The Price Anniversary House

Tucked in a wooded canyon just off the highway, the Price Anniversary House is among the oldest buildings in Pismo Beach, and it belonged to the man who founded the town. John Michael Price, who had bought this ranch land years earlier and platted the town in eighteen ninety-one, built the two story redwood home in the early eighteen nineties. He raised it as a gift, moving in with his wife Andrea not long before the couple marked their fiftieth wedding anniversary, which is how the house earned its name.

In a vernacular style touched with Victorian flourishes, it wears a gabled roof that once carried ornamental cresting, a porch trimmed with decorative woodwork, and carved window sills, the comfortable home of a prosperous pioneer family. The house was added to the National Register of Historic Places on November third of nineteen eighty-eight. Today it stands at the heart of Price Historical Park, a green space with walking trails, where volunteers keep the founder's home open to visitors.

To step onto its porch is to stand where Pismo Beach began, in the shade of the family whose name still marks the canyon, the park, and the earliest chapter of the town's story.