Pottery, Healing, and the Spirit of Bothin

If you have a Girl Scout or a student at Heartwood (me too—hand raised!), you probably know the stories about Haunted Bothin (pronounced bo-THEEN). A few of these have floated around for years, and I figured—what better feature for Halloween, right?

But once I started digging, I was floored by the real history of the place.

Huge thanks to the local historians and archivists who keep these stories alive—and to Lynn Downey, who quite literally rescued Arequipa’s history from being lost. (Learn more about what Lynn’s up to these days at the end of this story!)

Plenty of Halloween happenings this weekend with Goblins' BOOtacular in San Anselmo and Halloween & Magic in Mill Valley, plus Oktoberfest in Bolinas and Breezetoberfest in Fairfax.

Enjoy!

Kim Neumann

Before the campfires, the hills of Fairfax were home to a women’s sanatorium where healing, art, and spirit intertwined.

If you’ve ever driven (or biked) west out of Fairfax on Sir Francis Drake, you’ve seen them: first the small sign for Arequipa, pointing up a narrow road under the oaks; a little farther on, the entrance for the Henry E. Bothin Youth Center—today’s Girl Scouts of Northern California camp and Heartwood school.

Most of us pass by without knowing its past—back when this hillside was more about rest and recovery, and less about recreation.

Arequipa (ah-reh-KEE-pah) is the Quechua-derived name of a city in southern Peru, loosely translated as “place of rest.” Dr. Philip King Brown, a San Francisco physician, chose it deliberately—for a place where women with tuberculosis could rest and recover.

According to historian Lynn Downey, the name came from a ship called Arequipa that once sailed the waters around Central America. Its captain happened to be one of Dr. Brown’s neighbors, and he borrowed the name for his hillside sanatorium—a “place of rest” in both name and spirit.

He was, after all, the son of Dr. Charlotte Blake Brown, one of California’s first women surgeons and a powerhouse of her era. In 1875 she co-founded the Pacific Dispensary for Women and Children—which later became San Francisco’s Children’s Hospital—offering care to women and children when most medical institutions excluded both. She also created a medical training program for women, mentoring future physicians like Emma Willits and Ethel Owen, who would later serve at Arequipa.

Worth noting: Dr. Brown earned her medical degree from the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1874—because no California school would admit her. At the time, women physicians were barred from hospital staff appointments, and children’s wards were nearly nonexistent, since most hospitals served adult male laborers. So she did what other women of her era had to do: started the institution she wasn’t allowed to join. 

And so, Philip grew up watching his mother leave the dinner table for emergency calls, return hours later, and go right back to work.

Fast-forward to the years after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, when reconstruction filled the air with plaster dust, ash, and soot. Brown began to notice something grim in his pulmonary practice: working women were falling ill with tuberculosis at nearly twice the rate of men.

The reason was as much environmental as economic. While men labored outdoors—hauling bricks, clearing debris, breathing open air—women worked indoors as clerks, teachers, seamstresses, factory hands, and telephone operators, sealed in close quarters with poor ventilation and little sunlight. The lungs that had no chance to clear themselves became easy targets for infection, and few of these women could afford consistent medical care.

“Appalled by [the] statistic,” Brown wrote, “I determined that women should have a place of their own.”
— Arequipa Sanatorium Records, The Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley

Brown set out to create something radical for its time: a sanatorium exclusively for women, designed not just to isolate disease, but to give patients space, sunlight, and a real chance to recover.

The project coalesced quickly. Marin philanthropist Henry E. Bothin (more on him later) donated acreage outside Fairfax, part of a former Phoebe Apperson Hearst property. Architect John Bakewell Jr.—later of SF City Hall—donated the plans. Hearst paid for the laundry. Local families sent linens, books, and fruit.

Wait a sec—Hearst?

Indeed. Phoebe Apperson Hearst was the mother of that William Randolph Hearst, the headline-hungry newspaper tycoon who built castles and started media wars. But Phoebe—born in 1842 in tiny St. Clair, Missouri—was the one with the big heart.

She grew up helping her father run a general store, studied to be a teacher, and learned French and piano along the way. When she married frontier miner and businessman (and later U.S. Senator) George Hearst in 1862, he was 41 and she was 19—a gap that says as much about 19th-century gender economics as it does about their improbable partnership.

