In commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the founding of Lake County this year, Lake County News is publishing a series of historical stories about the county, its people and places. This week Helen Wilmans Baker Post is profiled in a selection from the Lake County Genealogical Society Newsletter, edited by Anita Crabtree.
What does Lake County, Calif., have to do with Daytona Beach in Florida?
This story begins during the Gold Rush.
The Gold Rush … many men joined it. And the stories of the land, the climate, the possibilities of this new area, were also reasons for migration. Did the women want to come to California? Or, were they just expected to come with their husbands?
Helen Wilmans was born June 14, 1831, in Fairfield, Ill. She was raised in an atmosphere of aristocracy, her ancestors being very wealthy. She was highly intelligent, a college graduate, and valedictorian of her college class.
In later life she was an American journalist, publisher and the leader of the mental science movement which stressed control of mind over matter. She started her own paper, The Woman’s World, and published a weekly magazine, Freedom.
She married, in 1856, John Caldwell, Baker, M.D. She may have expected to live a comfortable life as a doctor’s wife, somewhere in the eastern or Midwestern states.
But Dr. Baker got caught up in the stories of California, where Helen was taken as a bride. Dr. Baker purchased part of a Spanish grant in Solano County and they are listed in the 1860 census as living in Suisun, Solano County.
By 1870, Dr. Baker and his family, which now included four children, Ada, Florence, Claude and Jennie, had relocated to Lake County. Their property was located at the western edge of Morgan Valley and five miles from the closest community of Lower Lake. There, they farmed and Dr. Baker had Baker Quicksilver Mine.
In her book, “The Conquest of Poverty,” Helen wrote: “I was tortured day and night by fear of actual want. Where the next dollar was to come from was my continual thought. It was the last thing in my thought at night; it haunted my dreams, and in the morning I would be awakened by becoming gradually conscious of a weight at my heart. Arising and sitting on the side of my bed the day would face me with threats that I had no courage to meet. A thousand times in my weakness and inability to resist the present, my tears would fall all the minutes I was hastening to clothe myself. There was no valid reason for all this torture except that which existed in my mind. I had been so unappreciated that I had come to regard myself as an inferior creature. But at last my reasoning powers showed signs of awakening and I began to see light.”
Helen went on to write that she was a farmer’s wife and had done her work without flinching, although they lost money each year, and the place was mortgaged and finally sold for debt. It’s hard to say just what caused her to make her next move; it’s not known exactly when she did. Perhaps it was with the death of her youngest child, Jennie, in 1877. That might have been the final push. (She never mentions her children in this book.)
But, on a certain day she stood on a roadside with all of her possessions in a valise, waiting for a wagon to come along that would carry her into Lower Lake. She had no money and no idea of how she was going to live. She was going to San Francisco and intended to find work that was more meaningful than the work she had been doing for more than 20 years.
When she reached Lower Lake, a place where everyone knew her, she tried to borrow $10 to pay her traveling expenses to San Francisco. She asked one friend after another only to be refused; some of them did not have the money; others were afraid to do so.
She went through the streets until 9 p.m. when she saw a light in the village shoemaker’s rooms. Both the man and his wife were startled, and Helen believed that she frightened them out of that $10.
After spending the night with a friend in Lower Lake she was on the stage for San Francisco the next morning. She found a place to live, which took the last of the $10, and went without anything to eat for a full three days.
She found work in a little newspaper, but it went out of business after about six months. She found work with another paper and moved steadily upward. After two or three years, a large Chicago paper, the Chicago Express, hired her at an excellent salary and she moved there.
In the meantime, back in Lake County, Dr. Baker had divorced her Nov. 18, 1879. What seems strange is that in the 1880 census, she is listed as living with him (both listed as divorced), which may just mean that he still considered his wife. Who knows?
In Chicago Helen started The Woman’s World and became the founder of the school of Mental Science. She met Charles C. Post, a writer and someone who thought as she did. They married and later moved south to Georgia, where they lived for five years, and then in 1892 moved to Volusia County, Fla.
In 1895 Charles Post and Charles Ballough, who had homesteaded an area which at that time was known as Halifax, platted the property into town lots. Helen Post named it “The City Beautiful,” but was really originally called East Daytona.
In 1897 the settlers of East Daytona, who at the time outnumbered those of the settlement to the south, successfully petitioned to have the Peninsula's post office moved to their area.
Settlers in East Daytona petitioned for incorporation early in 1901. On May 24, after approval of the town's charter, the citizens of the new Town of Seabreeze held their first election at the Pavilion on what is now Seabreeze Boulevard. The southern community incorporated in 1905 and became Daytona Beach.
It was not considered woman’s work to be involved with this type of work, but Helen sat in her carriage directing all of the work on Ocean Boulevard: paving, urns with geraniums, ferns, palms and oleander.
Mr. Post and Mr. Ballough built the enormous Hotel Colonnades, the Wilmans Opera House, an amusement pavilion on the ocean and a 1200-foot pier extending into the sea. Charles and Helen Post had a large publishing house in the ground floor of the opera house. There they published a weekly paper called “Freedom,” plus numerous books and other publications.
Helen became world renowned as the leader of The Mental Science cult. She claimed to be able to heal human ailments by mental therapeutics. The mail poured in seeking her advice and for her books. And that was her downfall.
Helen’s son-in-law was credited by some with having the post office moved from the community south of them to Seabreeze, the seat of the Mental Science activities. The residents of the southern community resented having the post-office moved and started an investigation and prosecution for alleged violations and misuse of the U. S. mail.
The Post Office Fraud Order was placed on Helen Wilmans without even prior notice. There was no hearing, no trial, no conviction. Helen Wilmans was cut off from the world without chance for redress and condemned publicly without hearing or trial.
After this had been done, she was indicted on a charge of fraud, the U.S. Government contending that her claim of cure by absent treatment was necessarily fraudulent because it was impossible to be done. Her claim was false because absent cure was impossible, and it was fraudulent because she must have known that it was impossible.
The United States Supreme Court reversed this decision and, finally, the matter was dropped. All of this prosecution lasted over six years, exhausting all of the wealth of Charles and Helen Post with attorney fees and court costs.
When their position, power and affluence began to fade, Helen ended up tired, worn and impoverished. Over the age of 75 she became ill and died in 1907, three months after her husband’s death.
In 1925, after several years of debate, the three municipalities of Daytona, Daytona Beach and Seabreeze voted to consolidate.
On Jan. 1, 1926, the city of Daytona Beach was officially incorporated. So that is where the connection comes in between Lake County, Calif., and Daytona Beach, Fla.
As for the family that Helen Wilmans Baker left behind, she doesn’t mention her children in the book “The Conquest of Poverty,” but in researching them it was discovered that the second daughter, Florence, married Charles Burgman in San Francisco, but they moved to Seabreeze, Fla., where he ran the publishing house and other family enterprises.
Her oldest daughter, Ada, married someone by the surname of Powers and had a daughter, about 1888, while living in Illinois. This seems to indicate that Ada might have joined her mother when she moved to Chicago.
The son, Claude, was living with Florence and her family in Seabreeze in 1900, but he returned to Lower Lake, Calif., where he died in 1937.
Dr. John C. Baker died Aug. 29, 1896, and is buried in Lower Lake cemetery along with the youngest daughter, Jennie, and the ashes of son, Claude.
In Dr. Baker’s obituary it says that he practiced medicine for a number of years and that he owned and ran a drug store in Lower Lake.
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