Wilson Island Stories of the early 1900s

The Harrison B. and Natalie F. Traver Home at

731 E. Carmen Avenue

Architect of Fresno High moves into the Wilson Island

Harrison Baxter Traver, born December 2, 1881 in New York, was the first architect to move into the Wilson Island when he and his wife Natalie built their home there in 1919 at 731 E. Carmen Avenue.

At the time, Harrison was an up-and- coming architect who had graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a B.S. in architecture in 1906. It was in college that he presumably met his future business partner, William D. Coates, who graduated from Penn in 1904.

Traver got his professional start in Sacramento in 1909 working as a draftsman for the California State Engineer. At the age of 28, three years out of college, he was supervising state construction projects. Within a couple of years he moved to Oakland with his wife Natalie and began work as an architect. That year, he and his fellow college friend would form the partnership of Coates & Traver with an office in San Francisco.

They were ambitious young architects who in 1912 came in second in the competition to design San Francisco’s city hall, a $4 million project. They received $1,000 for their efforts, roughly equivalent to $26,000 today.

Two years later, in 1914, Coates & Traver designed an upscale San Francisco residence at 43rd and Fulton across from Golden Gate Park. That year he and Natalie moved to Fresno with their 4-year old son, William. Two years later their second son Henry was born.

Harrison had married Natalie S. Forrest in San Francisco in 1907 within a year of graduating from college. She had graduated from Columbia University in 1903. They enjoyed a long life together as Harrison’s career grew, moving from the Bay Area to Fresno - where they remained for 11 years - and later to Pasadena, California. At the time of Natalie’s death in 1959 at the age of 77, Harrison had become Senior VP of the Mutual Building and Loan Association in Pasadena, responsible for architectural supervision.

Around the time they built their home in the Wilson Island, Coates & Traver were designing Fresno High School, a short block away. Harrison could walk to the job site in minutes. They had a roomer, 52-year old draftsman Charles R. Lee. Perhaps a Coates & Traver employee. The firm went on to design Hanford High School (1920), and Porterville High School (1921). Upon completion of the latter, the Los Angeles Times noted it was among the best in the state. In 1924, they designed a shop addition for Hanford High.

They operated out of their office at #626 in the Rowell Building in downtown Fresno, a location that housed many of the architects, engineers, and builders of the time. Notable among them was the company of Richard Felchlin who would build a home a few doors from the Traver’s home several years after Harrison and Natalie left for Los Angeles.

Coates & Traver designs were not limited to schools. They were also the architects for the A. G. Wishon home (1915) on Huntington Boulevard in Fresno, and Fresno’s Liberty Theatre (1917).

After eleven years in Fresno, Coates & Traver split up. In 1925, Harrison and Natalie moved south where he went into private practice initially in Santa Monica. He became the architect for notable large-scale projects in the Los Angeles area. One of those was the remodeling of the Albert C. Burrage Mansion in Redlands, California including the addition of 19 cottages. Work began in January 1930, at the onset of the Great Depression, to convert the prestigious residence into a tourist hotel.

In the fall of 1930, work began on Traver’s design for the Urban Boys’ School, at Beverly Boulevard and Layton Drive, a $200,000 investment (equivalent to over $3 million today). The aerial view drawing shows its location relative to UCLA and Bel Air in the background, surrounded by undeveloped land in all directions.

According to his World War I and II registration cards, Harrison was a man of medium build at 5’7,” grey eyes, brown hair, with a tattoo on his upper left arm. Given his family history, his long career as a successful architect is not surprising. He was the son of lumberman and miller William Harrison Traver, elected mayor of Hudson, New York in 1880. His grandfather, Charles Newman (from New Fane, Vermont) built the first railroad bridge at Albany, New York and obtained the contract for the second bridge of iron. Newman was superintendent of construction on the Hudson River Railroad. A mechanic and farmer, he was described as “a man of force and energy, untiring in the industry, of quick discernment and sound judgment.”1 His grandson may have inherited and revealed these characteristics as he considered leaving Pennsylvania to start his professional career in California with a job in the State Engineer’s office in Sacramento after college.

The connection between the building industry in Fresno and the home at 731 E. Carmen Avenue endured well beyond Traver. Thirteen years after he moved out, it was purchased by William Bacon Sutherland and his wife Gertrude. Sutherland grew up in Fresno in the family home at 1029 N Street where he lived for many years until the land was condemned by the federal government to make way for the downtown post office. He came up through the ranks as a surveyor and eventually became a civil engineer with the firm of Ross & Sutherland. Their office, like Traver’s, was in the Rowell Building. Undoubtedly part of the community of architects and engineers designing and building early Fresno, the Sutherland family remained in the home that Traver built for the next 49 years.

The house remains today much as it looked when Traver first built it, with the exception of an 8’x16’ room added in 1934 and a bedroom enlarged in 1935.

Sources include public building and genealogy records, and newspaper articles of the period. Note: The historic name of this home has an error in the wife’s name. It was Natalie F. Traver (ne Natalie S. Forrest), not Nancy Traver. History of the Burrage Mansion: https://rahs.org/awards/albert-c-burrage-house/ Source: “The Champion Genealogy: a history of the descendants of Henry Champion of Saybrook and Lyme, Connecticut.” North American Family Histories, Champion. Page 99. Biography of Harrison B. Traver: http://www.historicfresno.org/bio/traver.htm Prepared by Jeannine Raymond, Ph.D. October 2019