The Life and Times of Annie H. Shinn
1856-1878
I mentioned Annie in my previous entry, positing that she might be the “ghost” of Shinn House. Since she died young (at just 21 years old!) and didn’t have any children, she doesn’t have any direct descendants to carry on her legacy, so I figured I would compile all that I’ve learned about her in the past year. She is often written out of the biographies of her more famous siblings (Milicent W. Shinn and Charles H. Shinn), and I don’t want her to be forgotten.
We have very little information about Annie’s life from Annie herself, so most of what I know about her is from what her family wrote about her or from vital records or newspaper articles.
***
She was born to James and Lucy Ellen (née Clark) Shinn in Round Rock, Texas on May 6, 1856. Her father, James, had taken his family from Iowa to Texas, where he was either prospecting for zinc and lead or farming. When his brother-in-law, Dr. Joseph W. Clark, wrote from San Francisco to invite the Shinns to come out to California and take hold of 250 acres of land he owned in Washington Township, Alameda County
(1), the Shinns gratefully took him up on the offer. In fact, they likely left only a month after Annie was born, as they arrived on the steamer Golden Age in San Francisco on July 14th, 1856. This means poor Lucy had a newborn and a four-year-old to manage on the steamboat voyage down to Panama, a railroad trip across the Isthmus, and another steamer up the coast to San Francisco. What an ordeal that must have been…
By the 1860 Census, Annie was four years old and living on the ranch in what was then known as Vallejo’s Mills, now called Niles (a district of Fremont CA). The Shinns—at that time a family of five—were living in a small one-room cabin (known as Sim or Sim’s Cottage after the man who built it
(2)), tending the land that they would develop into a successful nursery and orchard. The children slept in a small loft, while Lucy and James slept in the bed they brought with them from Texas in the main (only) room.
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| Circled: Window of loft where Shinn children slept |
According to the 1870 Census, Annie was living in Oakland with her Aunt Jennie (née Clark, Lucy’s older sister) and Uncle Edmund P. Sanford, their children (Annie’s cousins, Eddie and Mattie), her brother Charlie (who was likely attending the College of California (3)), and a few tenants. At that time Annie was 14 years old and was listed as attending Lafayette Grammar School, in the High School Department (later Oakland High School). She was apparently a bright student, as she was frequently listed on the honor roll—because they apparently published things like that in the newspaper in those days (4)! She graduated from Oakland High School in June 1872, when she was just 16 years old.
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San Francisco Chronicle, 6/5/1872
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To better visualize where Annie would have been staying during the school year, I made this handy map.
In 1874, she was listed as living at the north-west corner of 13th and Clay streets, in the same block as Edward Rowland Sill, one of the assistant teachers at Oakland High School. She may have even been boarding with Mr. Sill and his wife, Elizabeth "Bessie" Sill, as Millie would later board in one of their rooms when she was taking classes at the State University in Berkeley. The couple would become close friends with the Shinn family, with “Sill” being mentioned 58 times in the ~115 Lucy Letters
(5).
In the Fall of 1874, Mr. Sill was appointed Professor of English literature at the State University
(6), the same year Annie and Millie started their freshman years
(7). Professor Sill was a favorite of many of his students, the Shinns and Sanfords included. In fact, Annie’s cousin (later an early American psychologist),
Edmund “Eddie” C. Sanford, was said to have
admired Mr. Sill so much that “all his life long his judgment in matters of literary taste, his choice of books for holiday reading, his attitude to music and to the other arts, his whole aesthetic outlook were, with but little modification by personal temperament, the judgment and attitude and outlook of his former professor.”
Professor Sill was a prolific poet and writer, and he would
become a mentor to Annie’s sister, Millie, as she began her writing career—but this post is about Annie, so let’s get back to her story.
Annie was not only a good student—she was also a talented artist. In Spring 1871, she displayed several drawings at a school-wide exhibition of student artwork. Annie contributed several drawings which were praised as “excellent”: “one, a mountain scene, another entitled 'Meditation,' and another with no name labeled, representing a little fellow asleep in a chair just after a surfeit of good things. The two first are excellent, and the latter elicits not only admiration but laughter also”
(8). Later in Fall 1871, several of her drawings were displayed at the Mechanics’ Institute in an exhibition featuring art by students from all local public schools. She received a bronze medal and a diploma in the Landscape Drawing category.
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Painting of Mission Peak by Annie H. Shinn—could this be the “mountain scene” mentioned above?
 | Julianne Howe, Stivers Lagoon [Lake Elizabeth], 1966. Courtesy of the Washington Township Museum of Local History.
|
 | | View of Mission Peak on a similarly cloudy day, 2022. |
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I couldn't find any records of what she was doing in the latter half of 1872 through the beginning of 1873. The next mention I found of her was in July 1873, when the Board of Education appointed her to be teacher of the eighth-grade class
(9) at the Alice Street School
(10).