George Hearst built his empire with grit and speculation, investing in legendary claims like the Comstock Lode and the Homestake Mine. You could say that’s where William Randolph inherited his appetite for empire—he just applied it to ink and paper instead of ore.

Phoebe, meanwhile, transformed her wealth into a force for education and public good. She became one of California’s first major philanthropists—founding the state’s first kindergarten, funding scholarships for women, serving as one of the University of California’s first female regents, and underwriting the master plan that shaped the Berkeley campus.

So yes—same Hearst, different legacy. While her son built a media empire on scandal and spectacle, Phoebe built schools, libraries, and laundries—including the one that kept linens fresh for the women recovering at Arequipa.

Back to that hillside in Fairfax…

When Arequipa Sanatorium opened in September 1911, it looked like a big-shingle lodge—until you got close. There was no glass. Every “window” was a screened opening. Patients lived entirely in clean Marin air, year-round. Beds faced the sun. Meals were simple and local. Patients were weighed weekly, urged to rest, and prescribed milk three times a day—a calorie-dense “medicine” meant to rebuild weight and strength lost to tuberculosis.

At the turn of the century, tuberculosis was everywhere—in people, in cows, and in the milk that reached most kitchen tables. Pasteurization had been invented decades earlier but was still controversial; many believed that “clean dairies” could make raw milk safe without heating it. Before regulation, hundreds of cows were kept in crowded city stables—from the Mission District to Potrero Hill—supplying untested milk across the Bay Area.

By then, Dr. Adelaide Brown—sister of Arequipa’s founder, Dr. Philip King Brown—had already been fighting another front in the same war: tuberculosis in California’s milk supply. Based in San Francisco, she led the city’s early efforts to test herds, remove infected cows, and shut down unsafe dairies. Her campaigns helped inspire some of California’s earliest food-safety laws, paving the way for the pasteurization standards that followed.

At Arequipa, she practiced what she preached. The sanatorium kept its own small herd of dairy cows, which Dr. Brown personally inspected and certified as TB-free. Patients drank milk they knew was safe—local, fresh, and free from the disease they were fighting.

Fast-forward a century, and we’ve come full circle in some ways. Raw milk is safe again—but only from certified dairies that follow strict bacterial testing and herd-health standards. Lightly pasteurized, non-homogenized milk (think Straus Family Creamery) retains more natural enzymes and nutrients than the ultra-pasteurized, shelf-stable kind that travels hundreds of miles. And whole milk—once scorned—has earned a nutrition comeback, with more research pointing to its balance of fats and fat-soluble vitamins.

If Dr. Adelaide Brown were here today, she’d probably nod in approval at Marin’s small, transparent dairies—places where you can trace your milk to the pasture it came from, and the cows are as well cared for as the people drinking it.

Rest alone wasn’t the whole cure. Dr. Brown believed the mind needed purpose to quiet fear—and that steady, creative work could be as healing as fresh air.

So in 1911, he built a screened pottery shed just downhill from the wards and brought in three English-born masters of the Arts and Crafts movement: Frederick Rhead, Albert Solon, and Fred Wilde. Together they launched Arequipa Pottery (1911–1919), one of the country’s earliest and most beautiful forms of occupational therapy.

Patients learned to throw, glaze, and decorate pottery fine enough to sell. Their work appeared in San Francisco’s top shops—Gump’s, O’Connor, Moffat & Co. (the grand department store that later became Macy’s), and others—and proceeds helped cover treatment costs while giving the women a sense of pride and purpose.

In 1915, Arequipa Pottery was featured at San Francisco’s Panama–Pacific International Exposition, where former patients demonstrated their craft before crowds.

Today, the Oakland Museum of California holds the largest collection—more than a hundred pieces of tile and pottery—while others live on in private collections and museums around the country.

All through Arequipa’s years—especially during World War I (1914–1918)—Fairfax neighbors helped keep the place running. With food rationing and fruit shortages (most of California’s produce was being sent overseas for the war effort), locals stripped the trees in their own yards and carried baskets of apples, pears, and plums up the hill for the women at the sanatorium.

Music and company mattered, too. Local girls came to play piano in the ward or teach the newest dance steps in the dining room. In a time when tuberculosis carried heavy stigma, Fairfax embraced the women of Arequipa instead of shunning them.

