Roots Run Deep at Rios Adobe : Landmark in San Juan Links Family to Its Past

The office of Stephen Michael Rios, attorney at law, was once his great-great-great-grandfather’s kitchen, and Rios looks right sitting in it.

He is quite large seated behind the small desk in the tiny room. His head barely clears the top of the unusually low doorway. And, dressed in a brown leather jacket, a western shirt with mother-of-pearl snaps and long cowboy boots, Rios looks less like an attorney than a ranch boss.

But in his home--of which the office is a part --Rios knows as few men do that he is firmly in his proper place. He is the latest resident of the Rios Adobe of San Juan Capistrano, the oldest house in the oldest residential neighborhood in California.

The Rios family has lived in the adobe, a registered California state landmark, from generation to generation since it was built of mud, clay and straw in 1794. And now the adobe--situated just across the street from the San Juan Capistrano train depot--is the home and office of Stephen Rios, 37, former Marine, former counsel to a governor’s commission and overseer of a local family tradition that is nearly two centuries old. He is a man who lives and works in the 20th Century, but feels a powerful responsibility to keep vital the traditions of the 18th and 19th.

‘It’s Like a Museum’

“I love this house,” he says. “There’s no question that it’s the focal point of our family, of all our traditions. It’s like a museum, a museum that’s always open. Artifacts, furniture, family--they’re all here. And I grew up with the history around me. I lived it. I think that’s why I don’t feel any confusion about my role as a modern person as well as a person who’s part of old tradition. It’s been with me all my life.”

Rios was born in Santa Ana and spent about half of his childhood there and half at the adobe, where his father, Dan Rios, a longtime county sheriff’s investigator and later county marshal, tended the home and the land. Dan Rios died three years ago at age 74.

‘Started to Watch, Learn’

“I think I first became aware--or more aware--of what the adobe and our family meant when I left my adolescence,” says Rios. “I began to notice that my father was getting older, and I knew that he wouldn’t always be here to take care of things. And when your dad’s your role model, you start paying attention to how he does things. I started to watch and learn.”

At 18, Rios left home to join the Marines; he was stationed at Camp Pendleton during part of his four-year hitch. At 22, he entered UC Irvine, where he earned a degree in philosophy. He went on to obtain a law degree from UC Berkeley in 1975 and worked for a succession of special-interest law firms before being offered a post on then-Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr.’s Native American Heritage Commission. In 1979, he returned from Sacramento to Orange County and his ancestral home to enter private practice.

There are only two indications that the little front room in the adobe is a law office: diplomas on the wall and a couple of rows of legal reference books. Otherwise, the room is a hodgepodge of old photos, Indian figurines, religious pictures and statues, an ancient wooden chest topped by an animal hide and dusty sombreros, an old vanity and a small television set.

Artifacts From 2 Centuries

Elsewhere, the adobe contains antique furniture, a large brick fireplace, a more modern back kitchen and bedrooms and, everywhere, artifacts from two centuries of occupancy by a family of ranchers.

“It was built by Feliciano Rios, my great-great-great-grandfather,” says Rios, smiling as he tries to remember how many “greats” to include. “He was a Spanish soldier who was assigned to Father Serra’s expedition here to build the mission. He was on a six-year tour of duty when he married a Juaneno Indian woman in 1793. The records just list her as ‘Indian pagan.’

“He could have returned to Spain after his six years, but he chose to stay and try to obtain a land grant. That grant eventually became Boca de la Playa.”

After obtaining his grant, Feliciano Rios threw in with a brother who also had reveived a grant, and together they ranched the land between the northern and southern hills of San Juan Capistrano, a natural mouth opening to the beach in what is now Dana Point. In Spanish, their grant meant “Mouth of the Beach.”

But, says Rios, decades of debts accumulated, and many were paid off not in money but in land. The huge Rios holdings eventually shrank to the two acres on the front of which the Rios Adobe sits.

“My family was what were called Californios,” says Rios, “an ethnic type very particular to this area. They were combinations of Mexican, Spaniard and Indian.

“And they were all ranchers. They all raised livestock and worked the land. My grandfather, Damian Rios, was one of the best. He was a legendary horseman, and people brought horses from as far away as England for him to train. Everyone knew him as El Mancador--literally ‘the breaker of horses.”’

Damian Rios was killed in 1953 at age 93 when he was struck by a commuter train only steps from the adobe as he was returning from Sunday Mass.

Rios says he can claim “between 30 and 40 first and second cousins” who live in San Juan Capistrano alone. Many other family members are spread throughout California and Arizona.

But periodically they rendezvous at the adobe for weddings, baptisms and other family occasions. They gather in the front yard, amid a riot of trees, cactus and farming implements, for a barbecue. Recently Rios built a giant barbecue pit out of round rocks from the nearby creek bottom, a pit large enough to roast whole pigs and lambs, which Rios raises for that purpose.

