Doña María and the Rancho That Became a City
Near Santa Rosa, California
In eighteen thirty-eight, a widow with twelve children built an adobe house along Santa Rosa Creek and began to organize the land around her into something that would eventually become a city of nearly two hundred thousand people. Her name was María Ygnacia López de Carrillo, and the rancho she established is where Santa Rosa begins.
Doña María came from a family that had traveled overland to California with the Anza Expedition of seventeen seventy-five and seventy-six, among the first non-indigenous settlers to make that crossing. She married Joaquin Victor Carrillo at sixteen. After his death, she petitioned the Mexican governor for a land grant and received what was formally titled Rancho Cabeza de Santa Rosa, roughly eight thousand eight hundred acres of valley land centered on the creek. It was one of only a handful of Mexican land grants in all of California made to a single woman.
By eighteen forty-two, her ranch ran approximately three thousand head of cattle and fifteen hundred horses. She cultivated wheat, barley, corn, beans, and vegetables. The adobe structure she built, roughly twenty feet deep and ninety feet wide, with walls three feet thick, stood near the site of the present-day Carrillo Adobe park. Doña María designed it herself.
Her son Julio Carrillo, recognizing that the American settlement pressing southward from Sonoma would eventually reach the valley, partnered with a settler named Barney Hoen in eighteen fifty-four to promote the relocation of the county seat from Sonoma to a new town platted near the adobe. They offered to donate land for a courthouse and a plaza. County voters accepted. The county seat moved. The town was named Santa Rosa, after the rancho and the saint. In eighteen sixty-eight the state of California confirmed the city's incorporation.
Doña María herself had died in eighteen forty-nine, one year after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo transferred California to the United States. She never saw the city her land grant made possible. Her grandson, Romualdo Pacheco, born on the rancho, would become California's twelfth governor in eighteen seventy-five, the first California-born governor and the only one of Mexican ancestry to date.
The adobe today stands as an incomplete ruin. For more than a century, various preservation efforts have come and gone without fully stabilizing it.
