Added to the National Register of Historic Places on September 30, 2014

There are plenty of places in Los Angeles where you can witness the delicate dance between preservation and development play out (Campo de Cahuenga comes to mind). But it’s rare to find a site where the past and present exist in such stark relief as they do at the Michael White Adobe. 

This 180-year-old adobe home is completely encircled by the sports facilities of San Marino High School. A chain-link fence is all that separates it from a large swimming pool that wraps around the south and west side of the adobe; on a few occasions, a stray water polo ball has knocked off roof shingles or punched holes in the wall. The baseball diamond is right across a walkway to the east, and to the north is a parking lot, just below the San Marino Titans football field.

Zoom out on an overhead map of the Michael White Adobe and it becomes a tiny island of oldness, hemmed in by an endless sea of high-end residences (the median home sale price in San Marino is nearly $3 million as of May 2024). Back when it was built in the mid-1840s though, there was almost nothing here. An 1844 census tallied the population of Los Angeles at less than 2000 gente de razón (aka non-indigenous people), plus 650 Native Americans. Most of them lived a distance from the White property. Mission San Gabriel Arcángel was 2.5 miles south (its population had flagged anyway, after the Mexican government secularized the missions in 1833); the growing Pueblo of Los Angeles was 10 miles southwest.

The Colorful Life of Michael White

The adobe is the sole surviving remnant of Rancho San Ysidro, a 78-acre land grant given to Michael C. White by California’s last Mexican governor, Pío Pico, in 1845. White’s old friend, the politician and landowner Benjamin D. Wilson, once described White as “a man of roving disposition.” And indeed, he had a long, picaresque history before and after he settled in the San Gabriel Valley. There’s a certain Forrest Gump-ness to his life, in his penchant for getting mixed up in many of the most significant events in LA’s mid-19th century history. 

Originally from Kent, England, White joined the crew of an English whaling ship as a teenager, and arrived in Baja, California in 1817. After White spent several years of trading up and down the coast, the Mexican War of Independence against Spain resulted in trade restrictions. So White sailed to Hawaii (then called the Sandwich Islands), engaged in at least one skirmish with seafaring pirates, and went ashore in Santa Barbara in 1828, where he became one of SoCal’s first shipbuilders. He moved to Los Angeles at the tail end of 1829.

White got busy quick after arriving in LA. He built a schooner for the Mission San Gabriel Arcángel, converted to Catholicism, changed his name to “Miguel Blanco” and became a Mexican citizen. In 1831 he married Maria Rosario de Guillen from a prominent Californio family (they’d end up having 13 children together), and soon became the mayor of Los Nietos, near present-day Whittier. 

White traveled to New Mexico in 1839, accompanying an expedition carrying horses and mules, and in 1841 returned with a large caravan of SoCal settlers, including William Workman, John Rowland and Benjamin D. Wilson, all soon-to-be fixtures of LA politics and finance. In 1843 he tried his hand at land ownership when he was given the 30,000-acre Rancho Muscupiabe at the Cajon Pass by the unpopular California governor Micheltorena. The Serrano tribe that lived there stole all his cattle and he abandoned the property nine months later. It’s at this point that he petitioned the Mexican government to grant him the parcel of land, just north of the San Gabriel mission, where he would build his adobe. He was permitted to live on the land while the government considered his grant request.

In February of 1845, White was drafted by Workman, Rowland and Pío Pico to participate in a revolt against Micheltorena. White was by no means a revolutionary, and traveled to the old house at the Cahuenga Pass (where the Treaty of Cahuenga would be signed in 1847) against his will to prepare for battle. From February 19-20 the forces met at the Battle of Providencia – though “battle” is a bit of an overstatement, as the only casualties were a mule and a horse, killed by one of Micheltorena’s cannons. Eventually the captains of the two sides parlayed, Micheltorena surrendered and he and his troops left the country. A month later, now ensconced as governor of California, Pío Pico signed off on Michael White’s request for his 78-acre tract of land. Pico must have been very grateful for White’s support during the revolt, as reluctant as White was to participate.

The Adobe

Michael White built his adobe house somewhere in the 1843-45 range (no definitive proof of a date has been found). At that time, building with adobe mud bricks was still the method of choice for permanent structures, though its dominance would soon come to an end. California became a US state after the Mexican-American War ended in 1848, which brought an influx of Americans and Europeans with new building methods. In his excellent nine-part series “The Rise and Fall of Adobe Abodes in Greater Los Angeles, 1851-1876,“ historian Paul R. Spitzzeri cites numerous opinion pieces from the 1850s, calling for old adobes to be razed and replaced by more modern brick and wood-frame buildings.

There are fewer than 40 adobe buildings from the 19th century still standing in LA County. Even among those, the Michael White Adobe is an outlier. Whereas most adobe walls were built by placing two short bricks side by side parallel to the wall, the two rooms on the south side of White’s adobe are built of 22” long bricks, laid perpendicular to the wall line. You gotta imagine those unusually thick walls helped to keep things cool on those hot San Gabriel Valley summer days.