“When the family says they’re going to come here, they don’t say, ‘We’re coming over to your house.’ We all call it ‘the adobe,”’ says Rios. “A lot of them come here and stay for two or three days at a time. They come to feel rejuvenated.

“This house is a real blessing, no question about it, because it’s so rich in tradition, but it’s tough--it’s really tough--to maintain. The upkeep is never-ending. I’d stack my maintenance bill against any mortgage for any medium-sized house in San Juan.

“But Feliciano Rios seemed to know what he was doing. I discovered the foundation one time while I was doing repairs, and it’s just round rocks from the river bottom with no mortar holding them together. Maybe that’s one reason why the adobe has stood up so well against earthquakes.”

The mortal enemy of an adobe house is water and so, says Rios, he must constantly keep watch on the wooden roof and keep the adobe whitewashed. And, he adds, an ancient house sometimes calls for ancient maintenance techniques.

“Normally,” he says, “whitewash will stick to you and everything else, but we cut up one of the cactus plants in the front yard and boil it down to what’s called jugo --juice. The combination of the water and lime from that goes into the whitewash and it doesn’t stick to you.”

A second, smaller building on the property also is whitewashed regularly. Used today as a shed, it was once known as the Casa de los Rios, a small street-side stand at which Rios’ aunt sold homemade Mexican food to travelers. Spencer Tracy and Gary Cooper, who enjoyed taking the train to Del Mar to play the horses, were occasional customers, says Rios.

In spite of the fact that the main street of the tiny neighborhood is called Los Rios Street and the neighborhood itself is known as Los Rios, the occupant of the Rios Adobe dismisses talk of any sort of role as paterfamilias.

“I see my role as one of having responsibility for the adobe and its traditions,” he says. “And I like it that way. I enjoy it.”

However, Pam Gibson, San Juan Capistrano’s city historian, says that Rios and his family are well known and respected by both old and new residents of the neighborhood.

“When your family’s been around for nearly 200 years, you have a leadership role,” she says. “The adobe is very much the center of the Los Rios neighborhood.”

It is also very nearly the center of his life, both personal and professional. His law practice--which he says is equally divided between criminal defense, personal injury and family law--requires a 50-hour workweek.

“I’m in court three, maybe four days a week,” says Rios. “But on the weekends I’m here at the adobe doing maintenance. The practice pays the bills. It’s not what you’d call lucrative yet, but it gives me a comfort zone.”

Rios maintains a second law office elsewhere in the city and says he divides his time equally between that office and the one at the adobe. And, he adds, he seldom ventures out of San Juan Capistrano socially.

“With the exception of my sister, who lives in Tustin, all my friends and family are in San Juan,” he says. “Between a law practice and an old adobe house and a two-acre ranch, there’s not much time to take trips away. It’s all more than a handful.”

Rios has served on the city Planning Commission and has maintained a reputation as a stinging critic of development that he feels is incompatible with his city and neighborhood. He is particularly fierce in his denunciation of a disposal company that has been allowed to operate from a yard in the Los Rios neighborhood.

“I feel amazed sometimes at the intensity of the development I see going on around us,” he says. “And some of the things that have happened in this neighborhood have amazed and disappointed me, and I’ve been very vocal about it. Many people have good intentions, but they have no appreciation of the spirit of this neighborhood.”

And, he says, there is only one time to visit the neighborhood to gain that appreciation.

“You can’t know this place unless you come here at night,” he says with wonder in his voice. “You look out in the front yard and see the shadows and the silhouettes, and you can feel the difference. That’s when what I call the spiritual power of the adobe and the street comes out. When all the people and the tour groups and others are gone, that’s when this area can return to itself.”

Ghost legends abound in the neighborhood and, says Rios, “the center of a lot of the spirit activity here is the old pepper tree in our front yard. It’s about 150 years old and one of the more well-known ghosts--she’s called the White Lady--has been seen several times sitting at the base of that pepper tree. They exist, there’s no question about it.”

The adobe itself, he says, has played host to a number of unseen inhabitants who knock on doors and tramp through rooms with heavy footsteps. It is even speculated that the spirit of the notorious early California bandit Joaquin Murietta--who, it is said, was once given sanctuary in the adobe--has paid more than one ghostly return visit.

The legends and lore have been embraced by Rios’ own young children, Serita and Jess, says Rios. They live with their mother in Fresno but visit Rios frequently at the adobe. He has taught them both to care for animals and ride horses. Serita, 8, “planted every seed in the garden here,” says Rios. “And they both have their own lambs to look after. We’ve all learned about aspects of ranching.”

Will his 6-year-old son eventually take up the family tradition and live in the adobe too?

“Oh, no question about it,” says Rios matter-of-factly. “He loves the place. And he wants to learn how to take care of it just as I did.

“It all makes me proud. I don’t think I’ll ever leave here in my lifetime. Every time I think of going, my roots scream to me to come back.”