The author and poet Robert Louis Stevenson spent only a couple months in the Bay Area’s wine country back in 1880 — but that visit resulted in schools, a park, museums named for him.
And now, a bronze sculpture will also bear witness to the writer’s visit. Saint Helena resident Eric Hanson and sculptor Garr Ugalde plan to unveil a new bench and sculpture of the writer, his wife and dog on November 7 in front of its new home outside the Calistoga Depot, the same train station Stevenson traveled through on his honeymoon.
“We found that Robert Louis Stevenson, his wife Fanny, and his dog Chuchu came into this exact spot where I’m standing here, May of 1880,” said Hanson, standing in front of a historic train car in front of the depot.
The Scottish author spent a couple years in California between 1879 and 1880, vying for the affections of his future wife.
During the couple’s trip to the wine country they stayed in an abandoned bunkhouse at the Silverado Mine on Mount St. Helena.
It inspired his travel memoir, the Silverado Squatters. Among the many sites named for Stevenson in Wine Country was Robert Louis Stevenson Middle School in St. Helena, directly across the street from Hanson’s home.
“Kids would be out there sitting on my split rail fence which really wasn’t that strong,” Hanson said.
Hanson got the idea to save his fence by putting a bench in front of it where school kids could sit. But then the idea began to percolate — he got the idea to add a sculpture of Robert Louis Stevenson as an educational nod to the school.
The idea ruminated in his head for seven years until during a New Years Eve party, he struck up a conversation with Ugalde who happened to be a sculptor.
“I asked him about how long have you been thinking about this project? And he said seven years,” Ugalde remembered. “I said ‘well then what are you waiting for?’”
The pair came up with renderings of the bench and sculpture and tried to find a place in St. Helena to place it.
But after meetings with the parks department and other groups went nowhere, they decided to see if nearby Calistoga might be interested.
A planning commissioner suggested they seek a private site to avoid a lot of red tape.
They pitched the idea to Michael Madden, owner of the Calistoga Depot which he transformed into a restaurant and bar. He immediately gave the project a green light.
“This idea of having a monument of he and his wife and dog with luggage getting on the train,” Madden said. “The exact train that they themselves had gotten on to get up here back in those days — it seems like a perfect tie-in.”
Hanson and Ugalde raised money for the project through private donations and grants.
The sculpture, which Ugalde designed, is currently getting fabricated by a team of artists at American Fine Art Foundry in Burbank.
It envisions Stevenson sitting on a bench with a notebook in hand, while his new bride Fanny Vendergrift Osbourne stands over him, as the couple’s dog Chuchu looks up.
Hanson hopes the sculpture will become a portal of curiosity for visitors who encounter it.
“It’s a spot on the bench where people can sit and have an Instagram moment,” Hanson said. “And become part of history instead of just observe it from afar.”
While the initial sculpture was to only feature Stevenson, Hanson and Uglade said their research about Fanny and her impact on the writer’s life suggested her omission would’ve cut out a key chapter of the story.
“His wife was a really a driving force in his life,” Ugalde said. “She would get the first reads of everything he wrote, she was his first editor and she was actually the one that convinced him to start writing fiction.”
The sculpture will sit in front of an original set of railcars — the actual ones the writer rode when he made the trek to Calistoga.
While the town’s original population of 500 has since grown to 5000, Hanson said it still retains the same character as it did when Stevenson visited.
“It just enhances the story of Calistoga and the reason Robert Louis Stevenson came here back in the 1880s is still here today,” Hanson said. “We still have the hot springs here, the mineral baths and we still have the wine and we still have the same landscape.”