What we see today is essentially three main rooms on an L-shaped, 925-square-foot footprint: a south wing consisting of two rooms and a covered porch to their south, and a north wing of one room with a covered porch to its east. The southwest room has a fireplace in it, with a chimney poking out above the roofline. There’s a filled-in gap between the two wings, suggesting that they were built at different times, but it’s unclear which came first. Simple wood casing frames the doors and windows; floors are paved with brick today, but in previous years it was pine boards and – perhaps in White’s day – dirt. The roof is framed in wood, covered in wood shakes, with horizontal shiplap at the three gable ends. A simple pioneer home. 

According to the floor plan in a 1936 profile for the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS), all three of the extant rooms were used as bedrooms. So…where’s the rest of the house? The present-day adobe is just a portion of what existed there during Michael White’s time. There was a two-story, wood-framed addition with a living room, a kitchen and a hallway/staircase, likely built in 1870 or after when White’s daughter and son-in-law owned the property. HABS photos also show two lean-to structures on the northeast of the adobe, perhaps used as a shed and garage. The two-story wing was removed in 1947 and moved to 704 E. El Monte Street, according to the San Marino Historical Society.

After the War

Michael White lived on Rancho San Ysidro from ~1845 until 1878. It was a tumultuous time to live in California, right as it was transitioning from Mexican to American rule. While he was on an errand in Chino in 1846, White was imprisoned by the Californios for being on the losing side of a small battle during the Mexican-American War. He was later released in a prisoner swap with the American army, wherein he was exchanged for Andrés Pico. A couple years later, White found some limited success up north during the Gold Rush, but was swindled out of the money he earned.

So White settled back down at San Ysidro for the next 25 years. He grew grapes, raised cattle, and parceled off parts of his land to his children and their families. He would end up losing the rest of the rancho in 1878 after defaulting on a high-interest mortgage, and moved closer to the Pueblo to live with one of his kids, until his death in 1885. 

To the end of his life, Michael White was bitter about how things worked out for him after the Americans came to power. In 1877, Thomas Savage interviewed a 76-year-old White for H.H. Bancroft, founder of the Bancroft Library (now at UC Berkeley). Savage wrote the following in his introduction:

Mr. White is an Englishman, who believes that the Americans have treated him badly; he accuses Americans of having swindled him out of lands and robbed him of other property so that after having labored hard to secure a competency for himself and family, he finds himself in his old age, reduced to penury. All this misfortune he lays at the door of Americans, their authorities, and laws.

-Thomas Savage, California All the Way Back to 1828 (Bancroft Library, 1877)

Post-White Owners of the Adobe

After the Michael White era, the adobe went through a succession of owners and uses. A brief rundown: 

• Joseph Heslop (White’s son-in-law) and daughter Francisca acquired 10 acres of White’s property, including the adobe, and owned it from 1870-74. They were the ones that added the two-story wood frame addition that no longer exists. Heslop likely planted citrus groves on the property during this time. 
• James G. Foord (owner, 1874-1887) also used the property for citrus growing, aided by a small corps of immigrant laborers. By 1880, Foord owned whatever of White’s land hadn’t already been parceled off. He was also active in local politics, and served on the LA County Board of Supervisors.
• From 1887-1928, a series of owners cycled through that didn’t live on the property, including SGV Land & Water Co., then California governor Henry H. Markham, and then the prominent landowned Isaac Van Nuys. Nobody is 100% sure how the land was used during this era, though it’s possible that each owner employed their own team to keep growing stuff.
• The San Marino School District acquired the property in 1928, with the intention of building an elementary school…which wouldn’t appear for 20 years. 
• In the meantime, a Japanese farmer named Kojiro Tomoyasu and his family leased the adobe from the school district (~1928-1942). We believe he operated a farm, grew vegetables and fruit, and also grew flowers to sell at a florist shop the family ran down the street. In 1942, after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, the Tomayasu family was forced to move to an internment camp in Tulare, CA, as a result of Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066. Kojiro Tomoyasu died there.
• Tony Garcia, a maintenance worker for the San Marino School District, lived at the adobe from 1942-47 after the Tomoyasu family was forced to leave during WWII. It was during this era that the two-story wing was removed. 

From Adobe to Landmark

The modern era of the Michael White Adobe began in 1947, when the San Marino School District finally built Carver Elementary School on the land it had owned since 1928. An aerial photograph from 1948 shows the school complex down at the south end of the property, near Huntington Drive, with the adobe situated further north, surrounded by just a few trees and flat land. 

Carver Elementary left the site in 1953, and the campus was later remodeled and expanded to make way for the new San Marino High School. But before the first class of Titans set foot on campus, K.L. Carver – the longest-serving president of the San Marino Unified School District Board – led an effort to restore the Michael White Adobe. Locals donated funds, contractors and San Marino businesses donated man-hours and materials.  

