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Notes:
PROVENANCE:
Possibly with Redfern Gallery, Laguna Beach, California
Property of a private collector
The Casa de Estudillo, is a historic adobe house in San Diego. It was constructed in 1827 by José María Estudillo, an early settler of San Diego, and was considered one of the finest houses in Mexican California. It is located in Old Town San Diego State Historic Park and is designated a National Historic Landmark.
Besides being one of the oldest surviving examples of Spanish architecture in California, the house gained much prominence by association with Helen Hunt Jackson's wildly popular 1884 novel Ramona. The Casa de Estudillo is one of three National Historic Landmarks in Southern California that were closely tied to Ramona, a novel of Californio life shortly after the American acquisition of California.
The publication of Ramona, generated a nationwide interest in the region at the time. This, combined with the opening of the Southern Pacific and Santa Fe Railway lines meant that an influx of tourists made their way to Southern California to see the locations in the novel. Unfortunately, Jackson died in 1885 without ever having disclosed what the actual locations in the novel were, which caused a great deal of speculation.
In 1887, a front page article of the San Diego Union declared the Estudillo home to be "Ramona's Marriage Place", saying, "To sleepy Old Town (the house) is known as the Estudillos, but the outside world knows it as the marriage place of 'Ramona'. This was despite Jackson never having visited the house, but in the novel, Ramona was married in a "long, low adobe building which had served no mean purpose in the old Presidio days, but was now fallen in decay; and all its rooms, except those occupied by the Father, had been long uninhabited". Despite the novel being a work of fiction, visitors flocked to the building thinking it was the actual location of Ramona's marriage. To be clear, the newspaper did not simply invent this story; a tourist had already scratched the name "Alessandro" (Ramona's husband in the novel) in one of the walls. The caretaker decided to capitalize on the attendant publicity and began selling off pieces of the house as souvenirs. Naturally, the building's condition began to deteriorate rapidly.
The association with the novel was so keen that the application for National Historic Landmark status was entitled, "Casa Estudillo/Ramona's Marriage Place." The Journal of San Diego History goes so far as to say that without the novel's influence and the popularity of the house, the historic buildings that make up Old Town San Diego would have been razed. In fact, for a time, the Estudillos' relationship to the house was nearly forgotten. But thanks to subsequent restoration efforts, beginning with the Spreckel's family, Ramona's Marriage Place exists today as an integral symbol of San Diego's historic past.
