The Adobes of Montecito

NOTICIAS Journal OÏ TÓ‰ SňÊÅ BÅÂıÅÂÅ HÈÍÊØÂÈÇÅÒ Museum

Vol. LIII

The Adobes of Montecito

No. 2

T

he name Montecito usually conjures up images of great wealth and grand estates. Yet there is another, somewhat hidden history to this affluent community. In the early 1800s, Montecito became home to some of the South Coast’s earliest Spanish settlers, settlers who built some of the first adobe residences in what is today Santa Barbara County. Willard Thompson unearths the story of these early settlers, documenting their efforts to build a community out of adobe bricks. He begins by examining how and why settlers came to be here and proceeds through the decades to profile Montecito’s few remaining historic adobes of today, architectural remnants of a California long past.

THE AUTHOR: Willard Thompson is the author of the 2008 historical novel, Dream Helper, the first

in a trilogy entitled The Chronicles of California. He has written a number of articles on the history of the western U.S., which have appeared in magazines such as Westways, Range, and Persimmon Hill.

He is a recipient of the Sara Miller McCune Award from the John E. Profant Foundation and a Santa Barbara Writers Conference Community of Voices Scholarship in recognition of his work in historical fiction. He is also a docent at the Santa Barbara Historical Museum.

AUTHOR’S ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: I wish to dedicate this article to Maria Herold, Curator

of the Montecito Association History Committee. Without her firm guiding hand, encyclopedic knowledge of Montecito history, and unflagging enthusiasm for this project, it could never have come to fruition. I also wish to thank Lee Goodwin, former librarian of the Presidio Research Center and Lynn Bremer, Director of the Santa Barbara Mission Archive-Library for their personal assistance. The Early California Population Project of the Huntington Library was a source for much of the genealogical documentation of the narrative.

Front cover photograph shows a portion of the former Reyes Foxen Adobe, from the collection of the Montecito Association History Committee. Photograph by Wayne McCall. The back cover photograph of the Masini Adobe is from the collection of the Santa Barbara Historical Museum.

The map on pages 54 and 55 was drawn by Maria Herold, Curator of the Montecito Association History Committee. The numbers in parentheses in the text are keyed to the numbered adobes on this map.

INFORMATION FOR CONTRIBUTORS: NOTICIAS is a journal devoted to the study of the

history of Santa Barbara County. Contributions of articles are welcome. Those authors whose articles are accepted for publication will receive ten gratis copies of the issue in which their article appears. Further copies are available to the contributor at cost. The authority in matters of style is the University of Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition. The Publications Committee reserves the right to return submitted manuscripts for required changes. Statements and opinions expressed in articles are the sole responsibility of the author.

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MONTECITO’S NINETEENTH-CENTURY

ADOBES AND THE SETTLERS WHO BUILT THEM

Willard Thompson

The ru ed men who gathered at the dusty village of Alamos in the parched Sonoran Desert in 8 were the unknowing founding fathers of several Santa Barbara and southern California dynasties. They were men named Dom ngue and Feli , Lugo and Olivera, Romero and Ju re , and they came from the small mining camps and poor farming villages of Sinaloa and Sonora.

The women and children with them were just as tough as their menfolk, made flinty by their hardscrabble existence on

the northern frontier of ueva Espa a.

A few were career soldiers, like Ildefonso Dom ngue , forty-four-yearold widower and veteran of the Baja presidios, who was taking his teenage son and daughter with him to a new life in the north. Victorino Feli was just thirty as the expedition gathered, unaware of the trouble that lay ahead on the trail for him and his wife, Mar a Micaela, and their four children, ranging in age from ten to under a year.

All the marchers shared one thing in

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Fernando avier de Rivera y Moncada, at right, was part of the 1 expedition led by aspar de Portol , at left. Rivera’s 1 81 expedition would meet disaster at Yuma. rawing by Russell Ruiz.

Collection of the Santa Barbara Historical Museum.

common: they were seeking a better future in Alta California, most as the founding garrison of the royal presidio of Santa Barbara, the remainder as the original settlers of Los Angeles.

The offspring of these soldiers, and other pioneers who followed, became the nucleus of a tiny community that formed in Montecito. Over the course of the nineteenth century, at least seventeen adobe buildings would be built there homes, churches, saloons, perhaps even lookout posts for watching activity in the Santa Barbara Channel on pueblo land where no records of ownership are available until the 8 0’s, when Santa Barbara became a U.S. city. Most of these adobes are gone now, lost to raging floods or Montecito’s gentrification that gathered momentum in the 8 0’s.

The story of Montecito’s nineteenthcentury adobes, and the families who lived,

worked, worshiped, and played in those crude buildings, has never been told in a comprehensive way, but an examination of source documents, California histories, public records, and family oral traditions provides intriguing hints and insights into a time that only exists now in stories passed through the generations.

The Anza Trail

Founding settlers of El Pueblo de uestra Se ora la Reina de os ngeles de R o de Porci cula joined the men and their families in Sonora and headed for the new royal presidio of Santa Barbara. This band constituted the first expedition of soldiers and settlers to Alta California since , when Juan Bautista de An a led a party of two hundred men, women, and children from New Spain across the Sonoran and Colorado deserts to Mission San Gabriel,

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on their way to founding the presidio and mission at Yerba Buena. The An a party pioneered the trail, using existing missions as staging points until jumping off into the desert north of the Tubac presidio in southern Ari ona. An a befriended the unpredictable Yuman Indians at the critical Yuma crossing of the Colorado River, securing an overland passage to Alta California.

The new expedition formed in Alamos in 8 . Its leader was a forty-year veteran of Spain’s army in New Spain. Captain of the presidio at Loreto for twentyfive years, Fernando avier de Rivera y Moncada2 was looking forward to the end

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of his military career. Rivera had been appointed governor of Alta California by Viceroy Antonio Mar a de Bucareli in , a compromise selection Bucareli made to placate Jun pero Serra, Padre Presidente of the Franciscan missions. Rivera was subsequently replaced as governor by Felipe de Neve in , and ordered back to Loreto as lieutenant governor. By then he had had his fill of army politics.

Recruiting the Soldados and Pobladores

After years of delay, Comandante eneral of the Interior Provinces, Teodoro de Croix, decided in 80 to establish the three promised missions on the Santa Barbara Channel. Croix instructed Governor Neve to implement it. Neve turned to Lieutenant Governor Rivera to round up the necessary men and supplies and bring them north. At the same time, Neve ordered the founding of a new pueblo near Mission San Gabriel in order to increase production of the meager supply of food reaching his frontier troops.

Croix authori ed Rivera to offer prospective colonists daily rations valued at two reales, and a monthly salary of ten pesos these to be a free gift, and to continue for three years.

A soldado de cuero or leather jacketed soldier, typical of the military during Spain’s colonization of Alta California. rawing by Russell Ruiz. Collection of the Santa Barbara Historical Museum.

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Military recruits, who enjoyed a better income, and were on a different footing, were expected to repay in full whatever was expended on them.

The recruits assembled at San Miguel de Horcasitas in Sonora, and then marched to Alamos, where they were outfitted and divided into two groups. All settlers and some of the soldiers with families, including Ildefonso Dom ngue , his sixteen-year-old son, Jos Mar a, and fourteen-year-old daughter, Mar a Luisa del Carmen, were put in a company of forty-six travelers, led

by Alf re Jos de iga. He guided them westward, across Sonora to the mouth of the Mayo River, on the Bay of Santa Barbara, where they boarded ships to cross the Sea of Corte for Baja. From there, the party marched overland, stopping to rest at the Dominican Baja missions along the way, and arrived at Mission San Gabriel on August 8, 8 , weary, but safe after six months of travel.

Victorino Feli , his wife Mar a Micaela, and their children, stayed with Rivera and soon began the tough overland trek toward Yuma. Mar a Micaela had given birth to a son while the party waited at Alamos her ten-year-old daughter, Mar a Marcelina, and two other sons marched by her side.

Disaster on the Colorado

What happened when Rivera’s party got to Yuma was a disaster. The former governor rode in the lead of forty soldiers and their families, and horses and mules. They arrived at the Yuman Indian villages, at the confluence of the Gila and Colorado rivers, in late June, sore-footed, hungry, and worn out. Rivera decided to

Jun pero Serra, father of the California Missions.

Copy executed by J. Mos ueda from the original now lost.

rest the animals before making a final push across the California desert to San Gabriel, so he sent his military escort back to their Sonoran presidios.

There were two missions, manned by four Franciscan priests, in the Indian villages at Yuma. Rivera assumed the Yumans were peaceful, and they were to a point but had begun to chafe at their treatment at the hands of the Spanish.

They resented the way mission animals were allowed to gra e on their lands, resented the newly imposed forms of punishments, and resented deeply the contempt with which they were treated.8 Rivera, in what some saw as a display of arrogance, failed to distribute enough gifts among the chiefs upon his arrival. Then,

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he turned his livestock loose to forage on the mesquite trees that were a staple of Yuman diet. He sent the majority of the party women and children and all but a few soldiers on its way to San Gabriel, where they arrived safely on July , while his animals continued stripping the mesquite trees around Yuma.

The end was inevitable. The massacre began on July and continued the next day. It started while Father Francisco Garc s was saying Mass. He was taken prisoner by the Indians, while Alf re Santiago de Islas, the military commander of the settlements, was killed immediately, and his mangled body tossed in the river. As the rebellion grew, another priest had his head chopped off.

When the sun finally set on the bloody scene the next day, Rivera, the men who had remained with him, and four Franciscan priests lay dead. One of the fren ied Yumans stripped Rivera of his uniform and strutted about in the soldier’s white-plumed, tri-cornered hat and goldbraided, robin-egg blue tunic.

The An a overland route to Alta California was never used again.

The Start of a Family Dynasty

Ildefonso Dom ngue , recently widowed, led his son and daughter from Baja to Mission San Gabriel, perhaps in search of a better life for them. Led by Alfere iga, the Dom ngue family took the water route to Baja and marched up the peninsula into Alta California. They joined the other half of the party, including ten-year-old Mar a Marcelina Feli and her family, who had safely made the desert crossings with Rivera, at San Gabriel in July 8 . There they all stayed until

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March 82 before continuing up the coast to San Buenaventura and Santa Barbara.

Ildefonso’s daughter, Mar a Luisa, stayed behind at San Gabriel to marry.

Ildefonso became a founding soldado of the Santa Barbara presidio in April 82, but the records show he returned to Baja the same year, 0 leaving his sixteen-yearold son, Jos Mar a, on his own. One year later, Jos enlisted for a ten-year hitch as a presidio soldier on December , 8 . It is difficult to document when Jos Mar a Dom ngue courted Mar a Marcelina Feli perhaps Ildefonso arranged the marriage with fellow presidio soldado, Victorino Feli , before returning to Baja.

As we will see later, their union in 8 was the start of an extended family with large landholdings in Montecito.

JunĂ­pero Serra Founds Mission San Buenaventura

On September , 8 , the first settlers of Los Angeles gathered where souvenir shops on Olivera Street now stand to participate in the formal founding of the pueblo. The fifty-nine soldados slated for missions San Buenaventura and Santa Barbara, and the royal presidio of Santa Barbara, continued to gather strength at San Gabriel until the spring of 82. They left on March 2 , traveling along the coast with a train of two hundred people, an equal number of horses and mules, packs of utensils, foodstuffs, servants, and Indian neophytes from San Gabriel. A census taken in 8 listed one hundred women and children in the march.

They traveled to la playa del canal de Santa B rbara, Ventura where, on Easter Sunday, March 0, 82, Jun pero Serra celebrated a High Mass, raised a simple wooden cross and founded Mission

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San Buenaventura. The entire party pitched in to erect a crude mission of brush and tules. Serra, now joined by Governor Felipe de Neve and lieutenant promoted from sergeant Jos Francisco Ortega, continued up the coast. Ahead of them lay the question of where the mission and fort, midway on the Santa Barbara Channel coast, would be built.

Dispute Over Mission Site

Jun pero Serra and Jos de G lve , Inspector General for King Carlos III, had discussed the need for a mission on the Channel as early as 8.

Santa Barbara was intended to be the third mission in the chain along Alta

California’s coast, halfway between San Diego and Monterey, but plans were postponed. When the party arrived at Santa Barbara on April , 82, Neve began an inspection of the area before making a final decision. 2 Reluctantly, he concluded the Santa Barbara site was better than a previously selected Mescaltit n site, and wrote to Teodoro de Croix, This place was preferable to the site of Mescaltit n, the name the Spaniards gave to the Chumash villages at the Goleta Slough because Santa Barbara, rather than Mescaltit n had better advantages for pasture, land, wood, stone, and water, the latter three of which are lacking at Mescaltit n.

