In 1896, Cornelia Ann Hill, a widow from Middletown, New York, paid $3,000 for 3.55 acres on a hillside tract advertised as a "new subdivision on Redlands Heights." The house she built there in 1897 is Kimberly Crest: a French chateau-style Victorian with Italian Renaissance gardens, now a house museum in Redlands, California, with grounds open free to the public.
The name came later, from its second owners, and so did the money that shaped it. Kimberly Crest sits beside an orange grove in the heart of the old Citrus Belt, but citrus didn't pay for it.
Who built Kimberly Crest?
Cornelia Hill built it, with Los Angeles architects Oliver P. Dennis and Lyman Farwell, and she chose the site at the crest of the hill. Her reasons for coming to California were bound up with illness. The house's National Register nomination, prepared in 1995 by architectural historian Lauren Weiss Bricker, records that Mrs. Hill first visited the state in 1882 with her invalid husband, that at least 3 of their 6 children died of tuberculosis, and that Mr. Hill died of it within two years of the trip.
The house was finished in 1897. Kimberly Crest's own history puts the cost of the house and carriage house together at $12,000, and the house at about 7,000 square feet, which it calls a petite chateau. Franz P. Hosp, the Riverside horticulturist who had supplied more than 1,000 kinds of plants to the landscaped estate at Smiley Heights nearby, laid out the grounds.
Photographs taken just after it was completed show young orange trees planted on the open slope north of the house. The nomination reads that choice plainly: in planting a grove, Mrs. Hill "was following the local tradition of living within an agricultural environment."
Where the Kimberly name comes from
In 1905 Mrs. Hill sold the property for $29,000 to John Alfred and Helen Cheney Kimberly of Neenah, Wisconsin. J. Alfred Kimberly was a co-founder of Kimberly, Clark & Co., the paper company that became Kimberly-Clark, and he stayed its president until his death in 1928. He wasn't well, and the couple had begun wintering in Redlands to get away from Wisconsin winters. Kimberly Crest started as their winter house and became their permanent home.
Helen Kimberly changed the place more than anyone. She redid the interiors and hired the Los Angeles firm of Parkinson and Bergstrom, where her son-in-law G. Edwin Bergstrom was a partner, to design an Italian garden. The front lawn was graded into terraces, Hosp came back to choose the plants, and the gardens were finished in 1909. In 1922 the Kimberlys bought the neighboring lot to the northwest. The nomination describes it as a lot "which was and still is an orange grove."
Their daughter, Mary Kimberly Shirk, owned the estate from 1928 until her death in 1979. In the 1960s she promised her home to "the people of Redlands" if the city raised the money to buy the 39 acres next door as a park. The city did; Prospect Park was acquired in 1968, and the Kimberly-Shirk Association, formed the following year, opened the house to the public in 1981, according to the estate.
Paper, gas and copper money on a citrus hill
Kimberly Crest's story repeats across Redlands Heights: fortunes made in the East and Midwest, spent on winter houses set among the groves. The nomination places the Hills and Kimberlys among the many seasonal migrants of the period. Down in town, citrus meant work: groves, packing sheds, rail lines and nurseries. On the heights it was mostly scenery.
The pattern started with a pair of New York hotel keepers. Alfred H. and Albert K. Smiley, twins, ran Lake Mohonk Mountain House in New York State. They developed Cañon Crest Park, later called Smiley Heights, a 200-acre landscaped estate with their own winter houses. Its grounds were open to the public, and the Southern Pacific ran special trains from Los Angeles for day trips. Literature on Redlands was kept at Mohonk, and the nomination suggests Mrs. Hill may have first heard of the town there.
A few years after the Hill house, Albert Cameron Burrage, a Boston lawyer who had made his money in gas companies and copper mining, bought 17.57 acres from the Redlands Orange Grove and Water Company, by telegram, for $17,500, according to the local historical society. His Mission Revival house went up between October 1900 and February 1901, a winter retreat of about 16,000 square feet with terraced grounds and a 100-step entrance.
Not everyone on the hill lived the same life. The Kimberly Crest nomination quotes the historian Carey McWilliams on how Redlands was laid out by class: the very wealthy on the heights, townspeople in between, and "farther down the slope, and across the tracks," the Black domestic workers and the Mexican field workers.
Visiting Kimberly Crest
Kimberly Crest stands at 1325 Prospect Drive, off Highland Avenue, south of downtown Redlands. The estate's visitor page, as of September 2026, lists:
- Grounds open Sunday through Friday, 10 AM to 4 PM, at no charge. The estate closes Saturdays for private events and on most major holidays.
- Docent-led house tours of 45 minutes on Thursday, Friday and Sunday afternoons, for ages 9 and up; adult tickets are $15. The house closes for the month of August.
- Docent garden tours of an hour on the second Sunday of each month.
Hours and prices change, so check the visitor page before you go.
The site warns that the Italian gardens climb a steep hill by stairs, and that spiked heels aren't allowed. The state registered Kimberly Crest as California Historical Landmark No. 1019 in 1995, and the National Register listing followed in 1996.
Kimberly Crest in bloom season
Each spring the Redlands groves bloom, and for a few weeks the air around them turns sweet. The hotels of that era sold orange blossom scent to winter visitors as a souvenir, a story we tell in a fragrance of the Gilded Age, and the same season is behind our Orange Blossom perfume, a single-note scent, and the rest of our orange blossom collection.
For the grove side of the estate as well as the chateau, go on a second Sunday. The docent garden tour that day bills itself as "from grotto to grove".
Photo by Alex Kulikov on Unsplash.
