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The Marstons: A California Family – Part 5
Young Gunns
By Robin Lakin
March/April 2023
 Sonora, 1852
A baby’s first cry broke the silence in the two-story adobe dwelling on Washington Street in Sonora, California on May 20,1853. Douglas, Chester, Sarah, and Lizzie Gunn were anxiously awaiting the arrival of their new sister in the next room.
Anna Lee Gunn’s birth was assisted by her father, Dr. Lewis Carstairs Gunn, and Aunt Maria, a handsome, land-owning free woman of color in her sixties who operated a boarding house nearby.
In an unaddressed, undated fragment of a letter to announce Anna Lee’s birth, her mother, Elizabeth, wrote, “Our baby grows. She is not like the other children—her eyes are very dark and she has so much hair.”
The familiar cry of “Gold!” in 1849 brought the Gunn family from Pennsylvania to California before Anna was born. That same year, Lewis traveled overland while Elizabeth LeBreton Stickney Gunn and their four children joined him in Sonora in 1851, sailing aboard the Bengal in an arduous trip around Cape Horn.
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Left to right: Lewis Carstairs Gunn and son Douglas, Philadelphia, 1844 (ages 32 and 3); Elizabeth Lebreton Stickney Gunn, age 52, San Francisco, 1863; Douglas Gunn, age 22, San Francisco, 1863; Chester Gunn, age 20, San Francisco, 1863; Sarah Gunn, age 17, San Francisco, 1863 |
Sonora was a rough mining town where murders were frequent, grizzlies ever present, and dangers for children abounded. The year before Anna Lee’s birth, a fire swept through the town, destroying nearly every building. Miraculously, it spared the Gunn home, which also housed Lewis Gunn’s pharmacy and the Sonora Herald, a newspaper he owned and edited.
Lewis—an abolitionist, educator, medical doctor, drugstore owner, and newspaperman—was frequently away from home, leaving Elizabeth and their eldest son Douglas to manage the household. “I cannot tell you the amount of business Lewis has to do for the ‘Young Gunns,’” Elizabeth once wrote. “He will be absent about ten days.” Anna grew up with a strong mother and multitalented father.
Families with children faced dangers and hardships. While Lewis was away, another boy shot Chester in the face with birdshot. Not long after, he arrived home sans part of his right forefinger. He lost it at the knuckle in a hay-cutting machine accident at the local milkman’s farm—while helping out by feeding straw through the machine.
In this challenging environment, Lewis and Elizabeth persevered, educating their children, learning to adapt and make-do, and providing a home filled with love. The young Gunns thrived and looked out for each other, and helped their parents to nurture little Anna Lee. She would become the woman who would marry George W. Marston in San Diego, cultivate community interests, and come to be a patient, loving mother to the five Marston children, just as her parents had been to her.
Read the rest of the ongoing The Marstons: A California Story History Series.
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