In fact, the founding of Mission

The Royal Presidio at Santa Barbara. Watercolor by Russell Ruiz , 1 Santa Barbara Historical Museum.

. Collection of the

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Santa Barbara was still four years in the future and Serra never lived to see it. He and Governor Neve did not see eye to eye on how the channel missions should be administered. In addition, six new priests from Mexico, whom Serra was expecting to staff the channel missions, resigned when they learned Neve planned only one priest per mission, instead of the two priests serving at other Alta California missions.

Serra rode off in rather a huff when Neve told him no mission was in the offing. Soldados and their families settled in to build fortifications and housing. At first, the Santa Barbara pioneers lived in brush huts surrounded by the perimeter of the stockade being built. In the center of the planned presidio structures with roofs of branches or reeds were built for the comfort and protection of the troops and their families.

Neve’s instructions to Lieutenant Ortega specified that even those shelters should not be built until the stockade was finished. It is likely the founding families were exposed to the elements during the warm and dry spring and summer of 82, and were as protected as they were likely to be by the time the rainy season descended upon them. They survived inclement weather in their rough huts after all, life was not much different than the way they lived in New Spain before starting north.

There is no record of any adobe buildings being started before the spring of 8 , after Felipe Antonio de Goicoechea, a native of Real de Cosala in Sinaloa, like many of his men, replaced Ortega as comandante. On June 0 of that year, Goicoechea wrote to Governor Fages that construction of the guardhouse, three storerooms, barracks and three other buildings in the south

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fa ade of the presidio was beginning. Since May , twenty thousand adobe bricks had been made.

The adobe bricks were not made by the founding soldiers, although it seems likely they knew the skill from their former lives in the Mexican deserts.

Goicoechea reported to Fages that eight sailors from one of the Spanish ships bringing supplies from New Spain had assisted twelve Indian neophytes from Mission San Gabriel in the work. The bricks were made in pits dug by Indians in areas where the soil was suitable.

After adding straw, grass, pine needles, manure, weeds or similar binding materials, the Indians stripped to a minimum of clothing, jumped into the pit and jogged the combination until it was thoroughly mixed...

The dimensions of the mold were usually convenient fractions of one vara inches . enerally, the length of a brick in the Santa Barbara Presidio was 2 vara, the width 1 vara 22 inches by 11 inches and the thickness about 1 8 vara 4 inches ... Such a brick weighed 50 0 pounds... In a couple of weeks, depending on the weather, the bricks were dry enough to stack in piles adjacent to where the walls would be built. 8 Those first 20,000 adobe bricks were the foundation blocks from which Santa Barbara would rise. In time, an adobe brick pueblo would cluster around the fort. Not long after that, soldiers would begin building their own homes along the streams of Montecito. But first, the padres and soldados had to decide where to build the mission so that the mission lands could be described, and the pueblo lands established. It was not an easy decision. Each side had its favorite location.

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Mission Santa Barbara as it may have appeared in 1 4.

Engelhardt, .F.M., Santa Barbara Mission, 1 2 .

Mission Site is Last-Minute Decision

The location on Mission Ridge, where the familiar Greco-Roman fa ade of Mission Santa Barbara looks down over the city today, was not anybody’s first choice priest or soldier. The Franciscans had always favored building their missions as close to the largest Indian populations in the area as possible 20 the soldiers claimed they could not defend those locations and argued to build the fort at a distance from the Chumash villages.

While the evidence is sparse, it seems likely that a location in the future settlement of Montecito was the place selected for the mission after the Mescaltit n site was rejected by the military. Fages’s report on his inspection of Montecito with Fray Vicente de Santa Mar a from Mission San Buenaventura says they examined the place called Montecito, one league to the

rawing by Alexander Harmer in ephyrin

south of Santa Barbara and three valleys in length. It is thought to be the proper place to establish a mission. 2 A Spanish league was generally 2.2 miles.

Opinions changed when it came time to actually found the mission in the late fall of 8 . Father Fermin Lasu n,22 along with Comandante Goicoechea and three soldiers went out to examine the Montecito to look over the proposed mission site and found it unsuitable.

They decided then and there that the locale of El Pedregoso was the proper place. 2 ephyrin Engelhardt, OFM, says Lasu n, Goicoechea, and party rode about one league from the presidio to El Montecito to examine the locations.2 With the decision finally made, the Franciscans and Goicoechea established the dividing line between mission and pueblo lands, an important distinction that would impact the future development of Santa Barbara and Montecito, and play a

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key role in establishing the limits of land that would eventually be granted to retired soldado Jos Mar a Dom ngue . According to Maynard Geiger:

though the colonials preferred black loam as an adobe substance, the weight and fragility of the finished block precluded long hauling and every kind of soil was used.2

The next day the dividing line between mission and presidio was established. Five soldiers, including Jos Mar a om nguez and Jos Ayala, gave testimony concerning the dividing line. Pueblo lands ran from Arroyo Burro len to the southern point of the mission gardens25 about the intersection of Santa Barbara Street and Mission Street on a straight line to the crest of the mountains, along crest, along Carpinteria Creek and back to Arroyo Burro beach.2

Retired Soldados Receive Land

The boundaries are important because when soldiers started retiring from military life, many of them wanted to be on pueblo land, as far from mission lands as possible, and that made the East Valley, as they called Montecito, an ideal spot to build a home. The boundaries are also important because of a later lawsuit over a land grant that rocked Santa Barbara for years, and delayed the U.S. Government confirming pueblo lands to the American city.

Adobe was the logical material for retired soldiers to use for home building.

Not only was it a familiar material to the men and women of northern Mexico, there simply wasn’t enough lumber readily available to them. According to architectural historian Harold Kirker: ...at the time of Spanish colonization of orth America, the typical farmhouse in both old and ew Spain was constructed of either rubblestone or mud blocks... California’s moderate climate and the availability of familiar adobe materials made it easy for the Spanish Mexican immigrants to follow traditional architectural practices. And

It’s common for historians to say the soldados were given land in lieu of back pay following Mexico’s war for independence.

While it is clear that the Spanish and Mexican governments often failed to pay the men who manned the presidios, to say the land was in lieu of back pay is misleading. The men recruited in Sinaloa and Sonora were mostly family men who knew they were headed for new lives as permanent settlers of Alta California. In a personal reminiscence, Margaret Delbrook Villa, a Dom ngue family descendent, wrote, To the populace of these small corners of Mexico... decisions had to be made that would affect the future of the families who were migrating and the ones remaining. Families, neighbors and community gatherings were held to listen to the great Capit n Rivera about this great land which needed to be populated by families. 28 It’s also clear that the allocation of land was not a face-saving way of mollifying the near-destitute soldiers and their families after their service in Santa Barbara was over. California’s presidios were first of all military outposts, W. W. Robinson wrote in and in California, but they were also recogni ed as pueblos, the captains of the presidios being authori ed to grant and distribute to soldiers and citi ens house lots and lands within the four squareleague area measured from the center of the presidio square. 2 In 8 , Galindo Navarro, the Spanish

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DomĂ­nguez Adobe (1)

pin down a more exact date it could have been earlier. What we know for certain is that Jos Mar a and Marcelina picked a fine place to settle their growing family.

Their adobe stood on the east side of the tumbling, year-round waters of Montecito Creek, just below the confluence of Cold Springs and Hot Springs creeks. The deeply cut creek bed was strewn with large boulders swept down from the Santa Yne Mountains, providing find feeding grounds for fish, possibly steelhead trout, and water needed for adobe brick-making.

The steep banks were lined with alder and willow trees that also may have provided building materials.

Farther east, the land was more open, dotted with sycamore and coastal live oak trees on the rolling countryside, dropping in gentle terraces toward the Pacific Ocean.

One early resident of Montecito described the land as chiefly open fields and low wooded hills. The land was alive with small animals and birds nesting in the treetops and singing their unique songs along the streams. When the Dom ngue family settled in, the scent of flowers and fruit trees they planted, in addition to grapevines, undoubtedly added sweetness to the air.

Alfred Robinson described the kind of house the Dom ngue family probably built when he sailed into San Diego harbor in 8 0 and saw ... about thirty houses of rude appearance, mostly occupied by retired veterans, not so well constructed in respect either to beauty or stability as the houses at Monterey. 2

Dom ngue family reminiscences, on file at the Montecito Association History Committee, place the building of the first Dom ngue adobe somewhere in the early 800s, but no records have been located to

Mar a uisa om nguez poses beside the grapevine planted by her mother, Mar a Marce lina om nguez. Parra rande ane in Montecito commemorates this large grapevine. Collection of the Santa Barbara Historical Museum.

equivalent of attorney general, issued a written opinion, based on the Law of the Indies, granting presidio comandantes the authority to make grants of land outside the pueblo lands, too, with the stipulation the grantees would be obliged to use the land that is, put men in possession, build a house and keep cattle. 0 Jos Mar a Dom ngue was not among the first retirees at the Santa Barbara presidio, but he was shortly to become the most prominent landholder in Montecito.

Some of the veterans who came with Rivera may have begun leaving military service as early as the 0s. Dom ngue , who was sixteen when he came to Santa Barbara in 82, enlisted in the army the following year, along with his friend Jos f Calixto Ayala. Both are mentioned frequently in accounts at the presidio and in mission records. Their enlistments were not up until , later if they reenlisted.

They married sisters: Dom ngue to Mar a Marcelina Feli , age fifteen, around 8 or 8 . Calixto and Juana Vitala’s marriage was the first non-Chumash wedding recorded at the Santa Barbara Mission, December , 8 .

Mar a Marcelina Dom ngue had her first child at sixteen, in 8 , a son who died shortly after birth. All told, Marcelina delivered fourteen children, of whom all but two survived to adulthood. As Jos Mar a’s enlistment neared an end and his family grew, the need for housing must have become acute.

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No details of this first Dom ngue adobe have survived, yet it isn’t hard to close your eyes and envision it. Jos del Carmen Lugo described a typical adobe in the 8 0s: The house...rarely had more than two rooms.

One served as the entry and living room and the other as the sleeping room... Many of the houses had a doorway hung with sheepskin,

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cowhide or horsehide. No door had a lock or key... The adobe bricks would have conformed to the same dimensions used by brick makers at the presidio, and the building would have been a single story with a flat roof covered with tules or thatch supported on vegas rafters of pine or willow poles.

There would have been no fireplace because

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cooking was done outdoors or in a separate building.

Dom ngue probably built the house himself, using soil he found on the site.

Water came from the creek to make the mud, and the rafters could have been cut from any trees of the right length close enough at hand. It would not have been a grand house no whitewashed walls or red-tiled roof, just a window or two, with no glass, and a door. The floor would have been hard-packed earth, often with some binding material added.

Dom ngue located his home near an existing path the settlers came to call Valley Road in what became Spanish Town. Virtually all early Montecito settlement took place along the year-round streams where they intersected Valley Road at Montecito Creek, and eastward at Oak Creek, and San Ysidro Creek. The retiring soldiers knew water was essential for their families’ survival, and necessary for making adobe bricks. The abundant deer and gri ly bears that thrived in Montecito at that time also depended on these creeks.

Jos and Marcelina were the kind of people around whom legends are woven, and legends abound for both. As other families came to live along the banks of Montecito Creek, Marcelina assumed the unofficial title of matriarch, possibly in recognition of being one of Spanish Town’s first settlers, or possibly because of her warm hospitality at fiestas and fandangos.

Marcelina’s fame spread as a small grapevine she planted grew into a Parra rande. How the vine got its start is subject to a wide range of folklore. One story has Marcelina as a single woman living at home with her parents when a poor suitor gives her his riding crop, vowing to return to claim it, and her, when he makes his

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fortune. She sticks the crop in the ground, perhaps because she doesn’t believe the young man will ever return. The twig grows into the magnificent grapevine that was exhibited at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 8 . This version is patently untrue for a myriad of reasons.

Another version has the switch given to her by her husband, Jos , to hurry along a donkey she was riding.

More believable is the explanation that Marcelina obtained grapevine cuttings from the mission padres. Margaret Delbrook Villa recalls her ancestors telling her, The mission grapevine slip she Marcelina planted was in front of her adobe casa at what is now 8 0 actually 80 Parra Grande Lane. Marcelina carried water in an olla from the nearby creek to water this large grapevine whose trunk grew to fourteen inches in diameter.

