George Marston was one of the great community servants in the history of San Diego.
He was born in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, on October 22, 1850. In 1866, he entered the preparatory department of Beloit College, where he played right fielder for the baseball team. He then worked in a gristmill and clerked in a bank, before attending the University of Michigan as a pre-med student for one year in 1869. He came to California with his father in 1870, first to San Francisco and then on to San Diego in October on the sidewheeler Senator.
     The population of San Diego was about 2,300 when they arrived, two days before his twentieth birthday.
     Marston's first job in San Diego was as a clerk in the Horton House hotel, which had opened just one week before his arrival. Among his duties there was brushing the dust off visitors' clothing before they entered the hotel. After six months at Horton House, he took a job with Aaron Pauly and Sons general merchandise store, warehouse and wharf office. Starting in 1872, he clerked for storekeeper Joseph Nash for five years before he and a partner Charles Hamilton bought out Nash for $10,000. In 1872, Marston and Hamilton helped open a free reading room. In 1873 he was secretary of the Chamber of Commerce, and later its president.
     In 1878, Marston married Anna Lee Gunn, a teacher in the San Diego Academy - together they had five children. Hamilton and Marston split up the business, Hamilton concentrating on groceries and Marston on dry goods. The Marston Company ultimately became San Diego's leading department store. It not only provided him wealth, but it led to buying trips to San Francisco and New York, and experiences there built his interest in park development and urban planning -- the two areas in which he made his greatest contributions to San Diego.
     In 1882, Marston served on the first board of trustees of the public library, and was instrumental in the founding of the YMCA in San Diego. In 1887-1889, he served on the San Diego city council. Marston ran for mayor of San Diego in 1913 and 1917 and lost both times, after critics somewhat unfairly painted him as unfriendly to business and interested in beautification rather than growth. In the 1917 mayoral election the controversy over differing visions of the city's future came to be known as the "Smokestacks vs. Geraniums" debate. Marston believed in business, of course, but was tagged by Louis Wilde as "Geranium George" for favoring planning and civic beauty. Wilde (smokestacks) defeated Marston in 1917, but the debate over these two visions for San Diego continues today.
     Although Marston supported reform ideas including equal rights for women and minorities, workers' rights to unionize, and freedom of expression for all, his reformist impulses manifested themselves most significantly in a conservative agenda of park development and city planning.
     In 1902 Marston put up $10,000 so the Park Commission could hire Samuel Parsons, landscape architect for the City of New York, to prepare the first comprehensive plan for Balboa Park. Later he again contributed his personal funds, so that the City Council could hire John Nolen, one of the nation's outstanding city planners. Nolen prepared the city's first comprehensive plan in 1908, and returned in 1926 to draw up a more detailed plan, which was adopted as a guide to San Diego's urban development. He donated the Serra Museum, designed by William Templeton Johnson, and Presidio Park, with its architectural remains of the San Diego presidio, to the people of San Diego.
     Irving Gill designed Marston's home and had extensive contact with him through the early planning of the 1915 Panama-California Exposition in City Park. Marston served as chairman of the Building and Grounds Committee for the Exposition.
Marston had a lifelong interest in the Pomona College and Claremont's Associated Colleges. He was the first president of the board of trustees and remained an active member of the board for over fifty years.
     Marston was a founder and first president of the San Diego Historical Society in 1928; he had been an organizer and served as Trustee of the San Diego Public Library; he was one of the founders of the YMCA in 1882, served on its board for 62 years, as president for 22 years; Trustee of the San Diego State Normal School; City Council member; Park Commissioner; chairman of the Parks and Beaches Association. He raised funds and donated his own money to help start what are now Torrey Pines and Anza-Borrego Desert State Parks.
     Marston was also one of the founding members of the San Diego Art Guild.

