Restoration Takes Adobe Back Into the Past

“You wanna play with mud?” shouted Salvador Padilla, who had it all over his hands as he molded it into building blocks at the Reyes Adobe in Agoura Hills.

The mud was a mixture of dirt, water, sand and straw that makes adobe, the same material used by a Reyes family member to build the Reyes Adobe between 1797 and 1820.

Padilla is one of several workers taking part in the $158,000 renovation of the historical landmark. Agoura Hills officials had hoped that the five-year job would be completed today, but now say it is expected to be finished Aug. 11. The adobe may reopen to the public in October.

Financed with federal block grant funds, the renovation will restore the adobe to its 1820 condition, said Paul Williams, director of planning and community development for Agoura Hills.

“This is the one major historical structure we have,” Williams said.

The Reyes Adobe began as a 17,000-acre land grant to Miguel Ortega by King Philip of Spain in the late 18th Century, said A.J. (Sandy) Sandoval, president of the Las Virgenes Historical Society.

The earliest report of the adobe is in 1820, when Don Jacinto Reyes reportedly accepted it as a wedding gift from his father, who apparently built it, Sandoval said.

If the adobe’s main room was built as a storage shed as early as 1797, as some Reyes descendants have claimed, the adobe would be among the oldest buildings in California, Williams said.

The land overlooked a stretch of El Camino Real, a trail the Spaniards used to travel the coast. The adobe was a haven for the trail’s travelers, including renowned bandit Joaquin Murietta, Sandoval said. That stretch of land is now occupied by the Ventura Freeway.

Structural Changes

Ownership of the adobe changed several times. In 1935, Malcolm McKenzie bought it for $3,500 to preserve it. Ten years later, the Dodson family bought the building, making several structural changes to use it as a home, he said.

In 1975, the Dodsons sold the property to a developer, who built houses around the adobe and donated it to Los Angeles County.

Over the years, the adobe deteriorated. Inside the nearby barn, telephone numbers and graffiti are scrawled on a wall. Youths have vandalized parts of the property and dug underneath the barn for gold that they thought Murietta had buried, Sandoval said.

As one of their first tasks, the restorers erected an iron fence to keep out vandals, Williams said. Most of the remaining work has centered on restoring the 32-inch-thick adobe walls and eliminating changes made by the Dodsons.

The historical society applied in 1984 to add the adobe to the National Register of Historic Places, but was turned down largely because of the structural alterations. The society will apply again when restoration is finished, Sandoval said.

Sandoval said he would like to see the adobe become a museum that reflects life of the 1820s.

Williams said simulating the home’s 19th-Century furnishings would not be difficult because the family was not wealthy.

Several artifacts have been recovered at the site, such as U.S. coins from the 19th Century, a pair of earrings and a branding iron with the letter R . The earrings and the coins were found beneath the floor by the Dodsons. However, they were stolen in the mid-1970s, Sandoval said.

During the present restoration, workers found several old horseshoes and metal dinner plates, but Sandoval doesn’t know how old they are.

Sandoval has been a leader of efforts to restore the adobe since 1980, when he chipped in the first $10. He admits a special interest in the project because he is descended from 17th-Century Spanish conquistadores and was born in 1923 in an 18-room adobe house in Colorado, he said.

The Reyes Adobe, he said, “was something that was part of this area’s heritage and needed to be saved.”

Even Padilla, the construction worker, caught the history bug while working on the structure.

“It makes me feel good,” he said of working with adobe bricks. ‘With a simple thing like this, I’m making something like other people did years and years ago. That makes me feel special.”