The truth of Jos Mar a’s legends is harder to pin down, but important to the development of Montecito. Vicente Ju re , Jos Mar a’s grandson, thought Jos Mar a supervised the building of the mission dam and made bells for the mission church. A census of people living in the pueblo of Santa Barbara in 8 lists Jos Mar a’s occupation at age sixty-nine as brick layer, alba il which lends plausibility to the role he may have played in constructing the mission dam, and would certainly suggest he built the family adobe himself. 8 Los Prietos y Najalayegua Land Grant

Jos Mar a Dom ngue ’s eighth child, Jos Mar a de la Cru Dom ngue , received the Rancho Los Prietos y Najalayegua land grant in 8 from governor P o Pico. Jos de la Cru had previously purchased the land for twenty dollars in gold and two kegs of

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the alterations took place, but the new map was bitterly contested in the courts and the U. S. Congress. At one point, because he was accused of altering the map to suit his purposes, Huse needed bodyguards to protect him from a lynching at the hands of an unruly mob. It took until 8 0 for the legal war to be fought out, with Huse and his cronies losing, but the U. S. Congress was unable to patent the pueblo lands to the City of Santa Barbara until the battles were fully resolved in 8 2.

More Domínguez Adobes Are Built

Charles E. Huse, the attorney who unsuccessfully claimed that the os Prietos y ajalayegua land grant included the Santa Barbara pueblo lands.

Collection of the Santa Barbara Historical Museum.

aguardiente grape brandy from Ygnacio Lugo, an invalid presidio soldier who was squatting on the land now Dom ngue was requesting legal title. According to the original map dise o filed with the request, the land grant lay north of the Santa Yne Mountains along the Santa Yne River, and south of the San Rafael Mountains.

The land was considered without value.

In 8 , Jos de la Cru Dom ngue ’s son sold the rancho. In 8 , the map of the grant came into the hands of Charles Enoch Huse, a Santa Barbara attorney Huse bought the rancho in 8 . While in Huse’s possession, the map was altered to show the grant extending south of the Santa Yne range to include all the pueblo lands of Santa Barbara, including Montecito much more valuable real estate. It is unclear how

Whether Jos Mar a and Marcelina were generous in giving portions of their Montecito land to their children when the latter married, or if the children and grandchildren just settled around them, is unclear. The Dom ngue children began marrying in 8 , so it is likely Jos and Marcelina built their own adobe home along the creek before that time, probably after Jos ’s enlistment ended around the turn of the nineteenth century. Their children’s land spread eastward along Valley Road as far as Oak Creek, and father east along San Ysidro Creek.

Since Jos Mar a Dom ngue was a brick layer, it seems likely he had a hand in building the adobes his family lived in, probably with the help of his sons and sons-in-law. The land might have been parceled out to each child as they married or their military service ended, but no documentation of that has been found. Even if the Montecito land was not specifically granted to him and his offspring, Jos Mar a may have felt that by building homes for his children, who lived in them, he was establishing their claim to the land.

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The padr n census of 8 0 is an interesting and important document. It provides at least a starting point for dating the adobe structures in Montecito because we see Jos and Marcelina’s children married and living in separate living units. It is likely they set up homes in Spanish Town and along Valley Road during the 820s and early 8 0s as they married and raised their own children. 2 The padr n also shows the beginning of family dynasties of Santa Barbara.

Dom ngue sons married Romero, Villa, Urquide , Valen uela, and Varleas women the daughters married Rodrigue , Lugo, and Navarro men. The padr n shows a general population in the Pueblo Lands of Santa Barbara of 0 people in 8 , with eight officers and twenty-six enlisted men at the presidio. There is no information about how many of these people were living in Montecito.

Mar a Marcelina died in 8 at the age of ninety-four, but her will was not finali ed until 8 , with Charles Fernald representing all absent parties’ interests in the estate and guardian for minor heirs.

Concerned for her youngest daughter, Mar a Luisa, who was fifty and unmarried at the time the will was drawn, Marcelina left her second house probably wooden on the Parra Grande land, with the stipulation that, should Mar a Luisa marry, the house would revert to son Jos , although she did not specify which Jos . She left the land to Jos , and the original adobe home to daughter Mar a del Carmen, wife of Jos Mar a Rodr gue . There were fruit trees growing on the property and Marcelina gave one tree each to several children and grandchildren.

The will does not establish any other division of property among Marcelina’s children, but an 8 property map of

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Montecito, drawn by W. T. Norway, shows between and 0 acres owned by ten different Dom ngue family members.

Juárez Adobes— ˙ome and Bunkhouse

Jos and Marcelina’s twelfth child, Mar a no given middle name , was born in 808. In the 8 census, she is twenty-four, living with her parents and unmarried sister, Mar a Luisa. The census shows that Mar a had three children born on the wrong side of the blanket out of wedlock living with her, ages five, two, and one.

Life changed for Maria when she married Victor Dolores Ju re . Victor came to Santa Barbara sometime after 8 and the couple married on July 2, 8 8, with Father Narcisco Duran conducting the ceremony. Victor was twenty-three years old Mar a was approaching her thirtieth birthday.

Ju re family tradition says Victor was a wanderer who came to Santa Barbara and lived at Casa de la uerra because, according to Anita Ju re Hastie, the de la Guerra family, didn’t want him to run around loose. Vicente Ju re , the youngest of Victor and Mar a’s eleven children, said his father learned to read and write in the de la Guerra household with the de la Guerra sons. When it came time for the wedding, The de la Guerra family furnished the money . His wedding clothes were green, trimmed with gold and silver, knee breeches with buttons up and down. Victor Ju re left his wife with her mother and father in Montecito while he worked at Santa Cru Island for three years, herding cattle and sheep to pay for the finery furnished by de la Guerra. 8 Victor and Mar a built their adobe home

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Mar a Ju rez de om nguez and her husband, Victor, built their adobe home on the south side of Valley Road. She is shown here with one of her sons, Vicente Ju rez.

Collection of the Santa Barbara Historical Museum.

on the south side of Valley Road, east of the trail to the Hot Springs, after their marriage. 2 By today’s street numbering it would have been at 8 East Valley Road, the current location of Casa del Herrero, the George Washington Smithdesigned home of George Fox Steedman.

The 8 Sanborn map shows the adobe still standing behind an old wooden structure, both vacant. Both buildings have disappeared from the 2 Sanborn map that shows the land is now owned

by Mrs. J. H. Steedman 0 with the notation, New dwellings to be built here.

According to witnesses in the early years of the twentieth century, the adobe stood where the octagonal tiled pool of Casa del Herrero’s is today.

Vicente Ju re recalls life around the adobe, as told by his parents: The mountains were covered with chaparral and were full of wild animals. Cattle roamed everywhere. They his parents cleared land near the house and grew fruit trees figs, pears, apples and olives. They grew also squash, corn, beans and watermelons.

They had plenty of venison and beef. 2 The Ju re couple built another adobe structure farther east, near Oak Creek, just west of what later became San Ysidro Road. The building, improperly referred to as the Hosmer Adobe, is still standing.

Until Bradbury Dinsmore purchased the structure in 8 and presented it as a wedding gift to his daughter, Frances, and her new husband, Thomas Hosmer,

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it had served as a bunkhouse for the male Ju re children, not as Victor and Mar a’s primary residence as is typically believed.

The little adobe, I gather, was built to house the young men in the family who were going to stand guard against the animals that came down from the mountains to feast on whatever they had growing for the household... The children, I suppose, timed themselves maybe two or three took turns watching at night against the bears and lions that would come down, you see, and eat.

Vicente remembers that he and his brothers slept outside the house with about a do en dogs which were pretty mean. Two bears came down from the forest after the beef but the dogs drove them away.

The Ju re -Hosmer Adobe, Santa Barbara County Historical Landmark , was a simple, one-room bunkhouse, built on a rock foundation with two-foot thick walls. The plaque, placed on the building when it became a County Landmark, says

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it was built around 8 0. It is more likely, though, that it was built in the 8 0s if its purpose was to serve as bunkhouse for the Ju re ’s growing brood of children.

The adobe is twenty-six feet, seven inches long on its north-south sides and almost twenty feet on its east-west sides.

It was a single-story building with a flat roof. There were two windows, one each in the center of the east and west walls, and three doors. It is likely the Ju re boys had several lean-tos attached to the outside walls.

The Hosmer adobe in its original state was oored according to the prevailing Santa Barbara mode, which was accomplished by boiling asphalt seepage from the Carpenteria sic tar beds with sand and spreading it on a packed earth base while still hot. The rooms were not ceiled, the exposed rafters being rough hewn timbers. 8 This statement by Clarence Cullimore about the original flooring would appear to be his speculation there is no

The Ju rez Hosmer Adobe, a Santa Barbara County andmark. Victor and Mar a Ju rez built this adobe and used it as a bunkhouse for their children. It eventually passed into the hands of the Thomas Hosmer family. Collection of the Montecito Association History Committee.

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documentation available and hard to believe that the builders of a bunkhouse would make the long wagon trip to the Carpinteria beach for tar asphaltum when many adobes used cattle or ox blood mixed with sand to hard pack a floor.

In fairness, there is no question that asphaltum was a common roofing material and could also have been used in the floor. According to Harold Kirker, ...the early discovery of the La Brea pits in the Cahuenga Valley of Los Angeles, and the subsequent uncovering of similar deposits in Santa Barbara, Santa Clara, San Luis Obispo and San Diego, made asphalt the common roofing material in colonial California.

Sarah Bixby Smith confirms this approach to roofing. In her personal reminiscence, Adobe ays, she wrote about the building of Juan Temple’s adobe at Rancho Los Cerritos, Originally, the roofs were flat and roofed in the usual Southern California fashion, the first layer of redwood planks, then a covering of sand or gravel over which was poured hot brea asphaltum from the open beds beyond Los Angeles. ...When the summer sun was hot on the roofs the asphalt grew so soft we could dig it out with a stick and shape it with our fingers...but even without our intervention, the alternate shrinking and expansion of the substance made the roof more or less like a sieve in winter. 0 If asphaltum was used for roofing an adobe, it still would have left exposed the slender vegas supporting the tules over which the asphaltum was poured.

The threat of the roof catching fire may partly explain the reluctance of early adobe builders to have fireplaces in their homes. Tile roofs were far less common they became a roofing material after the Mexican Revolution in 82 , but were

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common only in the most affluent homes.

Tiles were replaced by thatch and shingles when the Yankees arrived.

The Ju re Adobe was greatly modified after Bradbury Dinsmore bought it for his daughter. The roof line was raised to a medium pitch so the ceiling could be finished. The roof was shingled. A wooden floor was installed, as was a fireplace.

Wooden structures were appended to the building to create more rooms, and a water tower built nearby. A story persists that the adobe had so few windows because there was a tax on windows at the time, but it seems more likely a bunkhouse simply didn’t need more windows.

Ownership of Valenzuela Adobe Uncertain

How many new settlers came to Spanish Town in the 8 0s and 8 0s, where Montecito Peak’s shifting moods of suffused golden morning light and winter pink moments, looked down on them, is difficult from this vantage point in time to quantify. Yet Montecito was clearly a community unto itself as early as the 8 0s. Alfred Robinson described it as ... the little settlement, as he rode to the Hot Springs in 8 .

On the 8 W. T. Norway land map of Montecito, 2 near the corner of Valley Road and the road to the Hot Springs, property owned by F. Valen uela is shown.

The property butted against Montecito Creek, across from the Parra Grande land of Jos Mar a and Marcelina Dom ngue .

Around 8 or 880, according to David Myrick, the nearest neighbor to William Alston Hayne, an early Montecito settler, was Sr. Valen uela who lived in a commodious adobe.

The 8 Sanborn map also shows the property

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owned by F. Valen uela, but he or she is something of a mystery person.

One possibility for the identity of F. Valen uela is that she was Filomena Valen uela, who married Francisco Dom ngue in 8 . It is likely the newlyweds were given the land adjacent to the original Dom ngue property by Jos Mar a and Marcelina. Francisco died in 82 and Filomena married Vicente Feli , but the ownership records may have continued to carry the Dom ngue name. The Sanborn map and a map drawn by Victor Lope , a youth, in 88 are the only other records of an adobe house existing on the property.

More DomĂ­nguez Adobes Along Valley Road

The 8 Montecito land map is loaded with the name Dom ngue . Jos Mar a and Marcelina’s children and grandchildren

spread along Valley Road from Sycamore Canyon to Oak Creek and beyond. It was a major family landholding and, without records, we can only guess whether it was all granted by presidio comandantes for military service or simply squatted on.

