CARRIED HISTORIC FAMILY’S LEGACY AROUND SAN DIEGO
Margaret “Peg” Marston, a homemaker and community volunteer who carried on her pioneering family’s passion for the history and natural beauty of San Diego, died April 15, two weeks after turning 100.
She was the widow of Hamilton Marston, who like his father and grandfather before him ran the family’s self-named department store downtown and became a tenacious supporter of Balboa Park and of environmentally sensitive land development.
“Marston is a name that carries historic weight in San Diego, right up there with Scripps and Spreckels and Horton,” said Bill Lawrence, executive director of the San Diego History Center. “Peg was an incredible steward of the Marston name.”
Her civic activities included the artistic and educational Wednesday Club, one of San Diego’s oldest women’s organizations, and auxiliary groups with ties to UC San Diego, the Salk Institute, and the Torrey Pines State Natural Reserve.
“Her love for San Diego, and for protecting our region’s parks, gardens, canyons and wildlife, was contagious,” said Ellen Moxham, a friend. “At 100 years of age, Peg still delighted in seeing the first roses of spring and hearing the great horned owls hoot.”
Margaret Day was born on
March 31, 1921, in Alberta, Canada, in a prairie town called Viking. Her father, Arthur, a World War I veteran, was a farmer. Her mother, Gladys, made paintings and sold them.
She arrived during a spring snowstorm, delivered by a midwife in a home without electricity or running water. It was so cold there during winters that her hand froze once to a metal mailbox, according to a story she told. Her mother had to pour water from a warm kettle to free her.
The hard life there grew harder during an economic downturn in the late ’20s. After her father visited a relative in Chula Vista and decided it offered a better future, the family boarded a ship in Vancouver and sailed south. Peg Marston, who was 7 then, never forgot her first glimpse of San Diego, on board the ship, rounding the tip of Point Loma and heading into the bay. It was sunset and the light was golden.
Her heart, she often recounted, filled with hope.
She graduated from Sweetwater High School and went to what was known then as San Diego State College. At church one day she met Mary Marston, whose brother, Hamilton, soon took an interest in her.
They married in 1941 and settled in Bonita. She dropped out of school to become a homemaker and raise the couple’s four children.
Hamilton was the grandson of George W. Marston, who in the 1870s founded what would become San Diego’s landmark department store, known to generations of local residents for its merchandise, fresh flowers and holiday window displays. Hamilton took it over in the 1950s and added a 190-seat tea room.
The Marstons sold the store to the Broadway chain in 1961 and, like their ancestors, turned to civic affairs. Hamilton led the successful fight in the 1960s against widening to six lanes state Route 163 as it passes through Balboa Park. He sponsored a 1974 study of San Diego’s attributes and challenges called “Temporary Paradise?” that remains influential in local planning circles.
His wife believed in and supported those causes, according to family members and friends, and continued to advocate for them after her husband died in 2006.
“She was a great storyteller,” said Lawrence, the History Center chief. “She believed the history of this region is important, and not just because the Marstons played a significant role in it.”
Since the mid-1970s, Peg Marston had lived in the longtime family home on Seventh Avenue near the northwestern edge of Balboa Park. It’s just north of the landmark Craftsmanstyle Marston House, now a museum, that George Marston and his wife, Anna, had built in 1905.
She was an adviser for a permanent exhibit at the museum, “The Marston Legacy,” and until recent years a daily presence in the gardens, where she would take walks and stop to chat with staff and volunteers.
Survivors include her children, George and Anne, both of San Diego, and Charles, of Berkeley; and four grandchildren. Her daughter Elizabeth died in 2004.
No services are planned. Her ashes will rest at St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral in San Diego.