The Carrillo Adobe is ‘where Santa Rosa began.’ 184 years later, it’s still in ruins

Blink and you’ll miss the unassuming historic site of Santa Rosa’s birthplace as you head down Montgomery Drive toward the bustling shopping center. A sign behind a chain link fence across the street from rows of ranch style homes proclaims the Carrillo Adobe, built in 1837, as the place “Where Santa Rosa Began.”

It’s here that Maria Ygnacia Lopez de Carrillo, widowed mother of 12 children, received from the governor the Rancho Cabeza de Santa Rosa, the original 8,800-acre Mexican land grant along Santa Rosa creek. Although the Carrillo Adobe where she lived with her family is steeped in history, efforts to preserve and interpret it for the public have been thwarted over the last century.

Eric Stanley, associate director and curator at the History Museum of Sonoma County, said people are drawn to the old ruins for a myriad of reasons: as a local landmark, relic of the mission, monument to Carrillo, to the narrative of Native Americans who previously inhabited the site and later became laborers to the Carrillo family.

“It's the complexity and layers of history that make it fascinating. There is something there for everyone to grab onto and some enduring mystery. It also becomes a mirror on the community and what we value, since the story that is emphasized has changed over the years,” Stanley said.

There was a public campaign in 1937 to preserve Carrillo Adobe, which had a sagging roof and crumbling bricks. The Press Democrat ran a series of stories that year romanticizing the old adobe’s history, including tales of the Bear Flag Revolt.

The Carrillo family raised cattle and cultivated grain, fruits and vegetables. It was later used as a trading post, post office and inn.

For the second half of the 20th century the Carrillo Adobe was owned by the Catholic Diocese of Santa Rosa. The church led another preservation effort in 1962, when a roof was installed. In 1981, the roof collapsed. In 1990, efforts were once again stalled.

Timing never aligned for stakeholders to come together in a coordinated effort to preserve the city’s birthplace. Over the course of several decades, if the church expressed interest in restoration, the city didn’t. And when city officials did, the church didn’t.

“How can there be this much interest and no result?” Stanley said. “Everyone was out of step, out of sync.”

In 1997, Maria Carrillo High School in Santa Rosa’s Rincon Valley was named in her honor. And in the early 2000s, the Carrillo Adobe and surrounding property was bought by Swenson Builders, a San Jose-based developer.

There are no known plans to preserve the building in the near future.

See the gallery above for photos of the Carrillo Adobe in Santa Rosa.