Lizzie's Victorian Family

Lizzie Hall Park was sixteen years old when she and her family moved into the mansion now known as the Park-McCullough House on Christmas Day, 1865. The Park family had recently returned from California. They had gone there in 1852, in the final years of the Gold Rush, because President Fillmore had appointed Lizzie's grandfather, Hiland Hall, as Federal Land Commissioner. His job was to make sure that disputes over land claims were resolved fairly. At the time Lizzie's father, Trenor Park, was a lawyer in Bennington. Hiland Hall encouraged Trenor, his wife Laura, and Lizzie to move to San Francisco because there was a need for lawyers, and Trenor Park could make a lot of money.

The Parks took Grandpa Hall's advice and moved to San Francisco when Lizzie was three and a half. Life in California was very different from life in Vermont. Lizzie lived in a house with a stable, shed, and chicken house. She had no one to play with except the pets her mother gave her, …"doves, cats, a little black and white dog, "Georgie" …, rabbits, a parrot and chickens." Lizzie never forgot her early years in San Francisco:

I 'helped' in the garden, kept house in the sand lot, setting up a kitchen, and turning out first-class dirt pies and cakes without number; cutting cookies with my Mother's gold thimble which I promptly lost in the sand. The street was boarded over, and I can recall the sound of the rattling watercart as it came to deliver water bought by the pail for domestic purposes. And I can hear now the echoing footsteps of my Father on the plank walk as I sat beside my Mother listening for it in anxious hours later on when his life was threatened, as were those of many others who took an active part against the dangerous lawlessness menacing the city on all sides.

Eliza Hall Park McCullough, Within One's Memory (North Bennington: The Park-McCullough House, 1923), p. 48. Within One's Memory, p. 49.

Other families from Vermont began to arrive in San Francisco, and they all became lifelong friends. After a few years, Hiland Hall and his wife, Dolly, returned to their farmhouse in North Bennington. Hiland Hall became governor of Vermont from 1858 to 1860. The Park family stayed in San Francisco until 1863, when Lizzie's mother, Laura, became homesick for North Bennington. By then Lizzie had a five-year-old sister, Lila, and a two-year-old brother, Trenor Luther (who was nicknamed Train). Lizzie's other grandparents, Luther and Cynthia Pratt Park, who lived in Bennington, must have been excited to meet their two younger grandchildren and to see how Lizzie had matured.

Their father had become a very successful lawyer in San Francisco and made a lot of money, just as Grandpa Hall had predicted. When Lizzie and her family returned to North Bennington, Trenor Park was able to buy the Hall farmhouse and 200 acres of land for $12,000. He and Lizzie's mother decided to build a "summer cottage" on this land and hired an architectural firm from New York to design the house in the French Second Empire style. The house was really a mansion. It had forty-two rooms, cost $75,000, and took eighteen months to build.

The Civil War was being fought at the time the house was being built. Many families in Vermont were struggling to maintain their farms in the absence of fathers and sons who had gone to fight in the War. But Trenor Park wanted to build a luxurious house that would show how successful he had become. He told the architect to build the house with all the latest technology. It had five bathrooms with hot and cold running water. A heating system with twenty-one registers and grates throughout the house supplied heat and fresh air to each room. There were also eighteen coal-burning fireplaces made of Carrera marble imported from Italy. Rooms were lit by Gasolier light fixtures.