Knave - Oakland Countess Made the Bricks That Built Her Chateau Carolands - Oakland Tribune, Nov 5, 1967
IT ISN'T every day you meet a Countess running a brick-yard - especially one who has had more than 50 years of success in its management and admits to 87 years of vibrant living.
It's even more unusual when the Countess tells you she has dedicated her life to the memory of her French-Canadian parents and is as proud of her Oakland heritage as anything else she possesses. And her possessions are indeed prodigious.
There are other admirable characteristics about Countess Lillian Remillard Dandini, the brickyard proprietor who, we hasten to inform you, was born in a modest eight-room, two-story dwelling at Tenth and Clay Streets in Oakland and now resides in an efficiently staffed 92-room chateau that stands on the crown of San Francisco peninsula's most verdant hills overlooking Hillsborough and its encroaching suburbia.
Proper name for the chateau is The Carolands. Countess Dandini has owned it since 1950. Its first owner was Harriet Pullman Carolans of Chicago (daughter of the Pullman car magnate) who had the mansion built in the era of 1912-1914 as a copy of one of Napoleon's chateaus in France.
It was Harriet's hope to entertain some of Europe's visiting royalty during the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, but World War I crippled her ambitious plans. Actually, the chateau was occupied only a few months when Harriet and her husband divorced and both returned East their separate ways. It had no other occupant until Countess Dandini took over 17 years ago.
CHATEAU Carolands is four stories high, counting its cavernous basement-like ground floor with wine cellar and kitchens immense enough to complement any hotel. Never really completed, the Countess purchased the place unfurnished but has since provided priceless antique furniture, fine paintings, statuary, china and 16th century mural tapestries that add graciousness to the carved ceilings, ornate marble. fireplaces, marble parquet floors and sweeping, curvaceous marble stairways. There's an elevator, too.
"I found one entire wing of rooms after I moved in," she told us with amusement. "I didn't even know it was there when I bought the house."
There are only three acres of garden remaining of the 550 acres of park-like surroundings existing when the big Chateau was abandoned by the Carolans in 1914. Matching several fountains in the gardens are numerous pieces of Italian statuary.
The Oakland home where Lillian Remillard was born on April 28, 1880, was erased from Oakland's landscape long ago. Its site is now a parking lot for Sherwood Swan's department store and food center. But another Oakland home in which she spent considerable time in Oakland still stands. It is a Victorian dwelling at the northwest corner of Thirteenth and Grove Streets. She was seven years old when her parents took her there in 1887.
WHILE the Countess Dandini was reaching out for the age of seven as Lillian Remillard, her Oakland playmates and school chums included Charlotte and Pauline Collins, next door neighbors to the Peter Remillard family at Tenth and Clay Streets.
"Across the street lived Dr. Samuel F. Rodolph. He had two sons, but they were older than I; chums of my older brother and sister," the Countess recalls. "Charles and George Rodolph became dentists.
"Clarence Wetmore who became distinguished as a member of the first class to graduate from the University of California was another of the older boys in the neighborhood. The Wetmore family residence at that time was on Eleventh Street. Clarence married a neighborhood girl."
Before Peter Remillard moved his family to the Victorian dwelling at 13th and Grove Streets in 1887 they rented a Fruitvale home for several months.
"I first attended Lafayette School in Oakland where Miss Bradbury was my teacher. Later my parents sent me to the Snell Seminary on Twelfth Street, only a block or so from our home. My closest chums there were Cordie Bishop and Nellie Pardee.
"Cordie became the wife of Dr. Harry Alderson, prominent Oakland physician. Nellie was the half-sister of Dr. George C. Pardee, later Governor of California.
"My first great sorrow was when Nellie Pardee died."
Lillian next attended Lincoln School in Oakland where her teacher was Mrs. Morgan, mother of June Morgan who became the wife of the violinist Antonio DeGrassi.
"June and I," she relates, "went to high-school together. She was captain of the basketball team that I played on.
Other high school chums included Jennie Crellin, daughter of the Thomas Crellins, and Olive Middleton who became Mrs. Willie Watt. I remember they used to tease me about a certain boy who always sought me out to help him with his French lessons," she said. The boy's name was Jack London.
