relocating to San Francisco. In 1869, he opened Haviland, Hooper, & Co., “importers, jobbers, and retailers of crockery and glassware, cutlery, etc.” In 1875, Haviland began working with J.C. Wilmerding as a liquor importer and wholesale dealer, eventually becoming a partner in the company.
Wilmerding and Haviland became quite wealthy from the business. Upon his death in 1894, Wilmerding bequeathed about $11 million in today’s dollars to UC to fund a vocational school, which later became the prestigious Wilmerding-Lick High School in San Francisco. John and Hannah Haviland moved into posh quarters along Van Ness Avenue, which at the time was lined with the opulent mansions of San Francisco’s upper crust. John served on local civic and financial boards, and received patents improving on a variety of household items. Hannah was active in society circles, attending receptions at Leland Stanford’s mansion, and contributing to civic charities, including a dozen Oregon quail she donated to the San Francisco Park Commission in 1878.
In 1894, John Haviland died unexpectedly after a short illness at age 63, leaving Hannah Haviland widowed for the second time in her life. She still maintained close ties with the Huntington family, even though her sister Elizabeth had died in 1883 at age 60, and Hannah continued to live on Van Ness Avenue. She was there in 1906, when her house barely escaped being incinerated by the firestorm that followed the earthquake; the fire burned to the opposite side of Hannah’s house before being stopped.
An enigmatic, generous legacy
Hannah lived at her house, 1909 Van Ness Ave., until her death in December 1919 at age 94. In addition to money for her nieces and nephews, she left amounts ranging from $45,000 to $360,000 (in current dollars) to charitable organizations such as the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, the San Francisco Protestant Orphan Asylum, San Francisco Hospital and Training School for Nurses, the YMCA, the YWCA, Calvary Presbyterian Church, and Associated Charities of San Francisco.
Hannah Haviland reserved the bulk of her estate for the University of California, however. Along with several paintings, now held by the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Haviland gave $250,000 (about $3.9 million today) as an unrestricted gift to the University for the construction of a campus building.
Haviland’s bequest is something of a mystery. The Havilands did not attend the University and had no obvious connection with it. Perhaps Hannah wished to emulate J.C. Wilmerding’s gift to UC. Perhaps she was following the lead of her friends Jane and Leland Stanford. The Stanfords, after losing their only son in 1884 from typhoid fever—at 15, he was almost the same age as the Havilands’ son Scott was at the time of his death—declared that “the children of California shall be our children” and founded Stanford University in commemoration. Perhaps it had been Hannah and John’s original intention to send their son to Berkeley and this was a way to fulfill those dreams for him, in spirit if not in body. Perhaps her bequest carried with it a defiant rejoinder to the loss of her two husbands and son.
Whatever the reason for the gift, there were no conditions attached. Within a year the regents would earmark the donation for a new building for the School of Education; eventually, the building would become the home of the School of Social Welfare.