Sacramento sculptor brings history to life, honoring Robert Louis Stevenson’s honeymoon

The inspiration started with two boys needing a place to sit.

Eric Hanson, who grew up in Sacramento, and his wife were living several years ago across the street from a Napa Valley middle school.

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“We had a split-rail fence around our house and the kids would wait outside for their rides to be picked up,” Hanson said. “One day she says, ‘There’s two boys sitting on the fence. That’s not good. The fence is going to fall apart. Go out and tell them to get off.’”

Hanson did as he was told, but the boys returned the next day and sat on the fence again. This time, Hanson brought them chairs which they used the remainder of that school year. But Hanson got to thinking:i A bench might serve a better purpose.

This realization has helped lead to the creation of a bench with life-size statues of 19th century author Robert Louis Stevenson, his wife Fanny Stevenson and their Irish setter cocker spaniel ChuChu. The bench, which is the work of Sacramento sculptor Garr Ugalde, will be dedicated Nov. 7, near where the Stevensons honeymooned in 1880 at the abandoned Silverado Mine.

Stevenson, who was largely unknown to American readers at the time of his honeymoon, wrote about it in an 1883 travel memoir, “The Silverado Squatters,” bringing attention to Calistoga. The setting also helped inspire the work he is arguably most known for, his 1883 novel “Treasure Island.”

How the monument came about

Ugalde and Hanson were talking at a holiday party in East Sacramento held by the family of R. Burnett Miller, who served as Sacramento’s mayor in the early 1980s. Hanson told Ugalde his idea for a bench.

“I said, ‘Well, how long you been thinking about this?’” Ugalde said. “And he said, ‘About seven years.’”

They exchanged information.

“I said, ‘I’m calling you Monday,’” Ugalde said. “And that’s how it started.”

Ugalde was already an artist of note. Based in Sacramento since 1993, he has created works that include a bronze cast of a tree slice displayed at Cesar Chavez Plaza. Ugalde created that in the 2000s in collaboration with Kerry Crutcher, who died in 2023, and it is known for having dates on it pinpointing the tree’s rings and what was going on in the world at the time.

Heather Fargo, Sacramento’s mayor at the time the slab was made, has not forgotten it.

“It adds something playful to the city, it adds certainly something interesting and I think it’s a source of pride for a lot of people who live in the city,” Fargo said.

The Stevenson commission came with a $210,000 budget. Hanson formed, the Robert Louis Stevenson Public Art Project, a 501(c)3 nonprofit, which helped raise money.

“People say, ‘How come they haven’t done this before?’” Hanson said. “I think, ‘Well, it’s not that easy and it’s not cheap and the bronze process is pretty complicated.’”

Creating the monument

Ugalde’s project went through an evolution, both in how it was made and what it depicted.

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Mary Miller, whose family held the holiday party where Hanson and Ugalde met one another, said she had seen the monument while it was underway.

“The whole process is fascinating,” Miller said. “It starts with clay and then it evolves and then you can shape things.”

Initially, Ugalde wasn’t going to include Fanny in the monument. This changed after Hanson and Ugalde attended a reading at the Robert Louis Stevenson Silverado Museum in Saint Helena of Camille Perry’s “A Wilder Shore,” a 2024 book about the Stevensons’ love story.

The work pays homage to the Stevensons’ honeymoon at the mine, which went bust by the time they arrived. They stayed in an abandoned bunkhouse. Stevenson set about interviewing locals about why the mine had failed. He also took time to explore the abandoned mine.

“He described one tunnel as… looking like a treasure grotto from a pirate’s horde,” said Dean Enderlin, board president of the Sharpsteen Museum of Calistoga History. “His biographers think that that may have been an inspiration for his later works.”

Still, even with a clear connection to local history, Hanson and Ugalde struggled to place to the statue. For a time, it appeared that the statue would be installed in Saint Helena, though those talks ultimately didn’t come together.

“If Saint Helena had gone through with everything, we’d have been done over a year ago with this,” Ugalde said. “But that threw us off. Because we spent about a year going back and forth with them.”

Enderlin said that Ugalde had reached out to his organization.

“He approached the museum about the idea of perhaps displaying it on our premises,” Enderlin said. “But it’s big enough we couldn’t find a suitable location for it. It really needed an area that was large enough to accommodate it and do it justice.”

Instead, the monument with the Stevensons and their dogs will be on display at the historic Calistoga Depot, where the couple arrived before heading on to the abandoned Silverado Mine.

“Calistoga does like public art,” Hanson said. “But they don’t have anything like this.”

Ugalde appreciated the opportunity, saying it was great to be part of an effort to bring a “historical event almost kind of to life even though these are inanimate objects.”

He noted the significance of Robert Louis Stevenson to Napa.

“We’ve got Silverado Trail,” Ugalde said. “We’ve got Robert Louis Stevenson State Park… The tagline of Napa Valley is, ‘And the wine is bottled poetry.’ That’s from ‘Silverado Squatters.’ I mean, it’s the tagline of Napa Valley.”

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