Adobe House Stands as History’s Sentinel

Costa Mesa’s Diego Sepulveda Adobe stands alone on a bluff overlooking a flat landscape of red-tile rooftops, low greenery and the graceful arc of the occasional palm tree. About the only spots not covered by the irrigated sprawl of modern human endeavor are two browned bluffs in the near distance, one to the north and the other to the south.

People used to live in both places. A Tongva, or Gabrielino, village once perched on the first bluff. The second held the 1855 adobe of rancher Eduardo Pollo Reno, namesake of Paularino Avenue, adobe historians say.

And people once lived here too in the Sepulveda Adobe, which now anchors Costa Mesa’s Estancia Park, a 5-acre patch of trees and grass north of Adams Avenue that’s hidden in the midst of suburbia.

Wind the hands of time back 180 years and this stretch of suburbia would be a very different-looking place. The Tongva were here first. Then in the early 1820s the padres at Mission San Juan Capistrano built this adobe as a shelter for vaqueros watching over the mission’s cattle. It takes half an hour -- without traffic -- to drive between the two places today; one can only guess at how long it took drovers to move cattle more than 20 miles over the open land.

Why the padres needed pastureland this far away from the mission is unclear. One theory is that the Spanish priests planted mustard to spice up their meals and the plants spread in a wildfire of yellow blossoms that choked out the native grasses upon which the cattle grazed.

“In this soil, it went crazy,” says Richard Duvall, 43, of Santa Ana, a local-history buff and volunteer docent at the Sepulveda Adobe, which is open to the public on the first and third Saturday afternoons of the month. “So they kept coming north.”

Part of the proof can be found on old maps. A framed copy of an 1868 Costa Mesa chart hanging inside the Sepulveda adobe shows a “mustard line” slanting from the northwest to the southeast above the present-day intersection of Adams Avenue and Harbor Boulevard.

North of the line, Duvall says, it was difficult for the cattle to find edible grasses amid the mustard beds; south was safe.

Then, as now, people gravitated to the high ground. Now it’s for the aesthetics of a pretty view. Back then, a long view was an early defense. “You wanted to be able to see people coming at you,” Duvall says.

With nearly 3 million people crowded into Orange County’s 798 square miles, it’s easy to miss these touchstones of the past. But when the Spanish padres used local Tongva tribesmen to build the original adobe here, the closest thing to a road was a dirt trail to the north, tying in eventually to El Camino Real, which connected the Franciscans’ California missions like beads on a rosary.

Over the years this modest building has had a range of names. Initially known simply as the estancia -- or station -- of the Mission San Juan Capistrano, historians have found an 1823 letter from the Colegio de Fernando in Mexico City authorizing its construction.

At the time, the land was owned by the Yorba and Peralta families. As Catholics, “when the church decided to build, they had no complaints,” Duvall says. The original walls were two bricks thick, about 26 inches.

In the mid-1830s, the church gave up the estancia and it changed hands several times until Diego Sepulveda bought it in the 1860s. He hoped that the proximity to the Santa Ana River would help his cattle survive a persistent and deep drought. It didn’t. In 1870, a farmer named Gabe Allen bought the adobe and built a wooden shell around it using timbers from the Wilmington Drum Barracks, a decommissioned Civil War military base in Los Angeles County.

That the Sepulveda Adobe still stands at all is a testament to the vagaries of greed. Newcomers to the region, particularly after the Civil War, took to looting abandoned adobes, Duvall says. The lure: a persistent and errant belief that Spanish gold was hidden within the walls.

The Sepulveda Adobe was left alone because few realized that it was an adobe: Allen’s building project had hidden the tell-tale adobe bricks. It wasn’t until a fire in 1961 -- it was still lived in at that time -- exposed the inner adobe that people realized the true nature of the building, according to a 1966 report in the Pacific Coast Archaeological Society Quarterly.

By then, the adobe was owned by the Segerstrom family, who had bought it and the surrounding land in 1940. In 1963, the family deeded the adobe and 5 acres to the city as a monument to the region’s early settlers. By March 1966 the structure had been restored.

The adobe is not in its original condition. Some of the walls have been replaced, Mexican tile covers the original dirt floor and the neat lawn upon which the building sits is a modern invention. But there’s enough of the original to give visitors a flavor of what once was.

Inside, the walls have been stripped to the original adobe, and newer bricks in the mode of the old were used in the reconstruction. Glassed display cases hold artifacts from the different stages in the adobe’s life. Outside, pepper trees shade mature jade bushes and agaves, and the lawn stops at a graveled fringe around the adobe.

Out of sight, the daily flow of suburbia rumbles along Adams Avenue in a relentless parade of the present. The rush-roar of the cars strains the peacefulness of the park in an incessant reminder of the complexities of life.

But if you listen quietly, you can hear among the rustling treetops the whispered footfalls of the dead.