Most of the families that came to Inverness for summers in the early 20th century were not especially wealthy. They were professionals, academics, artists, teachers and retirees. Historian Gray Brechin explains that Inverness in this era was mostly a middle-class summer retreat, comparable to Bonny Doon in the Santa Cruz Mountains or Fallen Leaf Lake in the Sierra. At the time, the very rich from the San Francisco Bay Area went to places where they could escape the summer fog—places like Ross, Woodside, or Lake Tahoe. Inverness has seldom been described as a place to escape the summer fog.
The Moller family of Oakland was an exception. As the historian Jack Mason wrote in his history of Inverness, “Inverness had no Vanderbilts, but it did have its Mollers….”
William Moller, who came from a wealthy New York City family, and Annie Delger, who came from a wealthy Oakland family, were married in 1873. Annie’s family outfitted miners with boots during California’s Gold Rush. In the second half of the 19th century, the Delgers were to boots what Levi Strauss was to blue jeans. The family was said to be Oakland’s first millionaires. The Moller family was also rich, having made their fortune in Germany and grown it in the sugar refining business in New York.
We know quite a bit about home life for the Moller family because their daughter, Lillian Moller Gilbreth, wrote about it in her autobiography, “As I Remember,” published posthumously in 1998. Lillian wrote that William, after marrying Annie and moving to California, co-owned the Dalziel-Moller Company, the largest plumbing and appliance supply company in the Bay Area. For a time, the family lived in a cottage on Telegraph Avenue near the Delger mansion. As Lillian perceived it, the proximity allowed her mother and grandmother to “run back and forth [between the houses] a dozen times a day.” The Mollers later moved to a larger house at 19th and Grove Streets.
As William and Annie’s family grew to include nine children and live-in staff, they moved to an even larger house on Prospect Avenue, in what was then called the Academy Hill area of Oakland. Their house was torn down in the 1940s to make way for part of the Summit Medical Center campus.
Dear Lillie—the Mollers addressed all their children as “Dear”—was the oldest of the nine children. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of California in 1900 and was the university’s first female commencement speaker. When she married Frank Gilbreth in 1904, the Oakland Tribune remarked: “Although a graduate of the University of California, the bride is nonetheless an extremely attractive young woman.”
Lillian’s professional life as a psychologist, an industrial engineer and an educator would later be chronicled in several biographies. The life she shared with Frank and their children became the stuff of the best-selling 1948 book “Cheaper by the Dozen,” which was later made and remade into movies.
That the Mollers ended up spending summers in Inverness rather than a place such as Ross may have had something to do with the tightness of their social circle. Lillian’s autobiography describes the family as clannish. In “Cheaper by the Dozen,” Frank Gilbreth Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey, two of Lillian’s children, describe their grandparents as introverted and conservative. The couple mostly kept to a small group of friends, family members and fellow congregants at their church, the First English Lutheran Church in Oakland.
Indeed, beginning in 1895, William served with Christian Schreiber on the church’s board of trustees. Christian, who owned a furniture business in Oakland before going bankrupt, first came to Inverness in the 1890s with a church group. In 1900, he and his wife, Martha, moved full time into a three-room cottage in First Valley known as Aldersyde. It’s possible that the Mollers maintained their acquaintance with the Schreibers and continued to enjoy one another’s company despite the differences in their economic fortunes.
Once the Mollers came to Inverness in 1912, they came in force. Real property records show that in March of that year, they purchased four lots on the downhill side of Perth Way, just west of where Perth intersects Douglass Street. By July, they had completed construction of a large two-story house with five rooms on the ground floor and four on the second floor. In August, they acquired a lot across the street and built one of Inverness’s first garages. There they housed three Packard automobiles used to transport their family, a French chauffeur named Henriette, a gardener, a cook, a first-story maid and a second-story maid.
That summer, the Mollers began receiving guests at their house, which they called “Wildwood.” A July 27, 1912, San Francisco Call article reported that the family had “closed their Prospect Avenue house for the season” and were spending time in their recently purchased “Inverness summer villa.” The article describes the house as one of the most “hospitable of the colony there.” Lillian’s younger sisters Gertrude and Ernestine had already “entertained friends from town in the new home.” The article closed by noting Lillian’s absence from the summer gathering place: “Mrs. Frank Gilbreth, formerly Miss Lillian Moller, did not come to the coast this summer. Since her marriage she has lived in New York.” Today, the house at the top of Douglass Street is still known as Wildwood.
If Lillian’s autobiography gives us a picture of Moller family life in Oakland prior to her marriage to Frank in 1904, “Cheaper by the Dozen” provides a picture of Moller family life in the years that followed. Lillian would bring her children to Oakland from the East Coast in the summers. Frank and Ernestine wrote that even before coming west, they knew what to expect because their mother had told them about her childhood. “We knew the arrangement of the house, even down to the full-length mirror on the hall door, which Mother’s young sisters used to open at just the right angle so that they could watch Dad’s courting technique,” they wrote.
When the children arrived, they were met at the train by three limousines. Frank and Ernestine wrote that their grandparents “took us to movies, on sightseeing tours in Chinatown in San Francisco, and away for weekends at their summer cottage in Inverness.”
In keeping with their clannish ways, the Mollers entertained mostly family and close friends in Inverness. Of the nine children, only three married. The other six lived at home with their parents well into adulthood. Newspaper columns of the day record visits by the Moller children and grandchildren to Inverness throughout the 1920s. Typical of these was a July 1928 Oakland Tribune article describing how Annie and her daughter, Miss Mabel Moller, were “passing the summer at their attractive place at Inverness in Marin County.”
Courtney Linn is an executive with a Sacramento-based credit union and lives part-time in Inverness.