Steps Back in Time

In my youth, I read “Two Years Before the Mast,” the chronicle of 19th century hard times at sea, by Richard Henry Dana Jr., and I still recall the 1946 movie starring Alan Ladd, Brian Donlevy and Barry Fitzgerald. Imagine my surprise--and my delight--when the book and movie recently popped back into my life.

It happened at Monterey State Historic Park in the lovely old port city of Monterey, which can claim--justifiably--to be the place where California’s modern history began.

In busy, tourist-favored Monterey, a two-hour drive south of San Francisco, the park is often overlooked, overshadowed by such star attractions as the Monterey Bay Aquarium, Fisherman’s Wharf, Cannery Row and the fabled golf course at Pebble Beach, all of which benefit from their splendid waterfront locations.

But Monterey State Historic Park gives context to these attractions and more. History unfolds here through more than a dozen 19th century structures, along with flower-filled gardens and splashing Spanish-style fountains, forming one of California’s most historical and unusual state parks. The 1827 Custom House, one of California’s oldest structures, is only steps from Fisherman’s Wharf, so a visit to the park can be added to the standard sightseeing itinerary.

You could easily spend two full and rewarding days here, as I did in late April. My wife, Sandy, was on a business trip in Monterey, and while she worked, I explored.

In 1834, young Dana took a leave from Harvard University and signed on as a seaman aboard the two-masted ship Pilgrim. For the next two years he recorded his adventures and mishaps in the booming cattle hide trade along the California coast from San Diego north to Monterey and San Francisco.

Cattle hides? Yes. Really. Mexican rancheros on the California coast supplied the hides, many of which were made into huge leather belts that turned the wheels of New England’s blossoming industries. Hides were so important to California’s economy in Dana’s day that many traders dubbed them “California bank notes.” It took 30,000 to fill a ship.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The park’s story really begins with the founding of Monterey by the Spanish, who built a presidio, or fort, in 1770, just a year before Father Junipero Serra established the Franciscan mission at nearby Carmel. (The mission still stands; the fort does not.) For 75 years, Monterey was first the Spanish capital and then (after Mexico’s independence in 1821) the Mexican capital of California.

Under Mexico, Monterey was named the sole legal port of entry for foreign ships, all of which, like Dana’s Pilgrim, were required to call at the Custom House. On July 7, 1846, at the outbreak of the Mexican War, U.S. Navy Commodore John D. Sloat sailed into Monterey, claiming California for the United States. At the Custom House, he raised the Stars and Stripes over California for the first time. (A flagpole still rises on the site of the original.) Mexico officially ceded the territory at the end of the war in 1848 in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

In the fall of 1849, California’s constitution was drafted in Monterey by 48 delegates from 10 districts as a prelude to statehood in 1850. All in all, this is quite a substantial history lesson. “For California history, it [the park] is the hub,” said Kris Quist, acting park superintendent.

The lesson is not at all daunting, although kids younger than about 10 may be bored. It unfolds in a 90-minute escorted walking tour ($5 per peson) led by an official park guide (some costumed, others not) and separate 45-minute tours of four house museums.

Here I should disclose that I majored in Spanish Colonial history at Berkeley, so I reveled in the park’s historical details. But you don’t have to absorb all the facts and figures to appreciate the beauty here. Inside and out, the carefully preserved adobes, reflecting Spanish Colonial architecture and an adaptation called Monterey Colonial--the differences are detailed in a tour of the Larkin House--are gorgeous. Each has its own colorful garden, 20th century romanticized versions of what might have existed in Old Monterey, and they alone are worth a visit.

One morning I sat for nearly an hour on a bench in the courtyard behind Pacific House, the visitor center, enjoying the quiet setting, which reminded me of the gardens of southern Spain. On one side stretches a red brick wall with Moorish-style arches. To the rear, wisteria clings to a shady arbor, and a giant magnolia towers overhead. Roses, petunias and impatiens bloom in profusion, and the cascading water of a blue-tiled fountain sings a little serenade. Birds flit in and out of an orange tree.

