Farnham, Eliza W.

Eliza Wood Farnham (1815-1864) came to Santa Cruz from New York in 1848, to claim a piece of property in the Potrero neighborhood belonging to her deceased husband, Thomas J. Farnham, an explorer and writer who made Isaac Graham famous as the hero of "The Graham Affair" (1840). The "Affair" and Farnham's role in it are briefly described in Elliott, pages 8-11.

Thomas later came to visit Graham at Zayante, who gifted him with a farmstead. Following Thomas’s untimely 1848 death in San Francisco, Eliza and their children came to live on the farm. She went on to become a leading abolitionist, writer and early feminist, and a friend of Georgiana Bruce. Eliza returned to New York in 1856, but Georgiana stayed on.

• California, In-doors and Out: Or, How We Farm, Mine, and Live Generally in the Golden State, Eliza Farnham (1856). Can be downloaded from Google Books.
• John L. Chase, The Sidewalk Companion to Santa Cruz Architecture (4th ed. 2023), Chapter Six, introduction, page 181
• "Eliza Burhans Farnham (1815 - 1864)", The San Lorenzo Valley Museum Blog, 2020-03-19, accessed 2023-08-12