Billing, Frederick W.
Frederick W. Billing, a native of Germany, was a businessman and talented amateur landscape painter who moved west from New York for his health. He had made a fortune in mining-related ventures in Utah before coming to California with his wife Wilhelmina in about 1885, establishing a winery in San Mateo County near today’s Woodside.
Billing's daughter Bertha married Englishman John F. Coope, and the newly-weds moved to Ben Lomond in ~1880, where Coope and his father-in-law established the Ben Lomond Wine Company. In 1899, Billing acquired the William Kerr ranch (today's Pasatiempo) and moved there. In the same year, the Ben Lomond Wine Company bought the Santa Cruz Mountain Wine Company, with its Santa Cruz winery. Unfortunately, Coope died suddenly in 1902, and the winery business seems to have declined from that point.
- Rowland states, on page 195 of his 1947 "Annals of Santa Cruz" (one section of the Rowland writings collected in 1980 as Santa Cruz: The Early Years), that Billing built his Pasatiempo house, but it was built by Kerr before Billing acquired the property. Rowland also asserted that the house burned down, but does not give a date. It was still standing in 1937, but its fate after that has not been verified (see "The History of the William Kerr House").
Billing's business partner John Q. Packard also moved to the area, building a house just across the San Jose road (now Highway 17) from the Kerr house. Billing, Packard, and Coope were all members of the committee established in 1900 to launch efforts to create what is now Big Basin Redwoods State Park.
- Traci Bliss, "Big Basin Redwood Forest" (2021 book).
- Late Harvest (1983 book), chapter 1 "The Origins of the Santa Cruz Wine Industry".
- Harvesting Our Heritage (2017 book), pages 22-23.
- John L. Chase, The Sidewalk Companion to Santa Cruz Architecture (4th ed. 2023), page 188.
- Carey Casey, "The History of the William Kerr House", MAH Online History Journal
