The Robert Louis Stevenson House

This two story adobe on Houston Street is called the Stevenson House, though the writer who gives it that name lived here only a few months. In the autumn of eighteen seventy nine, a young, unknown Scotsman named Robert Louis Stevenson crossed an ocean and a continent to reach Monterey. He had followed an American woman, Fanny Osbourne, who was waiting for a divorce, and he arrived nearly penniless and dangerously ill.

The building was then a boarding house known as the French Hotel, and Stevenson rented a room upstairs. Weak and feverish, he nearly died camping in the hills nearby and was nursed back to health at a local goat ranch. Yet in these rooms he wrote, including a loving essay about the town he called The Old Pacific Capital, capturing its crumbling adobes and its faded Spanish grandeur.

He married Fanny the next spring and went on to write Treasure Island and other classics that made him famous around the world. In nineteen thirty seven, two women bought this building to save it from demolition and gave it to the state. It now holds one of the largest collections of Stevenson's belongings anywhere in the world.