Depending on the source you consult, during the 1873-1874 school year, she was either teaching at
Lafayette Primary School,
Alice Street Primary School, or Harrison Primary School
(11).Then, at a Board of Education meeting in August 1874, Annie submitted her two weeks’ notice
(12). Presumably this was because she had recently been accepted to the State University; Annie and Millie’s names appear among the incoming freshmen class of 1878
(13). Their class size? Around 70. Freshman class size these days? More like
6,000-7,000.
Annie and Millie were both in the “
Classical” course of study, which was based on East Coast institutions’ curricula (e.g., Harvard, Yale, etc.) and was intended for students who wished “to lay a broad foundation of literacy, historical, and scientific culture as a basis for further professional study” or for a teaching career. Check out
this listing in the 1874
UC Berkeley Register of the classes students in the Classical course were expected to complete. The subjects tested on the entrance exam are kind of wild to my 21st century mind, especially considering that some of the applicants were as young as 16 years old. Applicants were expected to demonstrate at least some proficiency in math, English grammar, geography, US history, ancient Greek and Latin grammar, and ancient Greek and Latin literary works (e.g., Virgil’s
Aeneid, Homer’s
Iliad, etc.). Applicants who did not technically pass but who showed promise were sometimes offered admission to the University with the caveat that they make up their deficiencies through coursework, so as not to shut out students who weren’t able to afford private college preparatory schools. Also worth noting—tuition at that time was
free. 👀
However, textbooks and room and board were not. In a letter Lucy wrote to Millie in Fall 1876, she worries over the cost of groceries and books: “Then too you say you have spent $70 ($1,937.57 in 2022) since you went down [to Berkeley]. I suppose you bought most of the books that you will need for the year and that will not have to be done ever again”
(14). Millie would take a year off between her freshman and sophomore years to work and save up money to cover these costs
[read more about Millie's time in Red Bluff here]. Annie wouldn’t have to worry about these expenses for long, as she was unable to complete even her first year at UC Berkeley before her health prevented her from continuing
(15).
The above information was primarily gleaned from vital records and newspaper articles. We get much more intimate glimpses of Annie in the Lucy Letters. As this post is already getting to be quite long, I will follow up with details I’ve gleaned about Annie from reading these letters in an upcoming entry—stay tuned!
***
Notes
2. “Beard’s Nursery—Some Early Orchards,” in
Historical Sketches of Southern Alameda County, by Charles Howard Shinn (Oakland, CA: Alameda County Historical Society, 1991), 22–24.
↩
3. The College of California, which would later become UC Berkeley, would permanently move the location of its campus to Berkeley in 1874 after construction was completed on North and South Halls (Douglass and Thomas). Annie and Millie would have started at its new (and present) campus.
↩
4. For references re: Annie attending Lafayette Grammar School/Oakland High School, see: “Roll of Honor,”
Oakland Daily Transcript, May 13, 1871, San Francisco Chronicle Historical Archive; “Roll of Honor,”
Oakland Daily Transcript, March 8, 1871, San Francisco Chronicle Historical Archive; “Roll of Honor,”
Oakland Daily Transcript, November 24, 1870, San Francisco Chronicle Historical Archive; “Roll of Honor,”
Oakland Daily Transcript, October 15, 1870, San Francisco Chronicle Historical Archive; “Roll of Honor,”
Oakland Daily Transcript, September 3, 1870, San Francisco Chronicle Historical Archive.
↩
5. See various letters written by Lucy Ellen (Clark) Shinn to her daughter, Milicent “Millie” W. Shinn between 1874 and 1881.
Letters will be hosted online by California Revealed, coming in 2023.
**UPDATE 1/2023: The
Lucy Letters are now online! 🤓
↩
6. e.g., see “The Regents at Berkeley,”
Sacramento Daily Union, June 3, 1874, California Digital Newspaper Collection; “Oakland Matters,”
San Francisco Bulletin, April 10, 1874, San Francisco Chronicle Historical Archive; “A Good Teacher Complimented,”
Oakland Daily Transcript, April 23, 1874, San Francisco Chronicle Historical Archive.
↩
7. “Full List of the New Freshman Class,”
Oakland Daily Transcript, September 29, 1874.
↩
8. “Public School Exercises,”
Oakland Daily Transcript, May 31, 1871, sec. City Gossip & Local News, San Francisco Chronicle Historical Archive.
↩
9. I believe school grade levels were numbered in reverse at that time, with higher numbers being lower classes (e.g., a student in the first class would be up for promotion from the school). That is, this is how grades were numbered at the State University at that time, with freshmen being in the fourth class and seniors being in the first class. So, Annie would have had charge of younger students.
***ADDENDUM 1/2023: I believe I was able to confirm that grades were numbered in reverse. An
1875 report by the CA Superintendent of Public Instruction (at that time Ezra S. Carr
**) detailed the recently adopted new course of studies in public schools, which starts with the Third Grade for the youngest students and ends with the "Advanced Grade." (
**Ezra S. Carr, former Professor of Agriculture, who had recently been ousted by his colleagues at UC Berkeley. Soon after Carr was forced out of his professorship, he was elected CA Superintendent, which landed him on the UC Board of Regents with the colleagues who just fired him—awkward! For a contemporary account, see
this October 16, 1875 Alameda County Independent article; for a more accessible summary, see
this article from the Berkeley Historical Society & Museum.)
