Silicon Valley’s building boom in the late 1990s resulted in the
construction of numerous fine mansion estates in Santa Clara and
San Benito counties.
Silicon Valley’s building boom in the late 1990s resulted in the construction of numerous fine mansion estates in Santa Clara and San Benito counties. So plentiful are these Goliath homes created to shelter computer-whiz millionaires that they seem nothing out of the ordinary in our area’s local backdrop.
One local mansion does stand out however– the Hayes Mansion in San Jose’s Edenvale district. Almost a century old, it was for its Edwardian Age the zenith of the valley’s culture and art scene. Many prominent figures of twentieth-century history paid a visit to this elegant home located on Monterey Road near where the long-gone Frontier Village amusement park once stood.
The mansion was the gemstone of a grand estate built by Mary Hayes-Chynoweth, a 19th-century woman. Legend has it she used her alleged psychic powers to build her family’s fortune. Mary was born in Holland, New York in 1825, the daughter of a blacksmith and Baptist minister. The ninth of 10 children, she lived in dire poverty in the early part of her life.
At 17, she started working as a school teacher. At that stage of her life, she developed an interest in spiritualism, the belief that if one were in tune with the spiritual realm, the spirits of the dead could offer guidance. At age 29, she quit teaching and became a faith-healer and preacher.
At one of her sermons, she charmed a widowed farmer named Anson Hayes (a cousin of President Rutherford B. Hayes). Soon after they met, he proposed marriage and she accepted. They had three sons: Everis, Jay Orley and Carroll, who died as an infant. In 1873, Anson died of a heart attack.
Everis and Jay Orley graduated with law degrees at the University of Wisconsin and worked as attorneys. Mary moved in with them and, using her psychic powers, advised them on real estate and other investments.
The brothers bought shares in Michigan’s unproductive Ashland Mine, and Mary used her psychic energy to discover a rich vein of ore. This mine would be the start of the Hayes family’s wealth.
Listening to her spirt advisors, Mary and her sons moved to California in 1887. In San Jose, they bought 240 acres of land that once was part of the Bernal Rancho. Here, they began the construction of an extravagant Victorian mansion. Built for $175,000, the four-story, 50-room home had many modern conveniences including electric lighting.
Frescoed walls and decorative hardwood furniture made it a lavish place to live. So idyllic was the location that they named it Edenvale after the biblical garden.
Mary provided healing treatments to local residents of the valley through personal visits as well as through letters sent through the mail. She allegedly healed a man named T.B. Chynoweth of blindness, and although he was 21 years her junior, he proposed marriage and she accepted. Unfortunately, T.B. died 10 months after the wedding.
Bad luck struck the Hayes family again when the Edenvale mansion burned down in 1899. Mary hired a local architect named George Page to construct a replacement which would withstand another fire or an earthquake. He designed a three-story, Mediterranean-style villa in the form of a Maltese Cross.
The new 62-room mansion was completed in 1905 and was so strongly built, it easily stood up to the 1906 earthquake. Distinguished guests included Teddy Roosevelt, William McKinley, and Herbert Hoover. Mary died shortly after the mansion was completed, but her sons and their families continued to live in the wings until the 1950s.
Everis and Jay Orley Hayes both became prominent men. Everis served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1904 to 1918. Jay Orley lost his bid for California state governor seat, but he helped to form the Good Government League to fight corruption in San Jose’s city council.
In 1900, the brothers went into the newspaper business with the purchase of the San Jose Herald and, the next year, the San Jose Mercury. They later merged the papers into the San Jose Mercury News.
So distinctive is the architecture of this historic mansion that it was refurbished as a convention center and hotel. Unfortunately, it has been in the news lately for its financial troubles. The San Jose’s city council is considering throwing it a life jacket of funding to keep the historic home afloat.
You can take a free self-guided tour of the mansion. And perhaps, if your psychic energy is strong enough (if you believe in such stuff), you might feel the Mary’s spirit directing you through her beautiful home. The century-old Hayes Mansion would surpass virtually any grand home built in our own modern digital age.
Martin Cheek is a reporter for the Gilroy Dispatch. He is the author of ‘The Silicon Valley Handbook.’
