The Boronda Adobe

Out on West Laurel Drive in Salinas, set back from the road on a few acres of grass that give some sense of what the open valley floor looked like before the twentieth century, there is an adobe building that dates to the eighteen forties. It is among the oldest surviving structures in the Salinas Valley, and it is one of the finest examples of what historians call the Monterey Colonial style: a two-story building that combines Spanish colonial adobe construction with elements of New England architecture that arrived on the California coast in the early American period.

The man who built it was Jose Eusebio Boronda, who received a Mexican land grant of roughly two thousand two hundred thirty acres in this part of the valley from Governor Juan Alvarado in eighteen forty. The grant was called Rancho Rincon de Sanjon. Boronda built the adobe between eighteen forty-four and eighteen forty-eight, during the last years of Mexican California, before the American conquest of eighteen forty-six and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in eighteen forty-eight transferred sovereignty to the United States. He had a wood-shingled roof put on, wrap-around porches in the American style, open beamed ceilings, and two indoor fireplaces. The fusion of building traditions is visible in every structural detail.

What happened to the land grant after American sovereignty is a story repeated across California. Boronda's grant, roughly two thousand two hundred thirty acres, went through the legal proceedings required by the Land Act of eighteen fifty-one and was confirmed by United States patent at nearly the same size, two thousand two hundred twenty-nine acres, in eighteen sixty. The process by which the United States government required Spanish and Mexican land grant holders to prove their titles in American courts was slow, expensive, and systematically disadvantageous to the grant holders, many of whom did not speak English and could not afford extended litigation. Many lost their land entirely.

The Boronda family maintained the adobe until the nineteen twenties, when the last family member moved out. The Monterey County Historical Society acquired it in nineteen seventy-two and restored it as a museum, completed in nineteen seventy-six. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and designated a California Historical Landmark. The grass around it is quiet and the building is still standing because someone decided it was worth keeping.