Added to the National Register of Historic Places on March 24, 1971

Ygnacio, after he had finished his education, had wanted to have land and a place of his own…As far back as he could remember he had loved the land and hated the places where there [were] too many men and you could not do as you liked. Yes, he thought, he had wanted just what he had, a strong, safe house on a rancho where, with his friends and his children about him, he might live as he chose.

– Bess Adams Garner, Windows in an Old Adobe

It will never cease to amaze me how desolate Los Angeles County was during much of the 1800s. The Spanish and then Mexican rancheros who owned the massive acreage outside of the pueblo of Los Angeles had little infrastructure to rely on. Their families built the first homes and irrigation systems in the area, tended to their own livestock and cooked their own food, often hiring local Native Americans as servants and laborers. Home itself would have been a constant thrum of activity. But in the early 1850s, fewer than 8,000 people were living across 34,000 square miles. There might be miles between you and your closest neighbors, filled in with just sagebrush, wildflowers and chaparral. 

The Palomares Adobe in Pomona is a link to the rancho era, one of only 39 adobe homes from the 19th century that still stand in the LA area. For decades beginning in the early 1850s, this was the home of Don Ygnacio Palomares, his wife Doña Concepcion “China” Palomares and their large family. It was also one of the social centers of the Pomona Valley, long before the city of Pomona existed, an occasional chapel for the valley’s Roman Catholic population, a general store and a place of rest and recovery for weary travelers.

For thousands of years before the Palomares family settled in the Pomona Valley, the area was inhabited by the Tongva, Kizh and Serrano, mostly hunter-gather tribes who settled in small villages around the valley. After the Spanish missionaries came in the 1770s, much of the indigenous population in the San Gabriel and Pomona Valleys was brought to Mission San Gabriel Arcángel, baptized, and coerced into working for the padres. Some 6,000 native people are buried on the grounds there.

Fast forward to 1837. We’re 16 years into Mexican control of California, three years since the Mexican government secularized the missions. Ygnacio Palomares and his partner Ricardo Vejar petitioned Governor Juan Bautista Alvarado for a beautiful, largely empty stretch of land east of Los Angeles to graze their sheep and cattle. Previously the pair had raised livestock on the Rodeo de Las Aguas, a rancho in present-day Beverly Hills owned by Maria Rita Valdez. But their stock had multiplied, and now they wanted land of their own. 

Governor Alvarado had family ties to the extended Palomares clan, so he indulged Palomares and Vejar’s request, granting them land formerly held by Mission San Gabriel Arcángel. The land encompassed all or parts of present-day Azusa, Claremont, Covina, Diamond Bar, Glendora, La Verne, Pomona, San Dimas and Walnut – 15,000 acres in total. They named it Rancho San José, and divvied it up with Palomares taking the northern segment, Vejar the southern. After a couple years the grant was expanded by another 7,500 acres for Ygnacio’s brother-in-law Luis Arenas, though he soon ended up in debt, and sold his portion to an Englishman named Henry Dalton, one of the Southland’s most prolific landowners. 

Ygnacio Palomares’s first home was Casa Primera, a simple adobe built in 1837, the same year that his family settled on Rancho San José. Located near present-day Ganesha Park, it was the first permanent house in the Pomona Valley, and it’s listed separately on the National Register of Historic Places. 

The Palomares Adobe was Ygnacio & Doña China’s second home, built between 1849 and 1854, but it wasn’t originally meant to house the extended Palomares family. It was a wedding gift for their daughter Teresa and her new husband, Ramón Vejar, the son of Ricardo Vejar. ‘Twas a lovely adobe abode for its time, though fairly small at the outset, and just one story. 

Before the Palomares Adobe was inhabitable, Ricardo Vejar also built a house for the new couple, on his side of Rancho San José. Ricardo’s father had been a master woodworker who carved the altars at the Mission San Gabriel Arcángel. So Ricardo grew up around construction, and he built some deluxe digs for his son and future daughter-in-law – two stories, six rooms, a balcony to take in the views (you can see the house below). Unsurprisingly, Teresa & Ramón chose to live in the house that Ricardo Vejar built. Ygnacio Palomares was so pissed, he skipped the wedding and went camping in the canyon below Mt. Baldy, leaving China and the rest of the family to entertain the wedding guests. 

Around 1855 Ygnacio moved into his new home with China and their brood. While his pride may have been wounded because his daughter had declined his great gift, there was much about this house to be proud of. It was enlarged to include a south wing, turning the original L shape into a T shape, and in its final state encompassed 13 rooms – living quarters, store rooms, and a 20 by 30-foot sala (living room) with a 12-foot ceiling for social gatherings. Lining all but the west edge of the adobe was a covered outdoor veranda, perfect for shady lounging on hot days. Doors between each room and the veranda encouraged a life lived outdoors. 

By 1850 Ygnacio Palomares had earned his bona fides in political and civic circles throughout the Pomona Valley and Los Angeles proper. Between the 1830s and 1850, he served at various points as a local judge, justice of the peace, captain of a militia and, in 1848, alcalde (mayor) of Los Angeles – the last mayor before the Americans took over. 

