Keeper of Ancestral Adobe : Rios Patriarch Relishes Responsibility for Historic Home

As his two smallest children played with their mischievous mutt, Goldie, and a couple of young lambs in the front yard of his 200-year-old adobe home, Stephen Michael Rios could not help but smile.

Things seem to be going well for the current patriarch of the Rios family, one of the surviving Californio clans--the powerful Spanish, Mexican and Native American cattle ranchers and landowners who ruled the state before it became part of the United States in 1850.

As this town rang the bells at its famous mission to celebrate the traditional return of the swallows Saturday, Rios’ family marked the clan’s 200th consecutive year in this adobe home. The home is listed in history books as the oldest continuously inhabited house of its kind in California.

The entire Rios clan will gather sometime at the end of the fall for the celebration of the adobe home.

“It’s easier to track your heritage when you’ve got eight generations (of Rioses) who never left or moved away--the patriarchs, anyway,” Rios said. Of the more than 100 cousins and dozens of aunts, uncles and nephews in the family tree, only he and his children are direct descendants, Rios said.

Tall and somewhat portly, the 46-year-old lawyer on this day looked the part of a patriarch in his dark blue shirt, black slacks, cowboy hat and boots. The 1975 graduate of UC Berkeley Law School at Boalt Hall knows he carries the weight of his family’s history on his shoulders.

“There is no question about it, I do feel a sense of true responsibility not only to my four children, but to my extended family, which is quite large. There’s no other adult Rios (who is a direct descendant) in the family. I’m the only one left to carry the family name.”

The cost of keeping up the house alone is quite a load, he says. But being a Rios, he quickly adds, is a worthy reward.

“It is something my father inculcated in me and I’m doing it to my (children) as well,” he said.

The whitewashed adobe--made of mud, straw and clay bricks--is registered as a California historical landmark. The one-story home sits on two acres of land tucked in the middle of modern housing, shopping malls and wide roads just west of Interstate 5 and just a dozen yards from the Amtrak station.

Rios calls his spread “a museum,” which indeed it appears to be.

Although it is filled with the trappings of modern living--a computer, a television, a pastel-colored couch and cabinets for compact discs and videos--the adobe has not lost its original proportions or feel. And it is filled with memories and heirlooms.

On the walls are dozens of photographs and paintings of family members: Rios’ aunt, Juanita, who was named a city matriarch. There is also cowboy Damian Rios, his grandfather, who became a world famous amansador , or horse tamer.

And there is Rios’ father, Daniel, who in the 1940s and ‘50s was the county marshal for two terms. Daniel Rios, who also became head of the homicide and robbery divisions at the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, died at 74.

The main bedroom holds two tin-and-wood chests filled with family documents, photographs and other heirlooms, and an old bed with a cherrywood headboard. In a nook hangs a painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe, surrounded by candles.

Living in this house has not been easy, Rios said. Although it now has regular plumbing and a bathroom--past generations had to make do with an outhouse--the adobe must be whitewashed regularly to prevent rainwater from penetrating the walls and undermining them.

Rios laughs when visitors point to the house’s “tiny doors.”

“They’re actually regular doors, but you have to remember that these (wooden) floors were dirt floors” when the doors were installed, he said. “When they put in floors and doorways, they lowered the (height of the) doors by six inches.”

Back in 1794, a Spanish soldier named Feliciano Rios was granted permission by mission fathers to build a home just west of the mission. In 1843, Feliciano Rios’ son, Santiago, was granted 7.7 acres that included the land where the family’s home was built, the famous “grant within a grant” mentioned by local history books.

Santiago Rios became the region’s justice of the peace in the 1840s. His son, Damian, the horse tamer, died at 93, when he was hit by a train in front of his house.

“He was fit enough, he just didn’t hear as well” when the train sounded its whistle to warn the old man, Stephen Rios said. “He would’ve lived to be 103.”

Visitors stand along the front-yard fence every day and stare at the home, which radiates the spirit of old California with its garden of roses and greenery of every kind, including several cacti and an olive tree that a local monsignor brought many years ago from Jerusalem.

The tree was for Stephen Rios’ late grandmother, Gertrude Rheina, whom he lovingly refers to as “Nana Tula.”

Outside, there is a barbecue pit, made by Rios from riverbed rocks, that is big enough to grill a side of beef. A collection of artifacts from the Old West includes an enormous spoke-less iron wheel once used by a borax wagon train team.

In the back yard lies an almost empty farm that once was home to horses, goats, chickens and pigs. Nearby is a wooden abode that served as the home of the property’s mayordomo, or supervisor.

Rios likes to show off his 140-year-old pepper tree, which is rooted in a corner of the front yard. Pointing to a hole in the hollow trunk, he says: “Put your hand in there. Feel the energy. . . .”

“There is a spirit in there,” he says, only half-jokingly.

In the home’s front yard is a ramada, a porchlike hut made of bamboo stems and eucalyptus sticks featuring a frayed couch covered with an old bedspread. Many a community matter has been discussed and settled under its shade, said Rios, a former member of the city Planning Commission and its historical society.

San Juan Capistrano “council members have sat here with (constituents) to settle disputes,” Rios said. “There’s such a feeling of friendship here that it is hard to leave here without reaching some kind of compromise or resolution. It’s the spirit of this house, of the land grant.”