Adobe Worth Seeing, by Any Name

Betty Beacher, who spent part of her childhood living near the California Historical Landmark in Costa Mesa that is known as the Diego Sepulveda Adobe, says she thinks the adobe is one bit of California antiquity that is misnamed.

Beacher, a member of the Costa Mesa Historical Society, the nonprofit group that tends the adobe on behalf of the city, said Don Jose Diego Sepulveda, the mayor of the pueblo of Los Angeles during the middle of the last century, never lived in the building.

“I call it an outpost,” she said, strolling around the floor of the small reconstructed building in Estancia Park. “It was an outlying mission stock headquarters where the vaqueros who worked the rancho stayed.”

Today the adobe is one of the last reminders of the sort of wide-open place Orange County was in the last century. On a bluff top not far from the intersection of Harbor Boulevard and Adams Avenue, the structure once looked out over vast stretches of open cattle range, part of the huge Rancho Santiago de Santa Ana, which covered nearly 63,000 acres.

The rancho was originally given by the king of Spain to Jose Antonio Yorba, a retired Catalonian soldier, and his nephew, Juan Pablo Peralta, in 1810. From then to about 1830, Beacher said, the adobe was built as a place not only for the vaqueros, but for the padres from Mission San Juan Capistrano, who came periodically to the rancho to minister to the workers there.

Whether Don Jose Diego Sepulveda actually lived there at one time, or whether he ever used it as a way station between Los Angeles and San Juan Capistrano, is in doubt, Beacher said. Many official documents on display inside the adobe call the building the Estancia (station) Adobe, in reference to its use as a cattle station.

The adobe went through a succession of owners until the Segerstrom family, who in 1940 bought the land on which the adobe sat and donated the estancia and 5 acres of surrounding land to the city. Restoration began in 1966; the wooden, farmhouse-style structure that had for years surrounded the original adobe walls was stripped away.

Today, three of the original, rough estancia walls remain. The remaining walls, ceiling and floor were reconstructed of materials similar to those used when the adobe was first built, Beacher said.

The adobe’s three rooms, filled with furniture and artifacts that have been donated for exhibition, represent four periods in California’s history. In the southwest room, the earliest room of the adobe, a replica of a beehive-style oven has been built into one corner, and several stones for grinding corn are displayed around the room.

The east room contains the reception area and displays of several maps depicting Southern California land grants, mission holdings and such items as shells, fossils, tools and other artifacts found around the site.

The northwest room contains Victorian furniture of the type that might have been found in the adobe about the turn of the century.

THE DIEGO SEPULVEDA ADOBE AT A GLANCE

Where: 1900 Adams Ave., Costa Mesa.

Hours: Saturdays, noon to 4 p.m.; second and fourth Sundays of each month, 1 to 4 p.m.

Admission: Free.

Information and tour arrangements: (714) 754-5302.