As part of the restoration process, brick pavers were added on the interior and around the outside. Covered porches were recreated, and a modern toilet was installed in the small room to the northwest where an older toilet room once existed. New wood shakes were installed over the 1870s wood framing, and the whole thing was wired for electricity. The adobe also got a fresh coat of plaster inside and out, and the restorers added three “viewing portals” so visitors could see what an adobe wall looks like (a tour guide told me that 70-80% of the bricks are original). 

In the years after restoration, the San Marino Titans pep squad used the Michael White Adobe as a workshop, and then for a long while it was a storage space. Then the San Marino Historical Society occupied it from 1985 through 1998. They turned the north room into their offices and populated the south wing with period antiques to help give school kids and community groups a sense of what it was like to live there in the 19th century. 

These days, a volunteer crew called the Friends of the Michael White Adobe (FoMWA) has been its able steward since 2009, repairing water-damaged adobe bricks and raising funds for its rehabilitation. They formed to fight a San Marino Unified School District proposal to demolish the adobe, so that the high school could expand its pool. The preservation community came out of the restored woodwork to oppose that idea, and in late 2009 it was thankfully shelved. 

Despite that sigh of relief, access to the Michael White Adobe remains very limited. Under California’s Field Act of 1933, any building on a public school campus must be earthquake resistant if it’s to be used during school hours. The FoMWA is currently researching and raising funds for seismic retrofitting, so they can offer tours and school visits more often. In the meantime they’re exploring other ideas for adaptive reuse – on their website, there are some preliminary sketches of what it’d look like as a San Marino High School hall of fame. 

There are so many ways to read the Michael White Adobe. It’s a rare example of a building style that hasn’t been in vogue for 175 years, and the second oldest structure in San Marino, after the Old Mill. It’s a window into a fascinating era of transition in Los Angeles history. It’s a case study for how buildings change their purpose as new owners take over, and how difficult it is to preserve a historic building structure over a long stretch of time. 

I’m most drawn to the Michael White Adobe for the immigrant story at its heart. We don’t often hear about the early settlers that arrived from overseas, how their identities were formed and shaped as the political and economic winds shifted. Michael White was an Englishman, then a Mexican citizen, then a friend to many Americans who embroiled him in a war that pitted him against his chosen countrymen. On one hand White’s simple house was the only mundane thing about his life. On the other, the house is a perfect metaphor for Michael White. It’s a relic of an old world, encroached by modernity, but still hanging on.

Thank you to Marilyn Van Winkle at The Autry and Christa Lakon of the San Marino Historical Society for granting permission to use images from their collections. And thank you to Marla Felber of Friends of the Michael White Adobe for confirming the new location of the two-story wing of the Adobe.

Sources & Recommended Reading

+ AQYER, LLC: “The Michael White Adobe Virtual Tour”

+ Barrows, H.D.: “Michael White, The Pioneer” (Annual Publication of the Historical Society of Southern California, Los Angeles, 1896 – via University of California Press)

+ Ellinger, William W. Ill, Historic Architect & Board Member, Friends of the Michael White Adobe: Michael White Adobe’s NRHP nomination form

+ Friends of the Michael White Adobe website 

+ Gautereaux, Trevor: “Time To Move The Michael White Adobe” (Medium.com, December 5, 2016)

+ Historic Aerials by NETROnline (HistoricAerials.com)

+ “Historical Resident Population Spanish & Mexican Period 1781 to 1846” (Los Angeles Almanac)

+ “Michael White Adobe” (LAConservancy.org)

+ Historic American Buildings Survey: “Casa de Miguel Blanco, 2701 Huntington Drive, San Marino, Los Angeles County, CA Photos from Survey HABS CA-322” (Library of Congress)

+ Prosser, Daniel: “SurveyLA: Los Angeles Citywide Historic Context Statement, Context: Spanish Colonial and Mexican Era Settlement, 1781-1849” (LA City Planning Department, 2016)

+ “San Marino, CA Housing Market” (Redfin.com, accessed July 7, 2024)

+ Savage, Thomas & Michael C. White: California All the Way Back to 1828 (Bancroft Library, 1877 – via Library of Congress)

+ Spitzzeri, Paul R.: “‘You Are One of my Soldiers’: Michael White’s Recollection of the Battle of Cahuenga, February 1845” (The Homestead Blog, February 20, 2023)

+ Spitzzeri, Paul R.: “The Rise and Fall of Adobe Abodes in Greater Los Angeles, 1851-1876, Part One” (The Homestead Blog, June 22, 2024)

+ Williams, Janette: “Talk of demolishing San Marino’s White Adobe is off the table – at least for now” (San Bernardino Sun, October 28, 2009)

+ Withey, Henry: “La Casa de Miguel Blanco” (PDF – Historic American Buildings Survey, March 1, 1937; addendum 2009)