So serene, I thought, but this wasn’t always so. In Dana’s day, ferocious bull and bear fights were staged here--as entertainment. Women and children watched from the Pacific House balcony.

T o begin this history lesson, step inside Pacific House (1847), a tidy rectangular structure with an overhanging balcony, one of the gems of Monterey’s adobe legacy. It is on Custom House Plaza, where park-sponsored events are frequently staged.

As the park’s visitor center (it has just undergone a three-year renovation), Pacific House provides an overview of Monterey’s history from 1770 to the late 1800s. Then I stepped across the plaza to the Maritime Museum of Monterey to catch the park’s 20-minute orientation movie, which details Spanish settlement of the Monterey Bay area. Tour tickets are sold here, and the escorted walks begin just outside at 10 and 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. daily. Afterward and using the same ticket, you can take separate guided visits inside four historic buildings: the Cooper-Molera Adobe, the Larkin House, the Stevenson House and Casa Soberanes.

Even I, the enthusiastic history major, would have found five tours too much for one day, so I took two days to see everything, which was more relaxing, although I had to buy a ticket for each day.

On a sunny spring morning, three of us showed up for the 10 a.m. park walking tour, which would cover just under a mile. Without obviously defined boundaries, the park extends from near Fisherman’s Wharf into the charming Spanish-flavored commercial center of Monterey, home to some of the city’s better restaurants.

(The park’s escorted tours should not be confused with the self-guided Path of History walking tour sponsored by the Old Monterey Business Assn. You can pick up a free map almost anywhere in Monterey, and gold-colored medallions in the sidewalk pavement also help point the way along a two-mile loop. This route covers much the same ground as the park’s tour, but it points out other, privately owned historical adobes.)

To begin, guide Mary Hazel led us across the plaza to the Custom House, where Mexican officials collected import duties. On display at the entrance is a miniature model of the Pilgrim and a quote from Dana that the vessel carried everything “from Chinese fireworks to English cartwheels.”

The interior is filled with the sort of items that a visiting ship might have brought in trade in the 1830s. In one corner stands a barrel packed with fine china, in another sacks of Carolina rice and cocoa from Guayaquil, Ecuador. I spied a huge metal trap with powerful jaws and jagged teeth, so I asked about it. The rancheros slaughtered as many as 200 head of cattle at a time for the hides and left much of the meat to rot. “This attracted grizzly bears, so they needed bear traps,” Hazel said.

The tour takes in Monterey’s First Brick House (1847), an architectural change from the clay, sand and straw adobe that had been the prime construction material previously. (Though expensive, brick is more substantial and requires less maintenance.) Nearby is the Old Whaling Station (also 1847), used in whaling operations. Its front sidewalk is made of whale vertebrae--”one way to deal with all the leftover bones,” Hazel said.

Beyond its lovely patio garden is an adobe known as California’s First Theatre, built as a rooming house for U.S. Army soldiers in 1846. Bored officers organized a series of shows, hence the name. Since 1937, troupers of the Gold Coast, a local theatrical group, have staged melodramas on weekends.

Down the street at Colton Hall (1849), now part of City Hall, the second-floor chamber in which California’s first Constitution was written still looks much as it did then. Built of white stone just in time for the constitutional convention, the stately edifice boasts two tall pillars and reportedly was the only structure in California suitable at the time for such an important event.

Our tour paused briefly in front of the bright blue gate at Casa Soberanes, an 1840s adobe home notable for the grand Monterey cypress hedge that rings a terraced garden. We cut through the garden of the Larkin House, where Civil War Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, then an Army lieutenant, lived briefly in 1847; and concluded at the Cooper-Molera Adobe, a three-acre farm depicting family life in Monterey in the mid-19th century.

At the Larkin House, started in 1832 by Massachusetts merchant Thomas Oliver Larkin, visitors get an architectural lesson. Larkin, the U.S. consul in Monterey, combined the prevailing Mexican style--adobe walls, a second-floor balcony with overhanging room and walled garden--with the pointed roof, central hall and interior stairway of his New England heritage. The style became known as Monterey Colonial.

