The Estrella Adobe Church on the Grain Frontier
Near Paso Robles, California
Out in the rolling grain country northeast of Paso Robles stands a small, weathered adobe chapel known as the Estrella Adobe Church, said to be the first Protestant church built in northern San Luis Obispo County. In eighteen seventy-eight, a group of pioneer settlers gathered at the Estrella schoolhouse and resolved to build a church. They made the adobe bricks by hand right on the site, hauling water to mix the mud, and carried the lumber over the mountains all the way from San Luis Obispo.
By eighteen seventy-nine, the little church was finished. The Methodist congregation eventually moved on to newer churches, and the adobe fell into disrepair. Eventually it stood abandoned.
But in the nineteen fifties, the women of the Paso Robles Women's Club led a campaign to save it, and local builders lovingly restored it. It was restored by nineteen fifty-two and named a California Historical Landmark in nineteen eighty-one. The old church still sits beside the pioneer cemetery.
The church is California Historical Landmark number five forty-two, and the state marker credits the Paso Robles Women's Club History and Landmarks Committee with restoring it between nineteen fifty and nineteen fifty-two. The cemetery beside it holds burials dating from about eighteen seventy-eight to nineteen fifty-nine, and it is now maintained by the Pleasant Valley Estrella Cemetery District. You will find the little adobe on Airport Road.
