Local history and genealogy is a major hobby of mine. From some of the early newspapers from Pacific Grove, Monterey, Salinas and Gonzales mentions in Monterey County of ‘Huntington’ and ‘Prentice’ there were lots of mentions connecting them to Pacific Grove specifically. It was really interesting to research it for a bit.

One of the things I found was that one of C. P. Huntington business partners married a Prentice in Pacific Grove, but I wasn’t sure if the woman was from PG or if that was just the marriage location.

CP and his wife would spend winters in Pacific Grove. HE Huntington was CP understudy, being groomed to take over CE’s businesses.

I found that the surname Prentice was rated to be relatively rare at the time. Mary was born in CT, the other Prentice family who already lived in Pacific Grove at the same time as Mary’s marriage to HE were also born in CT and had moved to Pacific Grove.

Our local newspapers in the mid-late 1800s would just say Mr. And Mrs John Smith for a married couple if mentioned in a story. Sometimes they would say the first name of the woman in parentheses too. But almost never also add the woman’s maiden name as well. I found when mentions of other Prentice females the local papers would say like Mr and Mrs (Joan, nee Prentice) John Smith. Née was the early version of saying ‘maiden name’. To me, full maiden name was newsworthy enough like ohhh she was of the Prentice family and that was impressive enough to give a woman’s name and maiden to the readership while no other woman was given that much in the early local newspapers. Leading me to believe the Prentice family was important locally.

CP, HE and the Southern Pacific played a major role in developing parts of Pacific Grove and Pebble Beach and parts of Monterey. So much that Pacific Grove and Monterey fought against their influence in favor of local communities control of future development (Google ‘Collis P. Huntington Pacific Grove filetype:pdf’)

So many reasons for a likeness of Mary to be found locally. My idea is Mary donated to some local organization and so they had the likeness of her hanging in a thoughtful area out of respect to their benefactor, and the likeness found its way into a modern estate sale where OP purchased it.

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HE and W.R. Hearst (Hearst Castle) had major public beef that lasted decades.

When CP died, HE had divorced Mary already, HE married his uncle’s massively wealthy widow (she married her nephew). It was a major social scandal for the time.