![]() “I got to sleep in the tower room,” she said. In the late 1920s, long before the era of freeways, the trip from Palm Springs to Redlands must have taken longer than the hour-or-so drive of today.Īnd after her family arrived in Redlands, Susan remembers that “when we turned off the main road, the road up to Kimberly Crest seemed endless.”Īt the end of the drive, young Susan stepped into a fairy tale. The elder Kimberlys and Auntie Bob were all living at Kimberly Crest the winter Susan Kimberly Sutter’s family spent in Palm Springs. She and her husband, who was president of the Bedford Portland Cement Co., made their home in Indiana.Īfter her husband died in September 1919, Mary Kimberly Shirk came to Redlands to live with her aging parents at Kimberly Crest. Shirk in March 1905 at the home on Cedar Avenue where her parents lived before buying Kimberly Crest. ![]() In a Wisconsin winter, furnace troubles are serious indeed, so “we packed up to go to Palm Springs for the winter,” she said.Īfter they were settled in Palm Springs for a much warmer winter, someone in the family said, “We really ought to go see Auntie Bob.”Īuntie Bob was Mary Kimberly Shirk, the youngest of the seven Kimberly children. Sutter, daughter of John Alfred Jr.’s son Alfred Knox Kimberly, grew up in Wisconsin and recalls that one winter when she was about 5, something serious went wrong with the furnace in her home. ![]() The children were all grown up and had homes of their own by the time their parents moved into Kimberly Crest, but apparently they thought Redlands was a good place to celebrate Christmas.Īccording to Susan Kimberly Sutter, granddaughter of the Kimberlys’ oldest son, John Alfred Jr., the first Christmas after the Kimberlys bought Kimberly Crest, all the children decided they would come to Redlands for Christmas.Ībout 20 years after that first Kimberly Crest Christmas, Susan Kimberly Sutter made her first visit to Kimberly Crest. The Kimberlys, who came to Redlands from Wisconsin, had seven children – two sons and five daughters. John Alfred Kimberly, a founder of the Kimberly-Clark paper company, and his wife, Helen Cheney Kimberly, began wintering in Redlands in 1899.Īt the end of December 1905 they bought the French chateau-style house on a knoll west of Prospect Park as a permanent retirement home and renamed the house Kimberly Crest. This is the third part of the story of the Kimberly family whose Redlands home is now Kimberly Crest House and Gardens, preserved as a museum and a site for weddings and other events. ![]()
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