IT WOULDN’T BE CALLED DRUID HEIGHTS IF ELSA GIDLOW HAD NOT KNOWN ELLA YOUNG

Poet, Irish revolutionary, author of fiction, mythologist, mystic and University of California Berkeley professor Ella Young’s(1867-1956) interest in the Druids, the priests of the British Isles during their Celtic period, was the catalyst for the “Druid” in Druid Heights. Ella and Elsa had first met at the 80th birthday party of poet Charles Erskine Scott Wood in 1932 at his estate, “The Cats”, in Los Gatos, CA.

In her autobiography, Elsa: I Come With My Songs,  Elsa Gidlow says of Ella Young:

“My long friendship with Ella I regard as one of life’s enduring benedictions. There are many who are ready enough to share complaints of their struggles for survival; few who will or can present visions of why survival is worthy of effort. I had had intimations of such visions from my own inwardness, reflections of them from poetry. Few people, however, confirmed my sense of life as a  heroic adventure calling for qualities of fierce strength, and noble endurance, gentleness toward the weak, and passionate reverence for beauty, in particular the beauty of the living earth-until I met Ella Young”.

The best source of information about her I have found is the Wikipedia entry. She lead quite a life and a good part of it was spent in California. She died not long after Elsa moved to her new home west of Mill Valley, CA in 1954 and by then Young was living in Oceano, San Luis Obispo county, CA. There is no evidence that she ever came to Druid Heights, but she certainly had an influence on it.