Sarah Bixby Smith

Sarah Bixby Smith (1871–1935) was a California writer and an advocate of women's education. Adobe Days, her memoir of growing up in southern California, is considered a classic of the genre.

Early life and education

Sarah Hathaway Bixby was born at Rancho San Justo near San Juan Bautista, California, in 1871. Her parents were Llewellyn and Mary Hathaway Bixby. Llewellyn Bixby was a sheepman, and with other members of the Bixby family had come to California in 1852, driving sheep and cattle from the East. Llewellyn, with his brother Jotham and three cousins (John William Bixby, Thomas Flint, and Benjamin Flint), formed the Flint-Bixby Company in 1855 to buy land to run their livestock. By the mid-1880s, they had amassed large landholdings. In addition to Rancho San Justo were Rancho Los Cerritos and Rancho Los Alamitos in Long Beach, California, Rancho San Juan Cajón de Santa Ana, and part of Rancho de los Palos Verdes. Sarah spent her childhood on the San Justo, Los Cerritos, and Los Alamitos ranches.

She earned her bachelor's degree from Wellesley College in 1894 and became a writer and advocate for women's independence and higher education.

Career

Bixby Smith wrote both lyric poetry and nonfiction. Her volumes of poetry include My Sage-brush Garden (1924), Pasear (1926), Wind Upon My Face (1930), and The Bending Tree (1933).

Bixby Smith is best known for three highly personal memoirs of California history. The first, "A Little Girl of Old California" (1920), was a brief memoir of her girlhood, later expanded into the book Adobe Days (1925). Adobe Days uses details of Smith's childhood on the family sheep ranches to tell the intertwined stories of the pioneering Bixby family as it rose to prominence in California and the development of Los Angeles from its frontier-town days to the end of the 19th century. It has been called "deservedly a classic of California autobiography... [capturing] perfectly that intersection of civilization and frontier, New Englandism and Spanish Southwest, which turn-of-the-century California defined as its own special heritage." She also wrote Milestones in Los Angeles: Being a Brief Narrative of Los Angeles Through Five Decades (ca. 1933). At the time of her death, she was working on a book about the history of southern California.