David Hewes and family

David and Matilda Hewes rented the house from the Camrons’ and he and his family lived in the House for three years. Then, in an effort to improve Matilda’s failing health, they moved to Tustin in Southern California. Matilda died in 1887. David remarried two years later; his new wife was Anna M. Lathrop. Her sister, Jane, married David’s close friend, California Governor, Leland Stanford.

David Hewes is probably best known for donating the golden spike that linked the transcontinental railroad tracks in May of 1869 at Promontory Summit, Utah. His long-time friends and associates, the Big Four (Crocker, Hopkins, Huntington and Stanford), built the Central Pacific Railroad that drove east to meet the Union Pacific pushing west. They actively solicited Hewes to participate in their monumental venture. Hewes, to them, was a natural for the project; he was accustomed to working on a large scale.

In fact, Hewes had contracted to level off hill tops, sand ridges, and dunes of San Francisco. He started with a shovel, wheelbarrow, and a Chinese laborer. Within a few years his Steam Paddy Company purchased steam shovels for the work and went on to built the first steam locomotive on the Pacific Coast that hauled carloads of dirt to the eastern edge of the city where it deposited as landfill undoubtedly onto the rotting "skeletons" of Gold Rush schooners.

The proposal to join the Big Four must have tempted Hewes but, he was still smarting from recent loses. Hewes had joined the Gold Rush, but not to pan for gold. He had shipped collapsible metal buildings West to Sacramento, sold them to gain a foothold, then became a successful merchant, but he lost nearly everything in the Sacramento fires and floods of 1852 and 1853. Still in the process of recovering, Hewes was unwilling to take the financial risk and turned his friends down.

When the transcontinental railroad neared completion, however, Hewes, the tireless and talented promoter, recognized what his famous friends did not — the need for ceremony and pageantry to celebrate North America’s transcontinental railroad. He transformed an event, held in a remote and desolate part of the country, into a national celebration that was shared, simultaneously, from coast-to-coast via the telegraph system.

Resilient: a good word to describe David Hewes. For instance, he suffered great losses as a result of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, including most of his art collection, however, he looked around and saw opportunity and immediately undertook construction of the city's first reinforced concrete building. Often during his long life, David Hewes saw his fortunes soar and plummet, but he always fought back and prospered.