By the late 1920s, a new generation had taken up the work. In 1927, Dr. Brown’s son Dr. Cabot Brown, freshly trained at Harvard, joined the staff and gradually assumed leadership of Arequipa. He brought a more structured, hospital-like discipline, but also expanded its reach—admitting girls and teens in the 1930s and ’40s, when tuberculosis still lingered in California’s poorer and rural communities.

One of those girls was Rose Wong, born in San Francisco and raised in Watsonville. She entered Arequipa at fourteen and stayed for seven years. Her mother had died of tuberculosis and her father was an itinerant fruit picker, often gone for months at a time. At Arequipa, Rose found not just treatment but belonging. She later worked in public health and kept a photograph from those years—young patients of every race smiling together:

At a time when many hospitals still segregated patients, Arequipa practiced care without prejudice.

By the mid-1940s, new antibiotics changed everything. For the first time, tuberculosis could be treated with medicine instead of months of isolation, and sanatoria like Arequipa—once essential—saw their patient numbers fall almost to zero within a decade.

At Arequipa, Dr. Cabot Brown kept the program running as long as there were women to serve, convinced the “rest cure” still had value. But by 1957, only a few patients remained. The work was done. After forty-six years of continuous care, Arequipa closed its doors.

In 1960, the Girl Scouts of Northern California leased the former Arequipa property—along with the adjoining Hill Farm tract, also donated by Henry Bothin—and merged the two into what became the Bothin Youth Center. The land remained under the ownership of the Bothin Foundation, which granted the Girl Scouts a long-term lease. To this day, the Scouts continue to renew that lease, keeping the site active for generations of campers, students, and volunteers.

When site manager Happy Stanton arrived in the early 1980s, he discovered a trove of history scattered through the old, water-damaged buildings—Arequipa’s medical ledgers, patient files, pottery designs, and handwritten letters, left untouched since the sanatorium’s closure.

Years later, historian and author Lynn Downey—whose grandmother had been a patient at Arequipa—contacted Stanton while researching for her book. Thanks to his good sense to save the artifacts, she was able to catalog the entire collection and help transfer it to the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley in 1991.

So, who was Bothin?

Henry E. Bothin arrived in San Francisco in the 1870s from Wisconsin—a teenage apprentice with a knack for metalwork and pennies to his name. The son of a German millwright, he’d learned the steel trade in a Midwestern foundry before heading west in search of bigger opportunity.

By his twenties, he’d opened the Bothin Manufacturing Company, supplying steel doors and fixtures for San Francisco’s new skyline. By the 1890s, he’d parlayed those profits into real estate, becoming one of the city’s largest individual landowners.

When the 1906 earthquake and fire leveled nearly everything he owned, Bothin started over. Of the 81 buildings he held across San Francisco, 79 were destroyed, but within months he was back on the job. Using the resources of his own Bothin Steel Company, he supplied the materials and oversaw the reconstruction of dozens of commercial buildings throughout the city, helping rebuild parts of the Financial District and South of Market.

He worked fast, often reinvesting profits directly into new developments rather than taking dividends. Within a decade, he was again one of San Francisco’s largest individual landowners, known for both his business tenacity and his refusal to give up on the city that had made him.

In Marin, Bothin donated more than 150 acres near Fairfax for health and recovery work, including the land that became Arequipa Sanatorium. That gift would anchor more than a century of service on that hillside, from healing grounds to youth camp and Waldorf-inspired public school.

The Bothin Foundation, established in 1917, continues to fund capital projects for nonprofits serving Bay Area children, families, and people with disabilities—investing in the same kind of lasting community infrastructure he once believed could change lives.

Editor’s note: Once I was finished geeking out on Lynn Downey’s lecture (which became my primary source for this feature), I couldn’t resist reaching out to thank her—and ask what she’s been up to.

Lynn grew up in Marinwood (Terra Linda High, Class of ’72) and now lives in Sonoma, where she manages and curates the archives at the Tomales Regional History Center. She still writes about the American West, serves on the Marin County Civic Center Conservancy Board, and—mark your calendars—is giving a talk on Arequipa next February 17 at the Presbyterian Church in San Rafael, hosted by the Marin History Museum.

As Lynn put it, “Marin is still in my soul.”

You can learn more about Lynn’s work here.

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Thanks for reading,
Kim

Kim Neumann, Publisher