↩
10. “Election of Teachers,”
Oakland Daily Transcript, July 23, 1873, sec. Board of Education, San Francisco Chronicle Historical Archive.
↩
11. “Closing Exercises—List of Promotions.”
Oakland Daily Transcript, June 7, 1874, sec. Educational. San Francisco Chronicle Historical Archive.
↩
12. “Resigned,”
Oakland Daily Transcript, August 12, 1874, sec. Board of Education, San Francisco Chronicle Historical Archive.
↩
13. “Full List of the New Freshman Class.”
↩
14. See various letters written by Lucy Ellen (Clark) Shinn to her daughter, Milicent “Millie” W. Shinn between 1874 and 1881.
Letters will be hosted online by California Revealed, coming in 2023.
Lucy Letters online now!
↩
15. James Shinn to Hannah B. (Shinn) Mays, March 24, 1878, Washington Township Museum of Local History Archive.
↩ ***
References
“A Good Teacher Complimented.” Oakland Daily Transcript. April 23, 1874. San Francisco Chronicle Historical Archive.
“Arrival of the Golden Age.” Sacramento Daily Union. July 15, 1856. California Digital Newspaper Collection.
“Beard’s Nursery—Some Early Orchards.” In Historical Sketches of Southern Alameda County, 22–24. Oakland, CA: Alameda County Historical Society, 1991.
Berkeley Club.
A Memorial of Edward Rowland Sill, Who Died February 27th, 1887. Proceedings of the Memorial Meeting Held by His Friends under the Auspices of the Berkeley Club, at Oakland, Cal., 14th April, 1887, Together with Extracts from His Correspondence. Oakland, CA, 1887.
https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001693885.
Berkeley, University of California. Register of the University of California, 1874-1875. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1875.
Carr, Ezra S. “Sixth Biennial Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction of the State of California, for the School Years 1874 and 1875.” Sacramento, CA: Department of Education, 1875.
https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000061846.
“Closing Exercises—List of Promotions.” Oakland Daily Transcript, June 7, 1874, sec. Educational. San Francisco Chronicle Historical Archive.
“Election of Teachers.” Oakland Daily Transcript. July 23, 1873, sec. Board of Education. San Francisco Chronicle Historical Archive.
“Full List of the New Freshman Class.” Oakland Daily Transcript, September 29, 1874. San Francisco Chronicle Historical Archive.
Langley, Henry G.
A Directory of the City of Oakland and the Town of Alameda, for the Year Ending December 31st, 1874, Embracing a General Directory of Residents, and a Directory of Streets, Public Offices, Etc. Oakland, CA: Henry G. Langley Publishers, 1874.
http://archive.org/details/bishopsoaklanddi1874dmbi.
“Oakland High School.” San Francisco Chronicle, June 5, 1872.
“Oakland Matters.” San Francisco Bulletin. April 10, 1874. San Francisco Chronicle Historical Archive.
“Premiums Awarded to the Public Schools.” Daily Alta California, September 26, 1871. California Digital Newspaper Collection.
“Prizes for Drawing.” Daily Alta California, September 22, 1871, sec. Oakland Items. California Digital Newspaper Collection.
Prof. Carr’s record in California. Alameda County Independent. October 16, 1875. UC Berkeley Library.
“Public School Exercises.” Oakland Daily Transcript. May 31, 1871, sec. City Gossip & Local News. San Francisco Chronicle Historical Archive.
“Resigned.” Oakland Daily Transcript. August 12, 1874, sec. Board of Education. San Francisco Chronicle Historical Archive.
“Roll of Honor.” Oakland Daily Transcript. September 3, 1870. San Francisco Chronicle Historical Archive.
“Roll of Honor.” Oakland Daily Transcript. October 15, 1870. San Francisco Chronicle Historical Archive.
“Roll of Honor.” Oakland Daily Transcript. November 24, 1870. San Francisco Chronicle Historical Archive.
“Roll of Honor.” Oakland Daily Transcript. March 8, 1871. San Francisco Chronicle Historical Archive.
“Roll of Honor.” Oakland Daily Transcript. May 13, 1871. San Francisco Chronicle Historical Archive.
Shinn, James. Letter to Hannah B. (Shinn) Mays, March 24, 1878. Washington Township Museum of Local History Archive.
Shinn, Josiah Hazen. “1518. James Shinn (6).—Thomas (5), Caleb (4), Solomon (3), James (2), John (1).” In The
History of the Shinn Family in Europe and America, 310-314. Chicago, IL: Genealogical and Historical Pub. Co., 1903.
https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/005756003.
“The Regents at Berkeley.” Sacramento Daily Union. June 3, 1874. California Digital Newspaper Collection.
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