Dom ngue adobe structures stretched in almost straight lines along both sides of Valley Road, from Parra Grande to Oak Creek. On the south side of the dusty path, before arriving at the Ju re home, as your horse carried you east, you came upon an adobe on land owned by P. Dom ngue .

Around , the adobe still stood on land then owned by J. Minot. The Moody family, who had purchased nearby land on Hot Springs Road at the corner of East Pepper Lane, where they built a home called The Peppers, reported seeing the adobe on the adjacent property.

The single-room structure was well south of the road and hidden away from

The small, single room adobe built by P. om nguez still stands east of Hot Springs Road.

Collection of the Montecito Association History Committee.

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The largest of the adobes built by . om nguez stood in the vicinity of present day Montecito’s Upper Village. Collection of the Montecito Association History Committee.

it. At the time it was photographed, it had a peaked, shingled roof, windows on two sides and a wooden door, all with strongly timbered lintels. In photos, the building looks no more than ten feet by twenty feet, hardly space to raise a large family, but typical of the time. When the pictures were taken, its single room was functioning as a storage shed, but still had adobe charm as it nestled under tall trees, with flowering shrubs growing around it.

Another adobe, on land owned by A. Dom ngue , has survived into the twentyfirst century.

New York architect Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue purchased the land in 8 and built a comfortable home by adding on to the small adobe.

Goodhue had designed El Fureidis on Parra Grande Lane for James Waldron Gillespie in 0 and was working on a commission for Gillespie’s cousin, Henry Dater, whose house later became known as Val Verde.

During this time, Goodhue also designed the fourth Santa Barbara Country Club building, now the Montecito Country Club. Montecito so charmed Goodhue he decided to build a home there. The land he chose lay about halfway between Picacho Lane and San Ysidro Road on the north side of East Valley Road. It survives today incorporated into a private residence.

In a letter to his friend Cecil Brewer in August 8, Goodhue wrote about the property, ...In one corner is, or rather was, since it is largely demolished now, an old adobe’...consequently, I am rigging up our old one it was actually a stable into a cottage by means of a stone addition...

Goodhue is understating his plan here.

In its finished form, his old adobe was surrounded by rooms of wood and stone, with a partial second story added.

Nearby, but still farther east on Valley Road, on land owned by L. Dom ngue

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in 8 , stood three adobe buildings marching uphill northward from the road.

Today, the land those adobes stood on is the site of Montecito’s Upper Village, with the largest of the three buildings slightly north of Tecolote Bookstore. In 88 , when H.J. Buell purchased the grocery store on the north side of Valley Road from Timothy and Matilda Wheeler, 8 the large adobe stood behind the store, in the center of the property. The building, photographed in the 8 0s, was taken down to make room for the Buell’s large two-story house at the turn of the century.

May Whitton, Buell’s aunt, painted a picture from the photo. Both photo and painting show a handsome large adobe under tall trees. Along the front, under a covered veranda that ran the length of the building, are three doors and two windows, suggesting the adobe had more than one room. Several large barrels stand on the veranda in the photo. A shed is attached to the building with its own door. Shed and barrels suggest the building was used to store items sold in the grocery store. A chimney indicates a fireplace was built into one end of the building that had a shingled roof. All indications point to an adobe built in the second half of the nineteenth century.

The other two adobe buildings on L. Dom ngue land survived into the 0s.

One, approximately where a medical office now stands in Montecito Village, was used as a storeroom for the service station on East Valley Road until it was demolished.

The other adobe, well to the north, where an auto repair shop now sits, also disappeared at the same time. No record of the original builders of these three adobes exist, but it is likely all were built by Dom ngue children or grandchildren.

NOTICIAS Romero Family Builds an Adobe East of Oak Creek

Juan Mar a Romero was not a founding soldado of the Santa Barbara presidio, but he was the founder of Montecito’s largest extended family, surpassing the Dom ngue clan in si e if not in land ownership. Standing just five feet, two inches tall, with medium red hair, brown eyes, a fine slim nose and a birthmark on his right cheek, Juan Mar a arrived in Alta California in 8 , and by the next year he was a corporal of the Santa Barbara company.

The son of a soldier from Guadalajara, Juan Mar a was born around at Loreto in Baja California. He married Lugarda Salgado there in . Lugarda was about twenty-six and Juan Mar a was thirty-six when they arrived in Alta Calfiornia, bringing with them five of their eventual twelve children, including their oldest, Jos f Antonio. He was twenty-two years old and a soldier at the Santa Barbara presidio when he married fourteen-year-old Dolores Dorotea Alanis in 80 at the San Gabriel mission. 0 Jos f and Dorotea settled in Montecito after his enlistment in the army ended.

They were a productive couple, having seventeen children, fourteen of whom lived to adulthood. Jos f and Dorotea chose a location away from Spanish Town, on a sloping ledge of land overlooking the Channel that would ever after be called Romero Hill. They built an adobe near a spring, 2 commanding an elevated position with a view, just north of present day Santa Rosa Road, where it turns sharply. 8 No trace of the building exists today except in the memory of Romero family members who had it pointed out to them by their parents.

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The venerable San Ysidro Adobe still stands on the ranch property. The circumstances surrounding the construction of the adobe remain shrouded in mystery. Collection of the Santa Barbara Historical Museum.

It did not take long for Romero Hill to rival Spanish Town’s population. It had fewer commercial establishments than the enclave on Montecito Creek before the turn of the century, but must have been a bustling place of Romero extended family activity. The clip-clop sounds of horses and wagons crossing the wooden bridge over Oak Creek, as the sun fell into the Pacific, signaled the evening return of Romero workers, some from shops in Spanish Town, some from El Rincon Rancho in Carpinteria, and some from other parts of the county. A map dated around 20, shows twenty-seven structures all wooden east of Miramonte Avenue and south of Santa Rosa Road on Romero Hill occupied by Romeros or families by marriage. By then, the patriarch’s adobe was melting into the ground, the ruin barely visible in two photographs owned by a Romero descendant.

Dorotea Romero was as much a Montecito matriarch as Marcelina Dom ngue , but she did not enjoy the

fame of a Parra rande. Dorotea presided over the clan on Romero Hill for almost thirty years after her husband died in 8 .

When Dorotea wrote her will in 8 , at the age of eighty-nine, several years before her death, she divided everything she had into twelve equal pieces that she gave to her surviving children. She named acar as, her youngest, executor.

San Ysidro Ranch Adobe

Arguably, no other Montecito adobe has been the subject of more misinformation than the Olivera Adobe California State Historic Landmark, Santa Barbara County Historic Landmark 8, 8 , still standing on the San Ysidro Ranch.

It has become the subject of anecdote and romantic legend over the years, but the facts are romantic enough without the embellishments time has spread thickly over them.

In fact, even the name Olivera Adobe might be a stretch, for nowhere in the chain

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MAP LEGEND . Jos and Marcelina Dom ngue Adobe.

2. Victor and Mar a Ju re Adobe. . Ju re Adobe Bunkhouse Hosmer Wooden Home. . F. Valen uela Adobe. . P. Dom ngue Adobe. . A Dom ngue Goodhue Adobe. . Three L. Dom ngue Adobes.

8. Jos and Dorotea Romero Adobe. . Tom s Olivera San Ysidro Adobe.

0. Foxen Ayala Adobe. . Loren ana Adobe.

2. Our Lady of Mount Carmel Adobe Church. . San Leandro Ranch Adobe. . Lookout Adobe. . Masini Adobe, Kitchen and Adobe Barn. . Adobe Castle.

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umbers in parentheses in text are keyed to map.

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Interior of the San Ysidro Adobe. Bradbury T. insmore bought the property in 18 8 and transformed the ranch into a veritable arden of Eden. Collection of the Montecito Association History Committee.

of ownership of the property does the name Tom s Olivera appear. He was a soldier at the Santa Barbara presidio and the son of a founding soldado, Ygnacio Olivera, who was married to Mar a Maceala Feli by Fr. Jun pero Serra at Mission San Gabriel in October . Ygnacio was a sergeant at the founding of the Santa Barbara presidio. His son, Tom s, was born before Christmas in 8 .

Over the years, Tom s’s name has been linked with the Santa Barbara Mission, including claims that the mission priests had the adobe built for him and or as a way station for traveling Franciscans.

No records have been found to support either statement. The adobe stands on Pueblo Land where the padres had no authority to build, and the location was off the route to the mission and, even into the 8 0s and 8 0s, a difficult place to reach.

Tom s married a widow, Tomasa Cota, in 80 in Santa Barbara. She had

married Jos Mar a Osuna at Mission San Buenaventura in 80 , and bore him a daughter, Eduarda, before he died. Tomasa brought her young daughter to live with her and Tom s in the adobe. Most sources date the adobe house from 82 .

Olivera family tradition claims Tom s was appointed superintendent of Santa Barbara, Santa In s and La Pur sma missions, but when they were seculari ed in 8 - he was left without a job. In the Census of 8 , Tom s, Tomasa and five children are living in the Pueblo Lands, but the darkly beautiful Eduarda is no longer living at home. She married William Benjamin Foxen, an English sailor, who was bapti ed into the Catholic Church as Guillermo Domingo Foxen on the eve of their nuptials, May 2 , 8 . There is a charming legend about the first meeting of Foxen and Eduarda. He needed a light for his pipe when he visited the Olivera adobe to do business with Tom s, and she rushed to his side with it. Their eyes met

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and it was love at first sight. There are a couple of variations on this story, none of which are documented. It is more likely that Foxen met his future bride in his Santa Barbara store when her stepfather came in to trade just the typical tale of a dashing gringo being swept off his feet by a darkeyed se orita.

Swept off his feet or not, Foxen had a wandering eye. On January , 8 2, about eight months after he wed Eduarda, Foxen became the father of Jos de la Lu Reyes Foxen, whose mother was Mar a Antonia Stuart. Mother and son Reyes will appear again later in this narrative.

In 8 , Tom s Olivera petitioned Governor Juan Alvarado for land in the Santa Yne Valley. He was granted Rancho Tepusquet, yet in 8 - , he apparently was living back in Santa Barbara, possibly in the adobe, 8 although there is no indication he improved the land around it.

At this point, he passes out of the history of the San Ysidro Ranch Adobe. After a flurry of short-term owners, Colonel Bradbury T. Dinsmore, a Maine man and former lumberman on the Kennebec River, who came to Montecito by way of Humboldt County, bought the ranch in 8 8. He transformed the barren chaparral into a veritable Garden of Eden.

B.T. Dinsmore’s farm, after its metamorphosis from a rocky, sagebrush wasteland to a productive property, was frequently cited as an example of what could be accomplished with thoughtful planning and hard work, David Myrick wrote in his History of Montecito and Santa Barbara Volume I. Dinsmore summari ed his successes, writing in 882: I’ve had first rate success in getting rid of brush and rocks. ats, wheat, barley, corn and potatoes have done extremely well

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here when planted at the right time and without irrigation. Also, all kinds of garden vegetables... I have 50 orange trees four years old 50 three years old, and 200 two years old. I have 250 lemon trees and fifty lime also apples, pears, plums, peaches, figs, bananas and pineapples all growing finely and looking healthy.

Dinsmore also grew strawberries, which he picked and marketed from January through September. He planted almond trees and several varieties of grapes, commenting, The slope on the south side of the Santa Yne Mountains is undoubtedly the best grape region on the Pacific Coast.

The little adobe, measuring thirteen by eighteen feet in a single room, was home to the Dinsmore family for several years. Dinsmore’s grandson, Winfield B. Metcalf, remembered it as a co y home.

Grandfather Dinsmore and Grandmother were living in an adobe of one room, two doors and an asphaltum floor on their place. They cut out a place in the east wall and put in a window, and with a bed and a stove Grandfather and Grandmother were quite comfortable. 80 Royalty in the Ayala Adobe

When Jos de la Lu Reyes Foxen was bapti ed in the mission church on January 2, 8 2, no one in attendance was likely to have reali ed the irony of his name. For the small babe was truly the heir of kings and princes.

The royal link came from his mother’s side. Mar a Antonia Stuart’s father’s lineage was traced back to Scottish kings

by Barbara Ju re Wilson.8 George Stuart was a twenty-one-year-old midshipman on HMS Bounty in 8 , under Lieutenant

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William Bligh.82 He was not a mutineer, but was put ashore on Tahiti by the mutineers, where he fell in love with Peggy, the beautiful daughter of an island potentate.

