I'm not sure what news story prompted this letter to the Mercury Times that appears in today's edition, but it's fun nonetheless and carried the title "Winchester reputation should be restored"
The media would have you believe that Sarah Winchester was a superstitious eccentric. Her true story is much more entertaining.
Documents show Sarah, widowed and crippled with rheumatoid arthritis, was an educated and compassionate philanthropist. Her quiet donations benefitted our community.
Despite newspaper rumors that Sarah was a spiritualist, she was affiliated with St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Burlingame. After her death, her fortune endowed William Wirt Winchester Hospital, part of Yale. Sarah has no family to protect her reputation and prevent exploitation.
The Winchester House is a remarkable landmark and our Sarah deserves having her good name restored.
April Hope Halberstadt
San Jose
The rest of the story, as distilled on Wikipedia from our own Burlingame Centennial book is
In the 1920s Sarah also maintained a houseboat on San Francisco Bay at Burlingame, California, which became known as "Sarah's Ark" as it was reputedly kept there as insurance against her fear of a second great flood, such as the Biblical one experienced by Noah and his family, but a more mundane answer is that many people of her social standing in California at that time had house boats or yachts. The "Ark" was located near the eucalyptus grove at Winchester Drive, south of what was to become the intersection of Anza Drive and U.S. Highway 101. The ark was destroyed by fire in 1929.
My 1925 B'game map shows the Winchester property being the bulk of all the land east of California Drive from Oak Grove to Broadway.
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