How a Book, Cultural Attitudes Transformed San Diego s La Casa de Estudillo

Postcard of La Casa de Estudillo when the house was marketed as Ramonas Marriage Place. | Photo: Courtesy of California State Parks.

To visit a historically consequential home is to make the past more tangible. Surrounded by aged walls and antique furnishings, we are tempted to be literal-minded, as if we had entered a time machine and were plopped into that past. But if walls could speak, an important 19th century landmark in San Diego's Old Town, La Casa de Estudillo, would convey a different story. It is a tale of the complexity of history, of the ways that the past mirrors the attitudes of any given era, including our own.

Landmark homes, preserved and renovated for their significance, are part of a bigger cultural picture in attitudes toward the past. Beginning in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a collective desire took hold on both coasts -- and in between -- to preserve sites that represented colonial and national history. It happened with Jamestown, the first British settlement in Virginia, and it happened in California, with the newfound interest in restoring the crumbling Spanish missions and other California structures of the era of Spanish and Mexican governance. In the case of La Casa de Estudillo, craze for a novel, Helen Hunt Jackson's 1884 Ramona, added to the site's appeal and transformation.

Construction at La Casa de Estudillo. | Photo: Courtesy of California State Parks.

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Two pasts neatly converge with La Casa de Estudillo: the lineage of a prominent family and the history of California in an era of transition from Mexican to American rule. Not only was it a seminal example of a residence of the affluent and the powerful, it also housed the first schoolhouse and the first courthouse in San Diego. La Casa de Estudillo was home to four generations of the Estudillo family, beginning in 1830, when its first portion was completed, and ending in 1887, when the last of its family residents left for Los Angeles. (The local Kumeyaay likely did all the work, we are reminded.) By the late 1840s, the structure was L-shaped and by 1852 it had the U-shape it still features, when an expansion was completed. The house was declared a California Historical Landmark in 1932, became part of the California State Park system in 1968 and was added as a registered National Historical Landmark in 1970.

Capitan Jose Maria Estudillo was a military commandant at the nearby San Diego Presidio when work on his home began. His wife, Do a Maria Victoria Dominguez de Estudillo came from a prominent family as well. The generations of Estudillos who were to live in the house impacted the political and cultural life of the emerging town notably. Jose Guadalupe Estudillo, for example -- grandson of Jose Maria and Do a Maria -- became president of the board of trustees of the city of San Diego in 1868, and during his tenure set aside land that became Balboa Park; in 1875, he was elected state treasurer. It's no coincidence that the family built their home when they did. Mexico's independence from Spain in 1821 led to a new policy of providing land grants and the Estudillos were given large ones: in Otay, Temecula and El Cajon. Their wealth would derive from their large herds of cattle, raised at these locales, while the Casa in Old Town was their townhouse.

A floor plan of La Casa de Estudillo. | Photo: Courtesy of California State Parks.

Back then, in the nascent era of preservation, Americans liked their history to be filtered through a rosy veil. They invented images of harmonious British colonials and Native Americans joining hands at the first Thanksgiving or Spanish clergy and tribes co-existing nicely as the missions emerged up and down the coast. Of course, relations between those who had lived in these places for centuries and recently arrived Europeans were never that simple or happy. But authenticity was secondary; atmosphere mattered most.

From 1910 to 1964, La Casa de Estudillo was marketed as Ramona s Marriage Place, putting us in the mindset of the story of Ramona, who was in those years a phenomenally beloved heroine of Jackson's widely popular novel about life in Southern California during the period of Mexican power. The words were even painted on the structure. By the late 1960s, though, attitudes were moving in another direction: atmosphere was being reshaped by knowledge at numerous sites. And in recent years, that drive for greater authenticity has yielded significant revisions to the rooms at La Casa de Estudillo and to its narrative.

Old Spanish kitchen in La Casa de Estudillo. | Photo: Courtesy of California State Parks.

The history of the way La Casa de Estudillo has been presented to the public is a microcosm of the manner we have moved from an emphasis on atmosphere to a desire for greater historical accuracy. It had fallen into ruin after the Estudillos departed. Local magnate John D. Spreckels acquired it in 1906, and funded a reconstruction. The remodel was completed in 1910 under the purview of architect Hazel Wood Waterman, who was truer to the vision of Ramona than that of social history. She added fireplaces to several rooms, for example, where there were none before; it fit her Arts and Crafts vision of what would give a Mexican era California home a measure of charm. But beginning in 1969 -- the bicentennial of San Diego -- the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America committed themselves to furnishing the Casa in the style of its period. There was a flurry of furnishings added in the 70s, but a new phase of change has gathered momentum in the last three years, with the reinstallation of the rooms in the house to fit advances in historical scholarship.

La Casa de Estudillo was once marketed as Ramonas Marriage Place. | Photo: Courtesy of California State Parks.

Yet we shouldn't feel too ne

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