     "Irving John Gill has been widely regarded as San Diego's most prominent and innovative architect. He was born April 26, 1870, in Tully, New York. The son of a farmer, he had no formal education. He began studying architecture in the Syracuse, New York office of Ellis G. Hall, then in Chicago under Joseph L Silsbee. In 1891 Gill worked alongside Frank Lloyd Wright at the firm Adler and Sullivan in Chicago. After arriving in San Diego in 1893, Gill experimented with many styles, won loyal clients, and made a name for himself among the community's leading citizens, Progressive and otherwise. The Arts and Crafts philosophy was just beginning to take hold in San Diego when Gill arrived, but significant Craftsman influences did not appear in his work until about 1905. The Green Dragon in La Jolla (1894), whose cottages Gill designed, drew the finest musicians from around the country to entertain both colony residents and Hotel Del Coronado visitors.
     By 1908, Irving J. Gill was a well-established San Diego architect. Gill's fountain in Horton Plaza, built in 1909, remains there today. But his mature style, marked by spare designs and ingenious technical details, was just beginning, and his most important commissions were to come. In 1909 and 1910, he designed some of his most ingenious structures: Bentham and Scripps Halls at The Bishop's School in La Jolla, and the First Church of Christ Scientist at Second and Laurel Streets in San Diego.
     Gill spearheaded the creation of the San Diego Architectural Association; a group intended to professionalize the trade of architecture in the city.
     One of Gill's most prominent clients was Ellen Browning Scripps, a self-made newspaper millionaire born in England and raised in the Illinois prairies. She moved to San Diego in 1891 and to La Jolla in 1897. Gill designed many Progressive projects for which Scripps sponsored the money, including the La Jolla Recreation Center and the La Jolla Woman's Club, which together with The Bishop's School and her own house formed a "Scripps enclave."
(Contributed by Sarah Schaffer)

     Irving Gill left San Diego before the Art Guild was formed in 1915 and never became a member. In 1904, Henry Lord Gay, a world-renowned architect, of English ancestry, set up an office in San Diego. He became the first president of the Art Guild in 1915. He died of a stroke in 1921.

     Descriptive of one of the events held during their monthly meetings is this article written in the San Diego Union, 5/27/08:

DEPLORE LACK OF ART WITH PLAY

Allegorical Drama Keenly Satirizes Local Situation Before Art Association

     "Ghosts which in melancholy tones deplored the lack of interest taken in art and its perpetuation filled the home of Ralph Granger, corner Laurel and Forth street for and hour last night. Then the eerie white sheets were taken off and it was discovered that the supposed spirits were members of the San Diego Art Association, who enacted as interesting an allegorical drama, from the pen of Misses Rogers and Schofield, as was ever staged here.
     At least 150 guests of Mr. and Mrs. Granger listened to the hollow, woeful voices of the spirits. The play was called 'Visit from the Old Masters,' and these were all there - Raphael, Titian, and the rest - to deplore the fact that such a beautiful city, and a city with such natural advantages in the way of artistic landscape and the availability of material, art was compelled to take a back seat, with commercialism the dominant feature of civic life here.
     Mrs. L.L. Rowan was the pessimist witch of the play. She opened the first scene; weeping over a huge caldron of tears that art was no more in San Diego.
She called for a spirit, and Velasquez, impersonated by L.C. Sherwood, arose from the dead and took human shape. Then followed A.C. King as Whistler, C.A. Fries as Cellini, Mr. Valentine as Hogarth, Dr. Anderson as Raphael, Henry Mills as Fortuni, G.A. Haines as Titian, Jean Smith as Rembrandt, and J.C. Pierce as Da Vinci, all in ghostly apparel. Then Stalking on the stage made of the reception room, came female ghosts, in the persons of Margaret Rayburn, who was Morris, Mrs. Brust, who impersonated Corot, and Miss Rachael Granger, who was the only earth person to be shown. She was prettily attired as the Goddess of Hope in Art.
     Before the Goddess of Hope for San Diego came upon the scene, these gloomy spirits stalked about, telling of the tendency towards coon songs and vaudeville performances. Ironical shafts were hurled at local art and architecture by the Italina until squelched by Whistler.
     It is the intention of the entertainment committee of the Art association to give another playlet along educational lines soon."

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