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As a young man, Frederick Forrest Peabody could easily have
passed as the debonair “Arrow Collar Man”
A Winter Home in Montecito
Peabody had married Sarah Blanch Griffith, a clergyman’s daughter,
in 1882. Living in Albany, New York, the family grew to include four
daughters and a son. There, Peabody became a director of several
banks and, not forgetting his first vocation, a director of the Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute.
Having visited Santa Barbara briefly at the beginning of the 1900s, the
Peabodys returned to spend the winter season in 1906, and planned to
build a second home in the area. As he rode his horse along the hills and
valleys of Santa Barbara and Montecito searching for a suitable home site,
he found a beautiful hilltop with sweeping views of ocean, valley, and
city. He purchased those 60 acres on Eucalyptus Hill and hired Charles
Frederick Eaton to design the landscaping. Before further plans could
be developed, however, word reached him that one of his daughters was
seriously ill. He and Sarah left immediately for the East and didn’t return
to Santa Barbara for seven years.
Little was done on the estate during this interlude. Peter Reidel,
commissioned to carry out the landscape design, built a sweeping drive
to the top of the hill, and from afar, Peabody joined his Santa Barbara
neighbors in contributing money for the restoration of Eucalyptus Hill
Road. In 1910, he wired arrangements for 7,000 eucalyptus seedlings
to be planted on his lands and for a cottage to be built for his divorced
daughter, Rachael P. Frazier.
Frederick and Sarah finally returned to Santa Barbara in February 1913.
Staying in their daughter’s cottage, they engaged Francis Underhill to
design their house, a flat roofed, “stripped classical” style mansion built
around a central courtyard. They decided to call it
Solano
, sunny place.
The 1925 Earthquake damaged Solano, but the Peabodys spent the bulk of their efforts helping the town