San Bernardino de Sena Estancia

In eighteen nineteen, the padres of Mission San Gabriel established an outpost ranch here in what is now Redlands, about sixty miles from the main mission. They called it an estancia, a satellite grazing station, and named it San Bernardino de Sena after a Franciscan friar. Neophyte laborers from the Serrano and Cahuilla peoples worked the land, raising cattle to supply the mission.

After California secularization in eighteen thirty-three, the rancho passed to the Lugo family, then to Mormon settlers who held it from eighteen fifty-one to fifty-nine, then to a physician named Dr. Benjamin Barton. The original adobe deteriorated over the following decades, and what stands today is a reconstruction begun in nineteen twenty-six and finished in nineteen thirty-seven with Works Progress Administration funding.

It remains the earliest known European structure in the San Bernardino Valley, a starting point for everything that came after.