Jack was a senior and older than Lillian. But Lillian was the daughter of French Canadian parents and knew the language both from home and the classroom. "I was an advanced student in French and was glad to help Jack. He was ambitious, working at the time as part-time janitor at the school."
LILLIAN was one of five children born to Peter N. and Laurin Cordule Remillard, only three living to adulthood. Peter came to California in 1854 at the age of 17 with his brother Hilaire. [familysearch] The two farm boys grew up on the outskirts of a Canadian village 30 miles from Montreal. They mined for nearly seven years. Peter was 24 when he came to San Francisco looking for a job in 1860. That very year he went to work in an Oakland brickyard just east of Lake Merritt.
"That's the brick business I'm in today," the Countess says proudly. Two Frenchmen were the original owners of the brickyard; their names apparently lost to posterity. Peter was at work only three months when they made him yard boss. Three months later one of the partners decided to return to France and Peter became a partner in the brickyard business six months after he went to work.
In 1865 Peter encouraged two of his brothers to come to Oakland and buy out the other Frenchman. It was then that the firm became Remillard & Brothers. Eventually Peter brought his mother and father to Oakland along with his six sisters and a baby brother, age 10.
Bricks from the Remillard Brothers built the first Palace Hotel in San Francisco as well as the rebuilt Palace following the 1906 fire and earthquake, also the Phelan Building, the Shreve Building, the Flood Building. Every brick building in Oakland has Remillard bricks. It was Remillard bricks that built the great Chateau Carolands where the Countess now lives.
As the brick business grew, Remillard & Brothers bought additional brick-making property at Pleasanton (1889), [1884] at the Potrero in Richmond and Greenbrae in Marin County. They also incorporated in 1879 as the Remillard Brick Company.
PETER Remillard was shopping for horses to use in his brick business when he met Ferdinand Cordule shopping for ranch land in Contra Costa County. With Ferdinand was his 16-year-old sister, Laurin.
Two years later January 28, 1867 Peter and Laurin were wed in San Francisco, and the brickyard proprietor brought his young bride to live in Oakland.
Laurin was but 12 years old when she was brought from Canada to California with her seven brothers and sisters. Her widowed father opened a business at Sacramento, his store neighboring those of the railroad magnates: Hopkins, Huntington and Crocker.
"My mother retained many recollections of the railroad builders right up to the day of her death," the Countess says.
Laurin Cordule Remillard outlived her husband by 30 years. He died in Oakland in 1904, and Mrs. Remillard died in San Francisco on February 1, 1934.
Death brought sorrow to the Remillards on more than one occasion. Lillian was the last of five children born to Peter and Laurin, only three living to adulthood. Her oldest brother died in 1901, and her sister, Emma Julia, in 1956.
COUNTESS Dandini takes her 87 years lightly. She has been known to attend as many as three parties in a single day.
She purchased the Chateau Carolands to be able to give joy to her friends, and with her many talents she is frequently called on to judge and appraise the merits of aspirants in the cultural world.
After Peter Remillard's death in 1904 the management of the brickyard business was taken over by Mrs. Remillard and her daughter. In spite of Lillian's early interest in music and voice she was of great assistance to her mother.
The Countess was a school dropout in the 1890s, quitting the routine class room to study in New York City under Walter Damrosch and other noted instructors. Her soprano voice is remembered both on the concert stage and in opera. She sang at the Metropolitan.
She and her mother were in New York at the time of the San Francisco earthquake and fire in 1906. They immediately returned home and have since continued to live here.
She was one of the founders of the Leonardo da Vinci Society of San Francisco, the Pacific Musical Society, the Opera League of Oakland, the Pacific Musical Society and an organizer of the Salon Francais. Her name is also on the membership rolls of the De Young Museum Society, and she is among the Patron of Arts of the California Palace of the Legion of Honor.
Her former home on Vallejo Street in San Francisco was a rendezvous for famous personalities, and it was there that she met her titled husband. She and Conte Alessandro Olioli Dandini di Cesena of Italy were wed in August 1932. The marriage, however, was of less than seven years duration.
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