George died on the voyage back to England to stand trial for the mutiny, a prisoner caged on the deck of the British man-ofwar that foundered in a storm. Peggy, his Tahitian wife, died of a broken heart, but not before giving birth to a daughter, also named Peggy Stuart. The tragic story of the love affair between George Stuart and Peggy is chronicled in The Island, a poem

by Lord Byron.

Peggy Stuart was brought to California as a teenager by a Yankee ship captain named George Washington Eayrs,83 with a daughter, María Eayrs.

Faced with a smuggling charge when apprehended at Refugio Bay, Eayrs left Peggy and María in the care of José de la Guerra, and went to Mexico to settle his case. He never returned. Peggy was subsequently baptized María Antonia

Stuart and she and her daughter 84 were sheltered in Casa de la Guerra.

María Antonia Stuart was a widow at the time of Reyes Foxen’s birth. She had married Joséph Antonio Secundino Olivera85 in 1817. (No relation to Tomás Olivera). Secundino died in 1828, at the age of thirty-five, leaving María Antonia with five children. The 1834 padrón shows her living with her daughter by George Washington Eayrs, her five children by Olivera, Reyes Foxen and Manuela, a twoyear-old granddaughter, the child of Maria Eayrs and James Burke.

It seems likely that all nine were living in an adobe, built on the lower reaches of the slope along Oak Creek near the beach.(10) The house may have been built in the 1820s, surviving well into the twentieth century, not far from the Juárez bunkhouse on San Ysidro Road.86 In photographs, it appears to have been a large, handsome, single-story building. The peaked tile roof may be original, but more likely it was

María Antonia Stuart lived in this adobe located just north of San Leandro Road with seven of her children and a granddaughter. Collection of the Montecito Association History Committee. Photograph by Wayne McCall.

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added later. At least two sides had doors, but the house may have had only a couple of windows.

Francisca,8 Olivera and Antonia’s third daughter, married Juan Capistrano Ayala in 8 , when she was twenty-one and he was ten years older. Francisca’s husband was the son and thirteenth child of Jos f Calixto Ayala, a retired soldier and friend of Jos Mar a Dom ngue , who came to Alta California in with the An a party.88 It is not certain that Capistrano and Francisca Ayala lived in the adobe, but traditionally it has been called the Ayala Adobe. If they did live there, Capistrano was moving in with his mother-in-law, Mar a Antonia Stuart. She is listed as the property’s owner on July , 8 , when the city of Santa Barbara gave her a deed to the 8 . -acre property in exchange for .00.8 In 8 0, she quit-claimed the property for .00 to her natural son, Reyes Foxen, who later developed it. Mar a Antonia was not the only Montecito mother to leave property to her oldest son without regard to legitimacy. Mar a Dom ngue de Ju re left her property that became Casa del Herrero to Jos de Jes s Cota.

Lorenzana Adobe Built into a Hillside

As the population of Montecito grew 2 0- 00 people by 8 0 0 community needs grew apace. No longer were the residents along the streams tumbling out of the Santa Yne range content to make the arduous trip to Santa Barbara on foot, horseback or carreta. The influx of Yankees during the 8 0s, and the low esteem in which some of them held the Californios, may have made Montecito dwellers shy away from contact whenever possible.

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They built their own school, a polling place for elections, a place of worship and a place or two where they could dance and drink and celebrate.

Jacinto Loren ana, like others named Loren ana, never knew his real last name.

He spent his early life in an orphanage founded by Archbishop Francisco Antonio de Loren ana in Puebla, Mexico. Loren ana was archbishop from - 2, a brilliant scientist and humanitarian for his time.

He was recalled to Spain well before Jacinto grew up in a Casa de Cuna, but all the children cared for in the orphanage were given the archbishop’s last name.

In 800, possibly 80 , ten boys and ten girls, all named Loren ana, and all under ten years of age, were sent to San Diego and Santa Barbara as the first step in a planned program to relocate six hundred orphans to Alta California.

The plan never materiali ed. One boy died on the sea voyage from San Blas, so nineteen Loren anas landed in Alta California and became the founding members of the family, although they were not necessarily related. No other Loren anas followed. Along with Jacinto and his real brother, Felipe, several others in the group came to Santa Barbara.

Apolinaria Loren ana, a young woman who came from San Diego to Santa Barbara, told Herbert Howe Bancroft, Nineteen children were sent from Mexico under the care of Madre de Jes s, 2 nine boys under ten years of age, and ten girls, some of them already marriageable, who were distributed in respectable families in the different presidios.

Jacinto served in the army when he was old enough to enlist. He married Mar a del Carmen Rodr gue in 8 2, and the following year they had a son, Ynocente. Jacinto was well respected in the

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NOTICIAS

The orenzana Adobe was unusual because it was built into the side of a hill. It served as a saloon for part of its history. Collection of the Montecito Association History Committee.

community, serving as sindico trustee in 8 and again in 8 0. Ynocente married Rafaela Garc a in 8 .

We do not know when Ynocente first came to Spanish Town, or even if his father came before him to build an adobe on the upper end of Parra Grande Lane.

In 8 8, Ynocente received title to forty acres of land in Montecito, so that may be the date when the Loren ana saloon was built. Its more complex design and construction, and the addition of a fireplace, also argue for a later date. The saloon closed in 8 8, and was sold in a sheriff’s sale to G spar Ore a.

The partially two-story adobe was built into the side of a hill, with the lower story butted against the dug-out hillside.

To protect the bricks set into the hillside from moisture, the stone foundation rose

almost four feet high, rather than the more typical single layer of above ground stones seen in most adobe structures on flat ground. During a restoration project in the 0s, soil from around the building was used to make new bricks, and their gray color appears to match the old bricks well, an indication the original bricks were probably made onsite, too. The building is an L shape, with three rooms and a covered porch above a lower room. The main entrance was on the upper floor. It is likely the smaller room on the upper floor was originally the kitchen. There is a doorway from one of the main rooms onto a bree eway, probably originally paired with another doorway into the kitchen building.

Tradition has it that not only did the Loren ana Abobe serve as a saloon, it

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was alleged that Ynocente was making aguardiente there. During the 8 0s and 8 0s, Montecito was a prime location for grape growing, so it is not hard to picture Ynocente and Rafaela in the kitchen, fermenting grapes and feeding a still to make brandy for their neighbors. Possibly the brandy came from the Parra Grande grapes just down the hill.

The Loren anas had no monopoly on saloons in Spanish Town. The community also boasted of the Romero Dance Hall, Weeping Willow Inn, Alameda Saloon, and other watering holes along Valley Road. Like some other Montecito adobes, the Loren ana Saloon was erroneously thought at one time to be a stagecoach stop but there is no record of any stages stopping anywhere in Montecito.

In 88 , Reverend Edward Hildreth and his wife, Sarah, newcomers from Massachusetts, became the owners of the Loren ana Adobe, ending its tenure as a saloon, and beginning an on-going series of changes and wooden additions.

Today, the attractive Montecito home on the site has a hidden secret of adobe walls deep within that proclaim its beginnings.

The Reverend and his wife moved to Los Angeles after a couple of years because they thought Montecito too foggy. The house remained in the family until the 0s, and was the subject of poetry written by Geraldine Hildreth Hunter, Edward and Sarah’s youngest daughter.

The first stan a of her poem, The Old Adobe, sets a romantic tone for the rest of the verses.

What do you think about all day long, ittle house under the pine Two hundred years is a long, long time, ear little house of mine. 8

61 Victor Juárez and the Adobe Church

Victor Ju re gathered all these little children who spoke nothing but Spanish and he decided he would teach them their ABCs and their ones, twos and threes, so to speak. He used the little adobe and my grandmother was one of his students, you might say.

That’s how Anita Ju re Hastie described the start of Montecito’s first school. Ju re used the adobe bunkhouse later the Hosmer house to begin teaching Montecito’s children in 8 . 00 Hastie wasn’t sure how long the school lasted, but it was not too long before land was donated by Nemecio Dom ngue for a permanent school.

That first school was just one of Victor Ju re ’s contributions to the growing community. In 8 , he made the bunkhouse available for the first polling place in the Montecito election precinct. 0 Victor probably served as an election official.

Victor is best known as the man who gave land for the Catholic Church in Montecito. Tradition says the Montecito locals were weary of traveling into Santa Barbara to attend Mass, but a closer inspection of the records shows that it was the Diocese of Monterey that was most interested in bringing the faith out to a large group of Catholics who were not regularly attending Mass in town.

The Catholic Directory of the Founding of Parishes lists the founding of uestra Se ora del Carmen as July , 8 . On February 28, 8 , Bishop Thaddeus Amat laid the cornerstone of the new church, 02 with the Santa Barbara azette of March , 8 estimating some 200 people attending. Writing in his diary

62

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The ďŹ rst ur ady of Mount Carmel Church as drawn by Victor . opez in 18 . Collection of the Montecito Association History Committee.

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on Friday, July , 8 , Charles Enoch Huse noted that priests had celebrated a Mass in Montecito the day before. 0 It was not until October , 8 8, that Victor Ju re and his wife, Mar a, conveyed title for a little over four acres north of Valley Road to Bishop Amat. 0 The record says Ju re deeded a lot feet by 00 feet, originally the property of Mar a Dom ngue de Ju re .

The first Mount Carmel Church was completed in 8 , and built midway between today’s Hot Springs Road and Picacho Lane. 2 A drawing of the church, done in 8 by Victor L. Lope , an adolescent boy, shows great care and attention to details, even if it lacks perspective. It shows a long narrow rectangular adobe building, set well back from Valley Road, reached by two entrance drives. Seasonal streams run on both east and west sides of the church.

Along the street a wooden fence protects the church, with trees planted along the fence, and a call to worship bell hangs in one of them.

Lope depicted the church with two windows on the long side and a smaller window under the high-pitched, shingled roof that was supported by adobe bricks.

A simple cross tops the roof. Steps lead up to the front of the church, where double doors greet worshipers under a covered veranda. A second wooden fence surrounds the rear of the building.

We can assume the inside of the church and its furnishings were basic, like other small churches of the period.

Montecitans attending Mass undoubtedly stood, as worshippers did at other satellite churches in Santa Barbara County, and brought their own cushions on which to kneel. Priests came out to the first Mount Carmel church on a visiting basis, so it is

63

not likely that services were conducted by a priest every Sunday more likely services were held once a month.

In 8 8, the adobe church was replaced by a more imposing, high-steepled wooden church, closer to Hot Springs Road. The old adobe took on new life as a lemon packinghouse, under the ownership of Antonio Echarren. His two lemon crate labels, Carmelita and Favorita, were named for his two dogs.

The local clergy became increasingly unhappy that a consecrated Roman Catholic church was being used for such secular pursuits as packing lemons. After the turn of the twentieth century, the packinghouse church was converted into a home for the poor, and subsequently sold to a Yankee family who remodeled it into a private residence.

Confusion Surrounds the San Leandro Adobe

The fog of time seems to swirl most thickly around three adobes in the southeastern corner of Montecito.

Once again, the children of Jos Mar a Dom ngue and Mar a Marcelina Feli de Dom ngue figure prominently.

Damacio called Nemecio Dom ngue was Jos Mar a and Mar a Marcelina’s oldest son, born in October 88.

Sometime between 80 and 80 , at the age of seventeen or eighteen, he enlisted in the army. In 80 he married Simona Villa when he was twenty-one. Between the birth of his son, Apolonio, in 8 and 82 , Nemecio retired from military service and moved to Los Angeles, his wife’s birthplace.

In 8 , Nemecio was in possession of about 0 acres ,000 square varas of land north of San Leandro Road, called San

64

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After the Mount Carmel congregation moved to a new church, the old adobe was used as a citrus packinghouse for a time. Collection of the Montecito Association History Committee.

Leandro Ranch on later maps. Possession of the land was given him in 8 by officials of the pueblo. 0 Nemecio established a trust for Simona and quit-claimed the property to Apolonio, to become trustee when he died, with the stipulation that he had the right to change this agreement in any subsequent will he wrote. Apolonio was living in Los Angeles at the time, but it appears Nemecio and Simona were living on the property, likely in an adobe house.

An article appearing in the Saturday, May 28, 88 , edition of the Weekly Press, described the San Leandro Ranch property after it was acquired by James H. Swift. It said the adobe on the property was built as far back as 8 or 8 . Going on, it said, The old adobe ranch-house is fitted

up as a dairy house and is provided with all the modern conveniences.

Today, there is still an adobe structure on the former property of Nemecio Dom ngue , 0 but it is not clear if that structure is the one built during the nineteenth century or was built later.