At the Cooper-Molera Adobe, linked to the Vallejo family--one of the most socially and politically prominent names in Mexican California--visitors are guided through two adjoining residences. One, depicting the home of an affluent Mexican family, is sparsely furnished in the fashion of the day, and furniture is pushed back against the wall as if to accommodate dances, a popular pastime. The other is decidedly Victorian in style, cluttered and frilly and filled with luxurious trade goods, which is what affluent Anglo-Americans preferred.

The Stevenson House, a two-story adobe from the 1840s packed with memorabilia of writer Robert Louis Stevenson, tells a charming love story. In 1879, the author of “Treasure Island” and “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” briefly rented an upstairs room while he courted Fanny Osbourne, a divorcee 10 years his senior, and in 1880 they were married in Napa Valley.

On the wall is an original charcoal portrait of Stevenson done by Osbourne that dates to the couple’s first meeting three years earlier in France. “It was love at first sight,” the guide said, and the subsequent marriage was a happy one.

On this literary note, I reminded myself of a vow I’d made earlier in the day. Near my hotel, I stepped into Bay Books in search of a copy of “Two Years Before the Mast.” The store had a shelf of them. For two days I had strolled in Dana’s footsteps in Old Monterey, and now I was ready to renew our old acquaintance.

James T. Yenckel is a Washington, D.C.-based travel writer who grew up in California and returns to the state often.

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GUIDEBOOK

Exploring the Past in Old Monterey

Getting there: Monterey is about 345 miles north of Los Angeles, a six-hour drive on U.S. 101, slightly less on Interstate 5, west on California 46 and continuing north at Paso Robles on U.S. 101. At Salinas, take California Highway 68 to California 1. From LAX, nonstop service to Monterey is on United and American. Restricted round-trip fares begin at $236. You can fly nonstop to San Jose, about 65 miles north of Monterey, on United, American or Southwest. Restricted round-trip fares from LAX begin at $114.

Where to stay: Four excellent lodging choices are close to Monterey State Historic Park. We stayed at the 105-room Hotel Pacific, 300 Pacific St., telephone (800) 554-5542 or (831) 373-5700, fax (831) 373-6921, Internet https://www.hotelpacific.com. Rates, including continental breakfast, begin at $199.

Merritt House, 386 Pacific St., tel. (800) 541-5599 or (831) 646-9686, fax (831) 646- 5392, Internet https://www.merritthouseinn.com, is a 25-room B&B.; Rates begin at $155.

Doubletree Hotel, 2 Portola Plaza, opens onto the park; tel. (800) 222-8733 (reservations) or (831) 649-4511, fax (831) 649-4115, Internet https://www.hilton.com/doubletree/hotels/MRYADDT/index.html. Rates begin at $185.

The Marriott, 350 Calle Principal, tel. (800) 892-4789 or (831) 649-4234, fax (831) 372-2968, Internet https://www.marriott.com, is also convenient to Monterey’s commercial center. Rates begin at $159.

Where to eat: Montrio, at 414 Calle Principal, local tel. 648-8880, offers an American bistro menu in a restored firehouse. Stokes Adobe Restaurant, 500 Hartnell St., tel. 373-1110, serves American cuisine in a restored adobe. For an inexpensive lunch: Mike’s Seafood, tel. 372-6153, on Fisherman’s Wharf.

For more information: Monterey State Historic Park, 20 Custom House Plaza, Monterey, CA 93940; tel. (831) 649-7118, fax (831) 647-6236, Internet https://www.mbay.net/~mshp/. Also, Monterey Peninsula Visitors & Convention Bureau, P.O. Box 1770, Monterey, CA 93942; tel. (831) 649-1770, fax (831) 648-5373, Internet https://www.monterey.com.

(key to map, page 1)

1. Pacific House

2. Maritime Museum

3. Custom House

4. Custom House Plaza

5. First Brick House

6. Old Washington Station

7. California’s First Theatre

8. Casa Soberanes

9. Colton Hall

10. Larkin House

11. Cooper-Molera Adobe

12. Stevenson House