Archives West Finding Aid

Members of the Dabney family were the first, second, and third consuls for the Azores. They were John Bass Dabney (1766-1826), Charles William Dabney (1794-1871), and Samuel Wyllys Pomerey (1826-1893). John Pomeroy Dabney (1822-1874) was consul to Prussia and acting vice-consul. The family prospered through its foreign trade connections in England, Scotland, Germany, France, Mexico, South America and Russia. It was a large and extended family. The Dabneys had three estates on Fayal in the Azores, Bagatelle, Fredonia, and The Cedars. There were four boys and four girls in the family of John P. and Sarah H. Dabney, including Frank Dabney. The boys were sent to school in Jamaica Plain, Roxbury, Massachusetts, and the girls were tutored at home. Most of the boys attended Harvard but Frank Dabney, and his cousin, Herbert, attended MIT. After the accidental shipboard death of John Pomeroy Dabney in 1874, the fortunes of his wife Sarah and his son Frank seemed to diminish, and most if not all of the Dabneys left Fayal. Frank was required by his uncles to leave MIT and look after family investments in Ohio. Members of the family settled in estates in California near Santa Barbara. Samuel Dabney built a house in California in 1892 which he called the Fayal Ranch. Sarah H. Dabney lived abroad with at least two of her daughters. Frank Dabney settled in Seattle in 1900.

Edith Dabney was born around 1885 to Frank and Mary Dabney. She graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1903 and became the headmistress of a girl's school in Seattle. She married Sherwood Ford and was an aunt to her brother Jack's children Francis and Joan Dabney. In March of 1909, Edith joined her parents and six others for a skiing trip to Mt. Rainier where she and her close friend Milnora Roberts became the first women to make a ski trip on the mountain, and the first to make a trip of any kind to an altitude of 7000 feet in the winter. This achievement is chronicled in an article written on March 27, 1909 in the Seattle Times, as well as an article entitled, "A Wonderland of Glaciers and Snow" written by Minora's husband Milnor Roberts in June of 1909 in the National Geographic Magazine.