In the Historical Resources Inventory Report written at the time the Ennisbrook subdivision was being considered in the late 80s, on old San Leandro Ranch property, Rebecca Conard cited a personal communication with E. Hallor stating, ...in the only building on it the property was an adobe now restored as part of the main residence . It appears that Hallor was not speaking from firsthand information, because he does not appear in the Montecito Directory until

MONTECITO ADOBES

8 and so may not have been a resident prior to that year.

On the other hand, the personal reminiscence of Dulcie Cooper Montgomery, a woman living on the property in , given in an oral history to Maria Herold, Curator at the Montecito Association History Committee, indicated the original adobe was gone by then.

According to Dulce, there was only one building on the whole place and she described it as a two-story farmhouse, with a large porch, that described exactly the Swift farm house. 0 Later, Herold quotes Dulcie as saying, Around that time, a barn stable carriage house was built... However, the main effort in was directed to building the eastwest part of the adobe where it is now the part running parallel to San Leandro Lane .

The north-south wing was not part of the original plan.

So it is possible the original Nemecio Dom ngue adobe home may have been destroyed some time prior to , and a new adobe built at that time that forms the nucleus of the existing home. It is difficult to understand why adobe construction would have been used in the twentieth century, especially in conjunction with wooden construction. 08 We are unlikely to settle the uncertainty unless we look at the bricks themselves to see if they conform to the traditional dimensions used in Spanish Mexican times or conduct other archaeological investigations.

In 8 8, Nemecio and Simona sold their Montecito acres to Francis J. McGuire for 00. Rebecca Conard writes there is no record of Apolonio reconveying title back to Nemecio, but it appears from the original agreement between father and son that Nemecio felt he had the right to change the agreement, since he and Simona

65

were still living. What is most interesting in the document 0 is that in defining the boundaries of the land being conveyed to McGuire we learn that Mari Dom ngue de Ju re and Luisa Dom ngue owned separate parcels of land due south of Nemecio’s, on the south side of San Leandro Lane, a considerable distance from the other Dom ngue holdings. By 8 , when the land ownership map was drawn neither sister’s name appears. Still more pu ling is that the 8 map still shows Nemecio as the owner of San Leandro Ranch.

Small Adobe May Have Been a Lookout

On the south side of San Leandro Lane there is an adobe building incorporated as one narrow room of a more contemporary home.

Presumably it is on land originally owned by Mari or Luisa Dom ngue .

Remember that Mari owned two other adobes, one on Valley Road and the other on what became San Ysidro Road, while her unmarried sister, Luisa, owned the original Dom ngue home willed to her by her mother. The 8 U.S. Coastal Survey map shows the building, but there is no other dating for it. The 8 map names Nidever as the land owner, but does not reveal a first name.

Throughout its existence, the adobe has hugged the bank of San Ysidro Creek but has never succumbed to flooding because creek waters crested the far bank whenever the creek overran its banks. The structure, about forty feet by twenty feet, had a medium-pitched roof with a clerestory window at both north and south ends.

A wall separated the main room of the adobe from a narrow staircase, just inside the door, leading up to the window on the

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66

south side. Later, but probably still before the start of the twentieth century, wooden additions were made on the east and west sides of the building.

Like the Masini Adobe see below , this small adobe, far from the growing population centers of Spanish Town and Romero Hill, is different in construction from all the other adobes. The differences raise questions about its use. The stairway not a ladder leads up to a narrow ledge where a man might stand. At that height, he would have a clear view of the Santa Barbara Channel and the coastline for a considerable distance east and west.

Whether it was used as a lookout, however, is a matter of conjecture.

Monterey-Style Masini Adobe is Biggest Mystery of All

The greatest mystery of all Montecito adobe buildings lies tucked under the shoulder of Ortega Ridge, where Sheffield Drive meets North Jamison Lane. The adobe there is called Monterey style after the house built by Thomas Oliver

Larkin in Monterey in the mid- 8 0s.

Unlike all the other Montecito adobes, the Masini Adobe is a large, two-story building with balconies cantilevered off the second floor on both east and west sides.

The ground floor walls are two feet thick and second story walls a foot thick. Named for Pedro Masini, an Italian who owned it in the 8 0s and 8 0s, almost nothing is known of its early history.

The only information dating the building is the word of Mariano Palomares y L pe , grandfather of Helena Arroqui Meyer, who owned the property into the middle of the twentieth century. He told her of coming to Santa Barbara in 8 and remembered seeing the Masini being built when he was a boy. 0 The name Mariano is not found in any of the records. Mariano may have been a nickname for Antonio Mar a Palomares.

He would have been a young boy between ages five and eight , between 82 - 82 , and might have seen the adobe being built some time in those years, but this is only speculation based on the limited evidence at hand. It is also possible that Antonio

The Masini Adobe is one of the earliest examples of the Monterey style of adobe architecture.

Photograph dates from 1 04. Collection of the Santa Barbara Historical Museum.

MONTECITO ADOBES

remembered as a boy his stepfather, talking about the building of the structure, which could place the construction date earlier.

The significance of the date of construction of the Masini Adobe lies in its architectural style. If it were built in the first half of the 820s, it could well be the first Monterey-style structure built in Alta California, and certainly would have been the first outside of Monterey. 2 Architecturally, the Masini differs from the Larkin House in respect to its roof line and balconies. Harlan Hague and David J. Langum, Thomas Larkin’s biographers, wrote, It the house was the first twostory building in Monterey, and one of the earliest two-story structures in California. italics mine Larkin and his wife built what was essentially a New England Colonialstyle house, with two stories, traditional glass windows, center staircase and an upstairs fireplace... Larkin deepened the eves on one front to four feet to keep rain off the adobe bricks , but scaffolded another.

This gave the traditional American hipped roof an exaggerated rake. A double veranda was added on two sides. The adobe bricks were then whitewashed and the Monterey style was complete.

Unfortunately, Mariano does not tell us why the adobe was built. Its location in Montecito is at a considerable distance from other early adobes, and its style is dramatically different. There is no record of the building until Pedro Masini received title to .2 acres, including the twostory house, a separate kitchen building and a winery barn all built of adobe bricks for a fee of .8 , from the mayor and common council of Santa Barbara in 8 8. The U.S. Coastal Survey map of 8 shows the house and winery barn on the property.

Persistent beliefs hold that the

67

building was a military outpost, possibly a lookout and or a stagecoach stop. Its simple construction of two large rooms, one above the other, with only a ladder to the second floor, and a detached kitchen building, suggest an early dating, and could well indicate a soldiers’ barracks or a place of overnight lodging for travelers. If it were a military barracks, the second story balconies could have been observation posts.

Unlike two-story buildings constructed in Monterey using redwood cut in the Santa Cru Mountains starting in the 8 0s, the Masini Adobe uses pine, available from the San Rafael Mountains, to provide the supports for the second-story, cantilevered balconies.

While Mexico and South American colonies were fighting for their independence from Spain from 8 0 until 82 , the fledgling nation of Buenos Aires gave letters of marquis to Hippolyte Bouchard, a Frenchman, to attack Spanish possessions in the Pacific. In 8 8, Bouchard sailed into Monterey Bay with two ships and sacked the town. Continuing down the coast he wreaked havoc at Rancho del Refugio and Mission San Juan Capistrano. Jos de la Guerra, comandante of the Santa Barbara presidio outsmarted Bouchard and saved Santa Barbara from a similar fate.

Concerned another attack from the sea might come, the Spanish government ordered reinforcements for all four Alta California presidios in 820. Two hundred dragoons from presidios in ueva Espa a were marched north, with fifty men intended for each fort. The company that marched to Santa Barbara from Ma atlan, wore bright yellow uniforms. Was the Masini built after the arrival of these men to house them, and be used as a lookout The author doubts this. What argues

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The ood of 1 14 devastated Montecito’s Spanish Town and washed away much of the community’s adobe heritage. Collection of the Santa Barbara Historical Museum.

against the Masini being a military lookout is that it was built at the base of Ortega Hill while most military commanders prefer to build on high ground for better defense. If it were meant as a lookout for ships coming near shore, the house might better have faced south with a balcony facing the ocean.

As stated earlier, there is no record of any stagecoach stop in Montecito. Stages between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara stopped in Carpinteria. 8 A possible answer for the Masini Adobe’s purpose is that it was used in a shore whaling endeavor. The balconies provide a platform on which to watch for passing whales in the Channel, and its location just above Fernald Point provided a sandy beach from which boats could be launched and where captured whales could be rendered. In fact, the Masini has a striking resemblance to Monterey’s Whaling Station, built in the 8 0s, and

taken over by a group of Portuguese shore whalers in 8 . It is also possible the Masini Adobe was used in conjunction with the nearby adobe on San Leandro Lane previously mentioned.

Pedro Masini was involved in the asphaltum industry in Carpinteria which began in 8 . He is credited with discovering oil in a canyon behind Summerland which led to the founding of the Santa Barbara Oil Company in 8 , after his death. It is also possible he planted the vineyards stretching from the adobe down to the beach along Fernald Bay. He may also have been a shopkeeper in Santa Barbara, according to a passing mention in the Journal of Charles Enoch Huse.

Masini died at the age of fifty in 8 , leaving the property to his wife, Margarita Ayala. She remarried and soon thereafter she and her new husband, J. M. Rosales, lost the property in a sheriff’s sale over an

MONTECITO ADOBES

unpaid mortgage in 8 . The new owners were Jos fa Loureyro and Jos fa Lope de Etchas. It is unlikely that either woman bought the adobe to live in.

On December , 88 , an article in the Weekly Press said, A man named Gillis found Giovanni Trabucco, age fifty-six, murdered in the kitchen of Masini Adobe.

He was killed on December 2 or 2 . Gillis was caring for horses pastured in the vineyard when he went to the house and found the body.

Thus began the most notorious saga in the adobe’s history. Trabucco was a caretaker, probably charged with care of the extensive vineyards and winery. The killers were alleged to have taken gold from Trabucco, but they were never brought to justice. Romantici ing historians of the 80s made Trabucco out to be a miser, but people who knew him in the 880s documented in the local press that he was far from that, and well respected by his neighbors.

The Masini Adobe figured prominently in the fictional best seller, Ramona, written

by Helen Hunt Jackson in 88 . The story, which painted a romantic vision of southern California that persisted across the nation well into the next century, had heroine Ramona spending her wedding night in the Masini after fleeing Rancho Camulos. In 2 , Margaret Cameron wrote a novel titled Johndover. Set in the 880s, the title character, John Dover, lived in the Masini Adobe, and the story included an attempted murder resembling the real murder of Trabucco.

At the start of the twentieth century, Jos fa Lope deeded the Masini Adobe property to Juan Arroqui, who married Bernarda, Jos fa’s younger sister. From that time until 200 , the adobe stayed in the Arroqui-Meyer family.

69 Where Have They Gone?

Where have they gone The question is as pertinent for the families of the early settlers of Montecito as it is for their adobe buildings that dotted Montecito’s hillsides and stream sides before 00. It is easier to understand the demise of the structures than where the early families went.

There are seven surviving nineteenthcentury adobes in Montecito. Three the Olivera, Masini, and Ju re bunkhouse are stand-alone buildings protected as historical landmarks. The Masini on Sheffield Road, and the Olivera on San Ysidro Ranch property, are well maintained, sparkling with history and romance. The Ju re bunkhouse on San Ysidro Road next to Manning Park has a sad, neglected aspect. Improper materials have been used to make repairs and the surrounding lot has a cluttered, rundown aspect.

Three other buildings the Loren ana, Bertram Goodhue, and the lookout adobe on San Leandro Lane have all been incorporated into contemporary homes.

They should survive well into the future protected in this way even if their original appearance has been lost. One other adobe an early Dom ngue home stands out of public view in the backyard of another private home.

All the others are gone. Some were torn down as recently as the second half of the last century, but most were lost when Montecito transitioned into a community of Yankee gentlemen farmers in the 8 0s and thereafter. For settlers from the East, adobe was a foreign material. The newcomers preferred wooden homes, like the homes they had known. It wasn’t convenient to add on to one-room adobes so most of them became storage sheds,

70

uncared for until they began to crumble, or room was needed for other buildings.

One large adobe, 20 documented only in the recollections of some of the older residents of Spanish Town, hugged the western bank of Montecito Creek north of the East Valley Road bridge.

Nothing is known about it. It vanished in the thunderous torrent of water that charged down Montecito Creek following the downpours of . Along with as many as fifteen wooden houses and five barns on the west bank, appearing on an 8 map of Spanish Town, the adobe castle may have washed out to the ocean or its bricks melted along the stream. To this day, nothing has been rebuilt on the flood plain in this area.

