Helen Wilmans was born June 14, 1831, in Fairfield, Ill. She was raised in an atmosphere of aristocracy, her ancestors being very wealthy. She was highly intelligent, a college graduate, and valedictorian of her college class.
In later life she was an American journalist, publisher and the leader of the mental science movement which stressed control of mind over matter. She started her own paper, The Woman’s World, and published a weekly magazine, Freedom.
She married, in 1856, John Caldwell, Baker, M.D. She may have expected to live a comfortable life as a doctor’s wife, somewhere in the eastern or Midwestern states.
But Dr. Baker got caught up in the stories of California, where Helen was taken as a bride. Dr. Baker purchased part of a Spanish grant in Solano County and they are listed in the 1860 census as living in Suisun, Solano County.
By 1870, Dr. Baker and his family, which now included four children, Ada, Florence, Claude and Jennie, had relocated to Lake County. Their property was located at the western edge of Morgan Valley and five miles from the closest community of Lower Lake. There, they farmed and Dr. Baker had Baker Quicksilver Mine.
In her book, “The Conquest of Poverty,” Helen wrote: “I was tortured day and night by fear of actual want. Where the next dollar was to come from was my continual thought. It was the last thing in my thought at night; it haunted my dreams, and in the morning I would be awakened by becoming gradually conscious of a weight at my heart. Arising and sitting on the side of my bed the day would face me with threats that I had no courage to meet. A thousand times in my weakness and inability to resist the present, my tears would fall all the minutes I was hastening to clothe myself. There was no valid reason for all this torture except that which existed in my mind. I had been so unappreciated that I had come to regard myself as an inferior creature. But at last my reasoning powers showed signs of awakening and I began to see light.”
Helen went on to write that she was a farmer’s wife and had done her work without flinching, although they lost money each year, and the place was mortgaged and finally sold for debt. It’s hard to say just what caused her to make her next move; it’s not known exactly when she did. Perhaps it was with the death of her youngest child, Jennie, in 1877. That might have been the final push. (She never mentions her children in this book.)
But, on a certain day she stood on a roadside with all of her possessions in a valise, waiting for a wagon to come along that would carry her into Lower Lake. She had no money and no idea of how she was going to live. She was going to San Francisco and intended to find work that was more meaningful than the work she had been doing for more than 20 years.
When she reached Lower Lake, a place where everyone knew her, she tried to borrow $10 to pay her traveling expenses to San Francisco. She asked one friend after another only to be refused; some of them did not have the money; others were afraid to do so.
She went through the streets until 9 p.m. when she saw a light in the village shoemaker’s rooms. Both the man and his wife were startled, and Helen believed that she frightened them out of that $10.
After spending the night with a friend in Lower Lake she was on the stage for San Francisco the next morning. She found a place to live, which took the last of the $10, and went without anything to eat for a full three days.
She found work in a little newspaper, but it went out of business after about six months. She found work with another paper and moved steadily upward. After two or three years, a large Chicago paper, the Chicago Express, hired her at an excellent salary and she moved there.
In the meantime, back in Lake County, Dr. Baker had divorced her Nov. 18, 1879. What seems strange is that in the 1880 census, she is listed as living with him (both listed as divorced), which may just mean that he still considered his wife. Who knows?
In Chicago Helen started The Woman’s World and became the founder of the school of Mental Science. She met Charles C. Post, a writer and someone who thought as she did. They married and later moved south to Georgia, where they lived for five years, and then in 1892 moved to Volusia County, Fla.
In 1895 Charles Post and Charles Ballough, who had homesteaded an area which at that time was known as Halifax, platted the property into town lots. Helen Post named it “The City Beautiful,” but was really originally called East Daytona.
In 1897 the settlers of East Daytona, who at the time outnumbered those of the settlement to the south, successfully petitioned to have the Peninsula's post office moved to their area.
