Casa de Estudillo
Old Town San Diego State Historic Park
4000 Mason Street, San Diego CA 92110

Courtesy California State Library

Photo by Marlena Krcelich

CONSTRUCTION OF LA CASA DE ESTUDILLO began in 1827 for Presidio Comandante José María de Estudillo and his family. It is the oldest surviving example of a typical one-story Spanish-Mexican adobe townhouse in San Diego County. Built in a U-shape surrounding a courtyard, the original thirteen rooms were connected by an external veranda surrounding the courtyard, where fruit trees and a kitchen garden were situated, along with a well and an horno (adobe oven), as most of the cooking and domestic work took place out of doors.

The adobe walls were between three and five feet thick in some areas, and covered in a protective coat of lime whitewash. A distinctive original feature of the house was a round cupola at the top center of the structure, where family and friends gathered to watch bullfights and rodeos in the plaza below them. Several generations of the Estudillo family were raised in this home, including many orphans that Señora Estudillo adopted. The home was a social center and served many functions, among them a residence, post office, town hall for meetings, fiestas and fandangos, and on Sundays it served as the chapel for the community until the Chapel of the Immaculate Conception was established in 1858.

In later years, due to the popularity of Helen Hunt Jackson's historical novel Ramona, la Casa de Estudillo was erroneously identified as the site of the "real" Ramona's marriage place. The Ramona story romanticized California while depicting the plight of the native peoples and brought many tourists to the area. Eventually, sugar magnate John D. Spreckels bought the house. Hazel Wood Waterman, San Diego's first woman architect, supervised its restoration. Tommy Getz, a local promoter, saw the potential in tourism for Old Town, and operated the dwelling as a tourist attraction billed as "Ramona's Marriage Place." Becoming a part of the California State Park system in 1968, the house has been a museum for nearly 60 years, and new restoration efforts to return the home to its original appearance are ongoing.

Old Town San Diego State Historic Park LINK