The arrival of newcomers from the East was as hard on the early California settlers as it was on their adobes. Early on, the two cultures clashed, making the 8 0s and 8 0s a troubled time in Santa Barbara, and throughout the Golden State.

The presidio’s founding families, and those who gathered around them in Montecito, were partly there to establish their own communities. They were as unlikely to want Yankees for neighbors as the Yankees wanted them.

There is no record of strife between the two groups, living side by side in Montecito, but over time, as their land was deeded to them by the American city of Santa Barbara, the original landowners sold out and moved on. The net result with the exception of the Romero clan, and the enclave of Spanish Town, which survived a little longer was Yankee gentrification in the late nineteenth century. According to a Santa Barbara County census, 2 published in 8 0, the following Spanish surnamed individuals still lived in Montecito: Romero , Cota , Ayala , Ju re 2, Valen uela 2,

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Dom ngue , Lugo . Of course, men and women with these surnames were living in other parts of the county.

A Final Thought

What remains is the over-arching question of why Jos Mari Dom ngue and his children had so much land in Montecito.

Did Jos receive all this land for service rendered when he retired to Montecito, and then passed it on to his children, or was the family simply squatters That 8 map showing land ownership, drawn

by W. T. Norway, shows numerous plots with the Dom ngue name attached, but patents or deeds of sale to many of these plots are lacking.

The issue of the Los Prietos y Najalayegua land grant is also a tantali ing mystery. Did the grant play a role in the Dom ngue family holdings in Montecito Probably not. Jos Mar a’s son did not petition for the grant until 8 , the grant was not completed until 8 and the family was well-established in Montecito by then. Contrary to the belief of family descendants, it is not likely that any land in Montecito had ever been included in the original grant, despite the efforts of Charles Huse.

Family tradition holds that Jos Mar a Dom ngue was more than a soldado de cuera at the Santa Barbara presidio. Family members tell of Jos Mari speaking English, French, and Indian tongues of his special service to Jun pero Serra of his being a supervisor for the building of the Santa Barbara mission dam and forging bells for the mission belfries. Is it possible he was rewarded with a large tract of pueblo land in Montecito for his efforts We know the presidio comandantes had the right to do so.

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71

The Spanish leaders were meticulous record keepers. We know enough about the Spanish mind of this historic period to be sure records were kept of land allotments made to soldiers upon their retirement.

Whether those records were sent back to Spain after the revolution, or back to

Mexico City at a later date whether they were destroyed, or whether they remain hidden somewhere in California, we can be certain they existed at one time. We can hope that future generations of researchers will find them and solve the mystery of the Dom ngue adobes in Montecito.

�ˆOTES

2

William Mason in The Census of 1 0 Menlo Park, CA.: Ballena Press, 8 , says Dom ngue had his wife Mar a Ignacia German with him on the journey. See Marie E. Northrop, Spanish Mexican Families of Early California 1 1850 Volume II Burbank: Southern California Genealogical Society, 8 , . Northrop writes Mar a Ignacia German died before 8 . Other sources support Northrop’s conclusion.

Rivera was the son of a minor office holder.

He was born in Compostela in the state of Nayarit. Enlisting at seventeen, he rose to the rank of captain but never became an equal in the eyes of the Catalonian Volunteers who came from the Motherland.

In 0, Rivera requested permission to retire from the army on the grounds of pain and bad health. He bought a small farm near Guadalajara, but was called back into service in , when he was appointed military governor of Alta California. Californians and the Military, Capitan Fernando avier de Rivera y Moncada, Military overnor of Alta California, 1 1

by Michael R. Hardwick California State Military Museum website, http: www.militarymuseum.org Rivera.html, accessed 2 January 200 .

Bucareli had balked at Serra’s request to name Sergeant Jos Francisco Ortega governor.

Instead, Ortega was promoted to lieutenant and Rivera replaced Pedro Fages as governor.

See Rose Marie Beebe and Robert M. Senkiwic , eds., ands of Promise and espair Berkeley: Heyday Books, 200 , .

Rivera was no newcomer to overland expeditions. By training and experience he

8

was the right man to lead the party, but by temperament he might not have been the best choice. Rivera had led the first overland party of the Portol expedition into Alta California in , taking all the pack animals with him for the entire expedition, and bla ing a trail for Portol and Jun pero Serra to follow two months later. His treatment on that expedition may have been the first step leading to what subsequently happened at Yuma. When the beleaguered parties arrived in San Diego in , and saw that scurvy had decimated the crew of one of the supply ships supporting them, and the second ship was nowhere to be seen, Rivera counseled his leader to rest the men before striking out for Monterey. Portol did not take kindly to Rivera’s advice and decided to proceed. He named Rivera First Explorer of the party, but assigned him and twenty-seven of his men to bring up the rear on the march.

Hardwick.

Rivera was successful in lining up fifty-nine soldiers to garrison the presidio to be built at Santa Barbara. Each man signed on for a recruitment of ten years and, as Croix saw it, They were to be married men, healthy, strong, able to endure hardship and of good character to set an example for the natives.

Subsequently, he added for Rivera’s benefit, No exaggeration as to the opportunities was to be permitted by recruiters. Richard S. Whitehead, Citadel on the Channel Santa Barbara: Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation, , 0.

Donald Cutter and Iris Engstrand, uest for Empire Spanish Settlement in the Southwest

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0

2

8 20

Golden, CO.: Fulcrum Publishing, ,2 .

Ibid.

Northrop, .

In , after Neve, governor of Upper and Lower California, traveled by horse from Loreto to Monterey, he outlined a plan for the three channel missions one at Ventura, another at Gaviota, and a third in the middle with a presidio nearby. Neve saw clearly that Alta California could easily be cut in half if the Chumash Indians decided to oppose his meager forces. It worried him enough to search for a place to build a fort. He agreed with others that Mescaltit n, in the vicinity of the Goleta Slough, was the ideal spot for the presidio.

Whitehead, 88.

Serra opposed the new site because there were more Indians to convert at Mescaltit n, but the decision was not his to make. It was a military decision and all Serra could do was complain. He did. In a letter to the College of San Fernando in Mexico City, he wrote, I have not the heart to describe to you what a sorry sight that foundation presents . . .

Neve deceived Serra about the founding of a mission at Santa Barbara, according to Maynard Geiger, OFM. There cannot be the slightest doubt that when Serra officiated at the founding of Santa Barbara presidio he honestly believed that at the same time he was also founding another mission. Maynard Geiger, OFM, Mission Santa Barbara 1 82 1 5 Santa Barbara: Franciscan Fathers of California, , 8.

Felipe de Neve to Teodoro de Croix, 2 August 82, quoted in Geiger, .

Neve had a new plan that would limit the missionaries to spiritual stewardship of the neophytes, giving temporal control to the military. Geiger, 0.

Whitehead, .

Geiger, .

Whitehead, .

Design adapted from a drawing by M. Vitruvius Polion see Geiger, 8.

As early as , Fray Pedro Font, accompanying the An a expedition, favored Mescaltit n as the best mid-channel site for a mission. But in 8 , Fages, accompanied by a priest from Mission San Buenaventura, inspected a site in Montecito and reported favorably on it. Neve, now comandante of

2 22 2 2 2 2 2 28 2 0 2

8

the Interior Provinces, authori ed Fages to proceed with founding the mission, and seems to have given tacit approval to the Montecito location. That is where the confusion begins.

It is not clear whether El Montecito, as the records refer to the site, was a location or a description. If it simply meant little hill, whether the little hill in question was what we now call Mission Ridge or one of the gentle rises in Montecito is not certain. uoted in Whitehead, 02.

Lasu n had become Padre Presidente of the Franciscan missions in Alta California upon Jun pero Serra’s death.

Geiger, 2 . ephyrin Engelhardt, OFM, Santa Barbara Mission San Francisco: The James H. Barry Co., 2 , .

Since the mission gardens did not exist at that time, Geiger is giving this reference for the contemporary reader.

Geiger, note , 2 .

Harold Kirker, California’s Architectural Frontier Salt Lake City, UT, Gibb M. Smith, Inc. 0, .

Reminiscences of Margarita Delbrook Villa, January , on file at Montecito Association History Committee.

W. W. Robinson, and in California Berkeley: University of California Press, 8, .

Robinson, .

Santa Barbara ews Press, 8 May .

Alfred Robinson, ife in California Santa Barbara & Salt Lake City: Peregine Smith, Inc, 0 , 2.

Jos del Carmen Lugo, Life on a California Rancho, The Historical Society of Southern California uarterly 2 September 0.

Spanish Town grew famous for those lively celebrations. Legend suggests the likes of outlaws Fautino Loren ana, Tiburico Vasque and Joaqu n Murieta surreptitiously enjoyed these festivities.

The large si e of the vine argues for an early planting date. One source places the date as .

Anita Juare Hastie, interviewed by Margery Cronshaw, June , on file at Montecito Association History Committee.

Villa oral history.

Ibid.

For a detailed discussion of this fascinating

MONTECITO ADOBES land dispute see Jesse Diamond Mason, History of Santa Barbara County, California Oakland, Thompson and West, 88 , .

0 In the archives of the Presidio Research Center, Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation.

I use the term living units rather than households because it seems clear that unrelated people were living together as in the case of a young boy or girl with a different surname living with a family that may have taken them in.

2 Only second-born Nemacio age forty-six and fourth-born Jos Francisco are not listed in the padr n. Nemecio struck out for Los Angeles after retiring from the presidio, but returned to Santa Barbara later in his life. Jos Francisco died in 82 .

It is unclear in the will which Jos is referred to here. In fact, all her sons mentioned in the will are named Jos with no further explanation of which one she means. It would be normal for the time if the Jos referred to was Jos Mar a Damasio, the oldest living son, but apparently it was Fernald’s job to sort this out.

Not all parcels on the 8 map show acreages at least three Dom ngue parcels have no acreage figures so the high number is an estimate. The estimate does not include the San Leandro Ranch of Nemecio Dom ngue of 0 acres of land on San Leandro Lane, or land owned by Mar a and Luisa south of San Leandro Lane discussed separately.

Victor Dolores Ju re , the eighth of fourteen children, is nothing if not a colorful figure in nineteenth-century Montecito. His early history is cloudy, but we can piece together some of it. His father, Francisco, was fortyfour when he signed on with Fernando Rivera for the long trek to San Gabriel and Santa Barbara. His wife, Trinidad, walked at his side, carrying her one-year-old son, Francisco, in her arms and pregnant with a boy who would be named Joaqu n. Joaqu n never knew his father, who died at San Gabriel on March , 82. Trinidad gave birth to Joaqu n on July 28 the same year. He was bapti ed by Fr. Antonio Cru ado. Alone, with a toddler and newborn, it was incumbent on Trinidad to remarry quickly on this isolated frontier. She did, to Antonio Rodr gue , who took her and her sons north to his post as a mission guard stationed at the Monterey presidio. By 0,

73 Antonio had achieved the rank of corporal and had added three more young ones to his brood. He died on Oct. 22, 820, according to his death certificate at Mission San Carlos Borromeo and is buried at the Monterey presidio. His stepson, Joaqu n Ju re , served as a mission guard at both San Luis Obispo and Carmel before retiring to the pueblo of Branciforte. Victor Dolores Ju re , Joaquin’s eighth-born, was bapti ed at Mission San Antonio on March 2, 8 , and grew up in Branciforte. With whom Victor lived, and what kind of life he had during his youth, is unclear, but at some point, probably in his teens, he left home.

Oral history of Anita Juare Hastie, March , on file at Montecito Association History Committee.

In 8 , Governor Juan Alvarado granted Santa Cru Island to Capit n Andr s S. Castillero for services rendered during the revolution with Spain. So it is possible that Victor Ju re was one of the first ranch hands to work there. Castillero owned the island from 8 - 8 , but it is not known if he developed the island or ranched there.

Recollections of Vicente Ju re in Hastie oral history.

8 When Mar a died, she left the adobe to her oldest son, Jos de Jesus Cota, one of her natural children, a situation that displeased her Ju re family. Today, an escutcheon in the living room of Casa del Herrero shows the house was, Built on outer Pueblo Lands of Santa Barbara bought by Jos de Jesus Cota for 2 cents an acre in 8 8, twentytwo years after General Fremont captured the town and presidio. In fact, Cota owned the land but paid to have the City of Santa Barbara provide him with a deed, like many of the original land owners who paid to have their ownership confirmed.

It is unclear why Virginia Steedman, wife of James Harrison Steedman, George Fox Steedman’s older brother, is listed on the Sanborn map as owner of the land in 2 .

