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Patty Reed was only a child of eight when her family left Springfield, but she too retained many memories which she shared with various writers, including C. F. McGlashan, Evelyn Wells, and Katherine Wakeman Cooper. She also preserved a wealth of family documents and artifacts, later donated to Sutter’s Fort in 1946.
The most famous of these is "Dolly," a little wooden figure under four inches high. According to Patty, when her family was caching their goods along the trail, the children were told they had to leave everything behind. Among other items, Patty rescued "Dolly" from the sand, and slipped them into her dress. Safely at the settlements, Patty took "Dolly" out and Margret Reed began to cry—not because Patty had disobeyed her, as Patty thought, but because she was glad that her daughter had had some comfort during her trials at the lake.
Patty grew into a small woman, with dark brown eyes. She married Frank Lewis on Christmas Day, 1856. Lewis died in 1876, leaving Patty with several children to support. She did this by keeping a boarding house, first in Santa Cruz, then in Capitola. Like her parents, she is buried in San Jose’s Oak Hill Cemetery.
Patty was the special pet of her grandmother, Sarah Handley Keyes, who died in Kansas not six weeks after the journey began.
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Mrs. Frank Lewis had good reason to despise snow, or at least want to live as far away from it as possible.
As little girls, Martha Jane "Patty" Reed and her sister Virginia filled dainty porcelain tea cups with the freshly fallen powder and dipped it out with small spoons, pretending it was custard.
The winter scene of 1846-7 might have made a fond childhood memory had there not been the reality of starvation and death. Grisly scenes of horror and agony were a part of everyday life for Patty and her family as they struggled to survive one of the most terrible episodes in the history of the West.
Even as a child of eight years, Patty impressed her elders as a child with as much sense as a grown woman. She showed her spirit when the first Donner Party rescue team arrived and both she and her younger brother were found to be too small to endure the forty mile trek through high drifts to safety. Staying behind at the death camp at Alder Creek, Patty turned to her mother and calmly said, "Well, Ma, if you never see me again, do the best you can."
Finally saved and reunited, the Reed family took up residence in San Jose. In 1856, at the age of eighteen, Patty married Frank Lewis of Santa Cruz. Living in San Jose, the couple had eight children. The youngest was three years old when the husband died in 1876.
As a widow, Lewis supported herself as the proprietor of hotels in Santa Cruz and Capitola, including the grand 160-room Hotel Capitola, built by Frederick Hihn in 1890, and later the Capitola Park Hotel, off Park Avenue.
Capitola Park Hotel originally housed workers of the California Sugar Beet Mill, established nearby in 1874. When the mill was dismantled, Frederick Hihn, Capitola's developer, purchased the building and moved it to a site across the road from the train depot. Under the management of the Donner party survivor, the inn, known as the Lewis House, became a local favorite.
Patty Reed Lewis is among many remarkable pioneer women who helped build and improve life in Santa Cruz County in the 19th Century. This winder, the Capitola Historical Museum is featuring a number of these women -- suffragists, teachers, writers, mothers, artists, and activists -- in a show entitled Pincushions to Politics: Women in Nineteenth Century Santa Cruz County.
The exhibit tells the stories of self-reliant women who lived here during the first decades of statehood, when the region was isolated and roughly settled. The experience of little Patty Reed, for example, was chronicled in the writings of the first local women's rights advocate, Eliza Farnham, who arrived in Santa Cruz early in 1850.