Bixby Smith was an amateur painter of landscapes and portraits in a realist style that hearkens back to the mid-nineteenth century.

[7] With her inherited wealth, she financed Arthur's graduate divinity school studies at the University of Chicago and Harvard on his way to becoming a Unitarian minister.

[8] In 1909, when Bixby Smith discovered that her husband had been having an affair with the children's au pair, she helped him to get a new position in northern California at the First Unitarian Church in Berkeley.

[9][10] Smith's life became more complicated when she got romantically involved with Paul Jordan-Smith, an interim minister at the same church, who had been divorced in Chicago three years earlier, and who was also a graduate student and instructor in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley.

[8] After Bixby Smith's 1916 divorce from Arthur and marriage on March 30 of the same year to Paul, the couple moved with the children to her mansion in Claremont, which had in the meantime been turned into a school for boys by W. E. Garrison.

In 1917, the school's lease ended and they began renovating the house back into a private residence, which they named Erewhon on completion.

Her marriage to Paul added his three children from an earlier marriage (to Tennessee-born Ethel S. Park) to the household: Isabella Lucile, Wilbur Jordan, and Ralph Wendell, who lived part of their young lives with their father and stepmother at Claremont, and the rest of the time with their mother and stepfather in Houston.

[1]: 319 Bixby Smith's correspondence, along with photographs, press clippings, and other documents, are in the Charles E. Young Research Library Department of Special Collections at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Rancho Los Cerritos (now run as a museum) houses the Sarah Bixby Smith Manuscript Collection and has four of her oil paintings on display.