Robert Lewis (later: `Louis') Balfour Stevenson was born in Edinburgh on 13 November 1850. His father Thomas belonged to a family of engineers who had built most of the deep-sea lighthouses around the coast of Scotland. His mother, Margaret Isabella Balfour, came from a family of lawyers and church ministers.

From infancy Stevenson was a sickly child, suffering from recurrent respiratory illnesses and coughs. These illnesses persisted throughout his life, taking the form of fevers, coughing, bronchial infections, and eventually "Bluidy Jack," a hemorrhage of the lungs that results in blood issuing from the mouth.

At the age of seventeen he enrolled at Edinburgh University (1867-1872) to study engineering. He abandoned this course of studies and made the compromise of studying law. Stevenson was called to the Scottish bar in 1875 but did not practice since he had decided to become a writer. While at the university Stevenson began to write verse and literary essays which were published in several periodicals. He also became increasingly bohemian and artistic, and in general declared his independence from his middle-class family values.

In his early twenties Stevenson wrote a number of travel essays which portrays his perceptions, moods, memories, and the lessons he draws from his travel experiences. Two essays, Forest Notes (Cornhill Magazine, May 1876) and Fontainebleau: Village Communities of Painters (The Magazine of Art, May and June 1884), describe Stevenson's stay in the artist colonies around Fontainebleau in the spring of 1875, where the Barbizon school of French painting had been located. His motifs focus on aspiring painters seeking escape from bourgeois society in an artists' colony. Stevenson's first published volume, An Inland Voyage (1878), is an account of the journey be made by canoe from Antwerp to northern France.

In July 1876 at Grez, France, Louis met an American woman, Fanny Osbourne, who was to become his future wife. After falling in love, Fanny later returned home to Oakland, California to reconcile with her estranged husband, Sam Osbourne. Failing this, Fanny decided to seek a divorce and Stevenson set out from Scotland to California. The couple married in San Francisco on May 19, 1880. An account of their honeymoon on Mount St. Helena in the Napa Valley was written about in Stevenson's The Silverado Squatters (1883). After receiving a yearly allowance of 250 pounds from his father, the Stevensons' returned to Scotland, eventually settling in Bournemouth, England until the death of his father in 1887. During these years Stevenson produced many works including: Treasure Island (1883), A Child's Garden of Verses (1885), Kidnapped (1886), and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886).

After Thomas Stevenson's death, Louis, Fanny, her Lloyd Osbourne and the widowed Margaret Stevenson set sail for America, landing in New York in 1887. They lived temporarily at Saranac Lake, New York before chartering the schooner Casco, berthed in Oakland, California, to set sail for the South Seas in 1888 . In 1889, the Stevenson family arrived at the port of Apia in the Samoan islands, where Louis bought property and built a house he called Vailima (`five streams in Samoan'). Continuing his career as a successful author, he became known in the islands by his Samoan name "Tusitala" (`A Teller of Tales'). On December 3, 1894, at forty-four years of age, Stevenson died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage. He left unfinished the stories of St. Ives and The Weir of Hermiston.

Robert Louis Stevenson was buried at the summit of Mount Vaea overlooking the sea. On his tomb was inscribed his famous poem, Requiem (1887), with the first words: 'Under the wide and starry sky / Dig the grave and let me die . . . /.'

The Museum's original 800 items have increased to over 9,000 and the collection continues to grow. Many items were acquired directly from heirs and friends of the Stevenson family. Original letters; manuscripts; journals; first, variant, early and presentation editions (including translations and annotated copies); rare periodicals; paintings and drawings; sculptures; photographs; scrapbooks; and memorabilia form the collection which includes: Stevenson's childhood letters and drawings; the last words he ever penned; two pages from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Stevenson's own copy of his first book, An Inland Voyage; the copy of A Child's Garden of Verses which he presented to his wife; his manuscript notes on The Master of Ballantrae and The Morals and Ethics of Life; unpublished manuscript poems; and over a hundred books from his library in Samoa. His lead soldiers; the desk at which he worked and composed Treasure Island; the box he made when learning carpentry as a boy; a `girondole mirror;' toll road sign; and his wedding ring are among many of the memorabilia comprising the collection.

Robert Louis Stevenson met Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne at an artists' colony in September 1876 at the Hotel Chevillon, Grez-sur-Loing, a riverside village south-east of Paris, France. He was twenty-five, and she was thirty-six, an independent American `new woman,' separated from her husband and with two children. Stevenson's meeting with his future wife, Fanny, was to change the rest of his life. Two years later in 1879, Fanny decided to obtain a divorce from her philandering husband, Sam Osbourne. As a result, Stevenson set out from Edinburgh, Scotland for California determined to marry Fanny. While awaiting her divorce, he lived briefly in Monterey, San Francisco and Oakland, almost penniless and fighting critical illness.

Finally, on May 19, 1880, recently divorced Fanny Osbourne, of East Oakland, California, and Robert Louis Stevenson of Edinburgh, Scotland, were married in the rectory of St. Andrews Presbyterian Church on Post Street, San Francisco, by The Reverend Dr. William Anderson Scott. The name of the church was later changed to St. John's Presbyterian.

Stevenson had suffered from fibronous bronchitis since childhood, and the newly married couple were seeking a location from the summer fogs of San Francisco which were extremely damaging to Stevenson's sensitive lungs. Friends suggested Calistoga in the upper Napa Valley. Upon arrival at Calistoga, Robert Louis Stevenson and his bride registered at the Hot Springs Hotel. However, the cost of ten dollars per week per person for the cottage encouraged Stevenson to seek accommodations of a more modest nature. Through a local storekeeper, Morris Friedberg, the newlyweds were directed to an abandoned mining town named Silverado, on the shoulder of Mount St. Helena, over two thousand feet above the little hotsprings town. There the Stevensons'moved into a deteriorating three-story bunkhouse.

For two months at Silverado, Robert Louis Stevenson found rest, fresh air and warm sunshine, contentment and rare health. He kept a diary, his `Silverado Journal,' a meticulous record of his experiences which were incorporated into his famed Silverado Squatters (1883) written when he lived in Bournemouth, England. Many of his notes of the enchanting, almost primitive scenery around him later provided much of the descriptive detail for Treasure Island (1883).

The Vailima Foundation was established by Charlotte and Norman H. Strouse in 1968 to provide funds for the creation of a Robert Louis Stevenson Museum in the St. Helena area into which their collection of Stevenson books, art, manuscripts and memorabilia could be placed as a permanent gift.

The trustees of the Vailima Foundation direct the affairs of the Silverado Museum and the Foundation provides the funds for the maintenance and expansion of the collection.

While funds are not solicited from the public, contributions are always gratefully accepted. Gifts of Stevenson material suitable for the purposes of the Museum are encouraged and, since the Museum opened, many generous and important gifts of Stevensoniana have been received, thus insuring the continued growth of the collection.