Billing, Frederick W.
Frederick W. Billing, a native of Germany, was a businessman and talented amateur landscape painter who moved west from New York for his health. He had made a fortune in mining-related ventures in Utah before coming to California with his wife Wilhelmina in about 1885, establishing a winery in San Mateo County near today’s Woodside.
Billing's daughter Bertha married Englishman John F. Coope, and the newly-weds moved to Ben Lomond in ~1880, where Coope and his father-in-law established the Ben Lomond Wine Company. In 1899, Billing acquired the William Kerr ranch (today's Pasatiempo) and moved there. In the same year, the Ben Lomond Wine Company bought the Santa Cruz Mountain Wine Company, with its Santa Cruz winery. Unfortunately, Coope died suddenly in 1902, and the winery seems to have declined from that point.
- John L. Chase, The Sidewalk Companion to Santa Cruz Architecture (4th ed. 2023), page 188.
- Carey Casey, "The History of the William Kerr House", MAH Online History Journal
