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Sunny. High 81F. Winds NW at 10 to 20 mph..
Clear to partly cloudy. Low around 55F. Winds NW at 10 to 15 mph.
This photograph of Josephine and Frank Duveneck, founders of Hidden Villa summer camp, was taken in 1978 on the couple’s 65th wedding anniversary. Josephine died 11 days later, shortly after completing her autobiography. Frank died in 1985 at 99.
This photograph of Josephine and Frank Duveneck, founders of Hidden Villa summer camp, was taken in 1978 on the couple’s 65th wedding anniversary. Josephine died 11 days later, shortly after completing her autobiography. Frank died in 1985 at 99.
Memories are short, especially in the Santa Clara Valley, where the population is ever-changing. A recent misunderstanding over Asian tiles on the exterior wall of the Duveneck home at Hidden Villa in Los Altos Hills brought this to mind. I thought it might be a good time to look back at the founders of Hidden Villa, Frank and Josephine Duveneck, for a refresher on their lives of service.
They were both East Coast children of privilege – though their fortunes likely did not reach the heights of some today in Silicon Valley. Josephine was a Whitney from the family that established the Whitney Museum of American Art. Frank’s mother was a Boott, whose wealth went back to the American Industrial Revolution.
When the Duvenecks married in 1913, they spent a year traveling – including a visit to China, the most likely source of those disputed tiles, where the wàn or manji symbols are often used to mark the location of Buddhist temples. On their route to the Pacific, the couple stopped to visit Josephine’s sister near Santa Barbara, who was living in a cottage surrounded by an orange grove.
“It was then and there we lost our hearts to California,” wrote Josephine in her 1978 autobiography, “A Life on Two Levels.”
After Frank’s service in World War I – he was a pacifist who found a post in a Signal Corps regiment that didn’t require him to carry a weapon – the couple settled into temporary homes first in Carmel and then in Palo Alto, and spent weekends with their growing family exploring the region in their Model T Ford.
One day, they saw a ranch called Hidden Villa for sale off Moody Road, a 1,000-acre property. They bought it for $20,000, the amount the owner needed to clear the mortgage. In 1930, they built a new Arts and Crafts-style home there with a large living room “for folk dancing,” wrote Josephine.
Hidden Villa became the headquarters for their activism. They set up the nation’s first youth hostel on the property and founded the Loma Prieta Chapter of the Sierra Club.
Josephine, a Quaker, spent her life on a spiritual quest, and Frank built her a small retreat where she could escape for contemplation. During World War II, the couple took in Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany and supported Japanese Americans who had been interned. They worked with the American Friends Service Committee to end racial deed restrictions on local housing. In 1947, Josephine founded America’s first multicultural summer camp for children at Hidden Villa, though friends told her it would never work.
“It seemed to me if one could get hold of children before prejudice intervened,” she wrote, “there might be a good chance to prevent its development.”
The couple incorporated Hidden Villa into a trust so the land, once a historical rancho granted to two Ohlone families in the Mexican era, would remain open space and its programs would continue into the future. Josephine died in 1978 and Frank in 1985. The family donated their papers to the Library & Archives at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, where they are available to researchers today.
Los Altos Hills volunteer and historian Jitze Couperus recently called the Duvenecks “a beacon to the world of tolerance and understanding.” It is humbling to ponder how much they accomplished in a world that needs more of those very qualities.
Robin Chapman’s new book, “The Valley of Heart’s Delight: True Tales from Around the Bay,” will be published July 25 by The History Press.
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