California Landmark Number One: The Custom House and the Economy of Empire

The squat adobe building to your left is California State Historic Landmark Number One. Not one of the great ones. The first one. And the reason it earned that designation tells you something important about what California was before it became California.

Built in eighteen twenty-seven under Mexican rule, the Custom House was not a symbol. It was a machine. Every ship entering Monterey Bay on the hide-and-tallow trade owed tariffs at this window, and a single cargo load could bring between five thousand and twenty-five thousand dollars in duties. For twenty years, this building made Monterey the wealthiest port on the Pacific Coast of North America, richer than San Francisco, richer than any other settlement north of Mexico City. The trade Richard Henry Dana documented in his memoir "Two Years Before the Mast," the cowhides cured on California ranchos, loaded onto Boston ships, carried around Cape Horn to New England shoe factories, all of it flowed through this building's ledgers.

On July seventh, eighteen forty-six, Commodore John Drake Sloat of the United States Navy sailed into Monterey Bay and raised the American flag over this building. Sloat's proclamation said that California was henceforth a territory of the United States. What he was actually announcing, in practical terms, was that the United States was taking over the Custom House. Sloat was not planting a symbol. He was seizing a revenue mechanism.

The building stopped operating as a working customs office in eighteen sixty-eight. It has been open to the public as a historic site ever since. The tariff ledgers are still here. The adobe walls are still here. Stand at the threshold and you are standing at the exact spot where two empires changed hands on a Tuesday in July, over a question of who got to collect the money.