George Fox Steedman owned Casa del Herrero after it was built. The brothers lived next door to each other on Ashley Road in 2 , before the East Valley Road land was purchased.

James Harrison Steedman had diabetes and that was the reason both brothers came to Santa Barbara. Robert Sweeney, personal

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74

0

2

8 0 2

communication with author. Sweeney will publish a history of Casa del Herrero in 200 .

And the house they lived in was up where the Bass house Casa del Herrero is now.

Hastie interview also Maria Herold, personal communication with author, February 200 8 Sanborn map.

Ju re in Hastie oral history.

Neither Bradbury Dinsmore, who bought the structure, nor Thomas Hosmer, who received it as a wedding gift, did any adobe construction all their additions were wooden.

The Ju re family was solely responsible for the adobe bunkhouse.

Hastie oral history David Myrick, Montecito and Santa Barbara, Volume I, From Farms to Estates Glendale: Trans-Anglo Books, , 2, sets the purchase price for the acres including the adobe at ,000.

Hastie oral history.

Ju re in Hastie oral history.

Gloria Calamar, Phase Historical Cultural Resources Study, Community Housing Corporation, December , .

Clarence Cullimore, Santa Barbara Adobes Bakersfield: Santa Barbara Book Publishing Company, 8, .

Kirker, 2.

Sarah Bixby-Smith, Adobe ays Cedar Rapids: The Torch Press, 2 , .

Robinson, ife in California, 0.

Original at Montecito Association History Committee Myrick, .

The name first appears in the census of 8 0 as Francisco Valen uela, a -year-old laborer married to Mar a H., age 2, with four children ages - . They are the only Valen uela family living in Montecito at the time. In the census of 8 0 and 8 0, the Valen uela family is headed by Jos Mar a Valen uela, age in 8 0, his wife, Jos fa, and six children ages -22, with Augustin the oldest. The 8 0 census confirms the same household members, all having aged by a decade.

Maria Herold, personal communication with author.

In Romy Wylie, Bertram oodhue, His ife and Residential Architecture New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 200 , .

Goodhue is likely wrong here, trapped in his Eastern lexicon. What he thought was a

stable more likely had been a residence when first constructed. A stable was housing for horses in the East horses were kept outside in early California, and an adobe barn seems more labor intensive than called for.

Myrick, . Buell’s brother, Rufus, became a cattle rancher and had the town of Buellton named for him.

8 Northrop, 2 Mason, Census, , shows Romero as an enlisted man without rank.

Dolores Dorotea Alanis had been bapti ed at Mission San Juan Capistrano, the daughter of Maximo Alanis and Juana Alvare . Maximo, with his wife and five children, is listed in The Census of 1 0 as stationed at the San Diego presidio, but, as a 2 -year-old, he had marched shoulder to shoulder with the Dom ngue , Feli , Ju re , Lugo, and Cota families from Sinaloa to San Gabriel in the Rivera party.

By 800, he was a resident of the pueblo of Los Angeles, where he was granted Rancho San Jos de Buenas Aires in 82 . He lived into his ninetieth year in Los Angeles, having survived two wives who produced twelve offspring. His daughter Dorotea survived into her ninety-first year and laid claim in her will in 8 to her father’s land grant.

0 Tom s, with nine brothers six surviving was the oldest his sister Juana de Jesus, the sixthborn, had six sisters. Tom s was born in 802 and acarias, the baby of the family was born in 8 . In the Montecito Directory of 0 there were sixty Romeros listed.

The spring stopped flowing after the 2 earthquake.

2 Myrick, 8.

Chain of Title from King of Spain, Title Insurance and Trust Company of Los Angeles, . This document shows the land title going from the Pueblo Lands to the United States in 8 . It was patented to the City of Santa Barbara, which passed the deed to parts of eight different owners between 8 and 8 8, when Bradbury T. Dinsmore acquired the land.

She is named Mar a Antonia Cota on her marriage record to Jos Mar a Osuna, and Mar a Tomasa Cota on her marriage record to Olivera. On each record the names of her parents are identical. Since record keeping was in the hands of the different mission priests it is not unusual to see this kind of discrepancy.

In 8 , the newlyweds are living in the

MONTECITO ADOBES pueblo with one son. The next year, Foxen acquires Burton Mound in Santa Barbara but soon thereafter bought Rancho Tinaquaic in the Santa Yne Valley from Victor Linares and moved his family there.

Baptism Record No. 00 8, Santa Barbara Mission. Throughout the history of this period, Mar a Antonia Stuart was variously named Stuard, Astuard, and Astuart. I use the English Stuart here.

Marie E. Northrop, Spanish Mexican Families of Early California 1 1850 Volume I, Burbank: Southern California Genealogical Society, 8 , 2 . Family sources say he was living in San Luis Obispo.

8 Mason, History of Santa Barbara, 2 .

Stella Haverland Rouse, ed., Reminiscences of Winfield B. Metcalf, oticias 2 Spring 8 : .

80 Barbara Ju re Wilson, From Mission to Majesty Baltimore: Gateway Press, 8 .

Wilson traces George Stuart’s ancestors back to King James V of Scotland, who had a son, Robert, Earl of Orkney, by his mistress, Euphemia Elphinstone.

8 The story of the Bounty Mutiny is generally well known. There are several good accounts of the mutiny and its aftermath, including the Nordoff and Hall novel that was made into a movie starring Clark Gable and Charles Laughton.

82 Robert Ryal Miller, A Yankee Smuggler on the California Coast Santa Barbara: Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation, 200 , .

8 The daughter, Mar a de los Remedios Jos fa Anita Eayrs, was the mother of Manuela and Ramona Burke, both born out of wedlock.

Ramona married Horatio Gates Trussell in 8 0.

8 Records in the Huntington Library’s Early California Population Project database are consistent, spelling his surname with a B while Marie Northrop uses a V . This is not uncommon as the two letters sound almost the same in Spanish.

8 It was demolished by the property owner in order to make room for a garage, according to Maria Herold of the Montecito Association History Committee, who remembers seeing the adobe in the 0s, personal communication with author, 2 March 200 .

8 The padr n of 8 calls her Francisco in error.

75 8

He enlisted in the Santa Barbara Company in 82, the same year Jos Mar a Dom ngue enlisted. Calixto’s marriage to Juana Mar a Vitala Feli , Mar a Marcelina Dom ngue ’s younger sister, is the first marriage of Mexican settlers recorded at the Santa Barbara Mission. Calixto retired from the army in 8 2, in his 0s, and was listed as an invalid, but the census of 8 shows him as a woodcutter hachero .

88 Abstracts of Land Titles, Book 8, p. , at the Montecito Association History Committee.

The dollar amounts here and elsewhere in the narrative are fees for the documents involved in the transactions, not the prices paid for the property.

8 Estimate based on the U. S. Census of 8 0.

0 Biography of Archbishop Loren a at http: www.newadvent.org cathen 0 b, accessed March 200 .

While not certain, it is likely that this expression is a euphemistic way of saying they came unescorted.

2 William Ellsworth Smythe, History of San iego County, 0 , at http: www. sandiegohistory.org bio smythe smythe.htm, accessed March 200 .

Northrop, Spanish Mexican Families Volume II, 2.

Tracing Ynocente and Rafaela is confusing because we have only U.S. Census reports at ten-year intervals. In the 8 0 Census, Ynocente is listed as a shopkeeper with a value of his real property shown as ,000.

A decade later, he is a farmer with property valued at 2,000. It is only in the 8 0 Census data that we find the couple listed as saloon keeper and keeps house in Spanish Town.

No reason for the sheriff’s sale is given, although it is not hard to speculate that failure to pay mortgage or debts was the reason. The sheriff’s sale is documented in a handwritten legal document recorded on June 2 , 8 , in the Santa Barbara County Recorder’s office.

Personal communication with current owners.

Handwritten original of the Old Adobe in Montecito Association History Committee files.

8 Hastie oral history.

It seems most likely that Victor was teaching in Spanish.

00 Phase II Historical Resource Investigation 0 East Valley Road, Montecito,

76 California, undated personal correspondence, Florence M. Ranger to Miss Mason in Montecito Association History Committee files.

0 I am indebted to Hattie Beresford for access to her extensive research on the history of Mount Carmel Church, conducted for the celebration of its 0th anniversary. See her article in Montecito Journal, 28 September 200 .

02 Edith Bond Conkey, ed., The Huse Journal Santa Barbara: Santa Barbara Historical Society, , 20 .

0 Original record in Santa Barbara Mission Archive-Library.

0 This would indicate that until that time, the land was pueblo land and not in the Dom ngue family. Named on the document are Antonio Mar a Ortega as judge of the Court of the First Instance, and Juan Pablo Ayala as judge of the Court of the Second Instance, and Anastacio Carrillo, Prefect.

0 George Yatchisin, The Boeseke Adobe Restored, Montecito Magazine 2 Fall 200 : .

0 Maria Herold, personal communication with author.

0 The author is familiar with a large, singlestory adobe brick house that was built on Santa Barbara’s Westside in the 0s, so there is no doubt that skilled adobe builders were available at that time.

08 Santa Barbara Hall of Records Book E., 0.

0 Neal Graffy, E. Clampus Vitus Commemorative Booklet, December 8 in Montecito Association History Committee archives.

0 Antonio Mar a Palomares was the grandson of Cristobal Palomares and Benedicta Saens.

Cristobal first appeared in the census of 0 as a twenty-year-old single man from Real de San Jos de Canelos in the state of Durango, serving at the presidio of Santa Barbara. Cristobal and Benedicta’s daughter, Concepci n, was bapti ed at Mission La Pur sima in 800 and married at Mission San Gabriel to Antonio Lope in 8 . Her son,

NOTICIAS Antonio Mar a Lope was born in 82 . Some time between 82 and 82 , Antonio Lope died and Concepci n married Ygnacio Higuera.

According to the 8 padr n, Ygnacio Higuera and Concepci n Lope are living in Santa Barbara with three children by Lope and three by Higuera. Antonio Mar a possible Mariano is recorded in the living unit.

The Custom House in Monterey was built in 82 some historians believe there was an earlier building on the same site, but no description survives.

2 Harlan Hague and David J. Langum, Thomas . arkin A ife of Patriotism and Profit in ld California Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 0, .

All information on the Masini history is from the author’s Masini Adobe Timeline in the files of the Montecito Association History Committee.

David Rui , personal communication with author. Mr. Rui was the contractor who did the restoration work in the building in 200 .

Later the Republic of Argentina.

The company was led by Narcisco Fabregat, a Spaniard then in his late thirties, who eventually settled in Santa Barbara and became a shopkeeper.

John Waugh, stagecoach driver from Los Olivos, South of Santa Barbara the next station was at Old Town, Carpinteria on the coast highway. In Michael J. Phillips, History of Santa Barbara County California Volume I Chicago: The S. J. Clarke Publishing Co., 2 , 8.

8 Jos fa Loureyro owned at least two other lots in Montecito and other property in Santa Barbara. In the U.S. Census of 8 0 Jos fa Lope is shown living at home with her father Mari no, who is a justice of the peace, and the man who remembered the construction of the adobe.

Old timers refer to it as The Adobe Castle.

20 The reat Register of the County of Santa Barbara, California 18 0, Independent Job Printing House, Santa Barbara, Cal.

Santa Barbara Historical Museum 2009 Board of Trustees Eleanor Van Cott . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .President Marlene R. Miller . . . . . . . . . . .First Vice President Lawrence T. Hammett . . . . . Second Vice President John W. Hunt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Treasurer Marilyn Chandler DeYoung . . . . . . . . . . . Secretary Daniel Alef Leslie S. Bernstein

Donald M. Fuhrer David R. Martin

Keith J. Mautino Edgar L. Sands

Robin Schutte Diane M. Waterhouse

Advisory Board Victor K. Atkins, Jr. Herbert E. Barthels

Robert T. Knight John R. Mackall

The Santa Barbara Historical Museum Board of Trustees wishes to acknowledge the generous support of the following Patrons for making the 2008 Remember the Magic Holiday Party possible: Laura & Michael Cleary Jeannine & Paul Daniel Mary Garton Kay & Richard Glenn Astrid & Lawrence Hammett Felicie & Paul Hartloff Karen & Josiah Jenkins Hope S. Kelly Colleen & Philip Kirst Jane Mueller Barbara & Arthur Najera Joanna Bard Newton Janet & Edgar Sands Robin Schutte Eleanor Van Cott Diane & Ralph Waterhouse John C. Woodward

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