Palomares hit his stride as a businessman in the 1850s. With the Gold Rush in full swing in northern California, he made good money selling hides and tallow to the ‘49ers up north, and beef to the miners flowing into cities up and down the coast. Carts of cowhide and beef fat from the Palomares stock would frequently return from the port loaded with fine fabric, clothing, coffee and spices from abroad.

The Palomares Adobe was an extension of the family’s prosperity, and a reflection of the new construction methods that Americans brought to California in the mid-1800s. It was known as the “casa de madera” (house of wood) because of the wood shingles on the roof and the pinewood planks used for the sala and master bedroom floors, at a time when most adobes featured tar roofs and compacted dirt floors. You can still see the square, handmade nails that held the floorboards in place, and the canvas lining laid above the beams of the ceiling, originally made out of discarded ship sails. Conspicuously absent are any closets. Sophisticated folk of the era kept their clothes out of fancy trunks instead. 

Fresh water was a constant necessity in those days, for humans and livestock and the trees, gardens and small orchards that surrounded the Palomares Adobe. Doña China kept an herb garden that she used for cooking and homemade remedies. Most of the water they needed was supplied by local ciénegas (marshy springs), extended by ditches that ran to the house. But the Palomareses mostly grew crops they needed for themselves. They didn’t run the kind of commercial agricultural operation that required extensive irrigation – that wouldn’t come until later, after they had sold Rancho San José.

The Palomares Adobe was full of life during those prosperous days. Generations of the Palomares clan lived there. They routinely hosted fiestas and weddings; babies were born and family members died within its walls. Priests from the San Gabriel mission would hold Mass in the sala, and hear private confessions in one of the master bedrooms. 

The Adobe’s location right on the main road leading from San Bernardino to Los Angeles meant that it was a frequent stopping place for travelers. Over the years thousands of oxcarts, wagons and carriages stopped there on their way to or from wherever, some to rest their animals and draw water from the Palomares well, some to stay the night. Doña China was known for her hospitality and cooking, and Ygnacio operated a small store on the south wing of the house where a visitor could purchase flour, needles, tobacco, whiskey and bullets for the road ahead. 

Unfortunately the Palomares Adobe’s golden years lasted less than a decade. In the waning days of 1861, LA County was battered by nearly a month of torrential rains, leading to horrendous flooding. Most of the cattle that survived the floods would be killed off by the years-long drought that followed, cutting off the major source of income for LA County’s ranchos, Rancho San José included. Compounding the horror, in 1862 a smallpox epidemic hit the Pomona Valley hard, claiming three of the Palomares family, nearly two dozen of the Alvarado family nearby, and scores of Native Americans in the surrounding villages.

Ygnacio Palomares died in 1864 at just 53 years old, and his wife Doña China soon began to sell off their land to American families and businessmen. It was a small blessing that this proud Don didn’t live to see the end of the rancho era. His friend Ricardo Vejar wasn’t so lucky – Vejar ended up losing his portion of San José, after taking out a large mortgage that he couldn’t pay back. The lenders were two merchants, Louis Schlesinger and Hyman Tischler. Schlesinger would soon die in the explosion of the SS Ada Hancock in the San Pedro harbor in 1863, while Tischler narrowly escaped an ambusher’s bullet on his way home from Rancho San José the following year. He soon sold the seemingly-cursed land to Louis Phillips, an immigrant from Prussia (now Poland) who would become one of the wealthiest men in LA County. Phillips’s Pomona mansion is also listed on the National Register of Historic Places. 

Back at the Palomares Adobe, Ygnacio’s son Francisco became the man of the house. Eventually he and his wife had their first baby, and moved into the old Casa Primera from 1837. For a spell, Teresa & Ramon Vejar moved into the Palomares Adobe to accompany Doña China; it was a full circle moment, as these two had rejected the house as their wedding gift, over a decade before. They moved out as well, after building a new house down the road. 

Things were changing in the Pomona Valley. New throughways had popped up that bypassed San Bernardino Road. Small town centers emerged, with fancy hotels and shops, and the legendary Palomares hospitality wasn’t as much of a draw. Doña China’s housemates had all either gotten married and left, or died. So in 1874, she sold the Palomares Adobe to Alvin Meserve & Rev. C.F. Loop, a pair of Americans from Santa Cruz. They also purchased the 2200 acres of land from Rancho San José that hadn’t already been subdivided. Meserve & Loop knew the transcontinental railroad would reach the Pomona Valley soon, and that they could make a tidy profit off of developing the land. 

Meserve & Loop planted grapes, olives and citrus orchards on their land, an investment in large-scale agriculture in a part of LA County that would later be defined by it. Another Santa Cruzan, Robert Cathcart, bought 100 acres from them and became the first American to live in the adobe, while his new home was being built. Meserve and his family lived in the Palomares Adobe from 1877 ‘til about 1890, and ran a successful nursery that sold cypress, eucalyptus and pepper trees in addition to the fruit of hundreds of thousands of citrus trees. Their son Edwin Meserve was one of the first white kids to be educated in the Pomona Valley.  

With the advent of the railroad, the Pomona and San Gabriel Valleys continued to grow. Pomona incorporated in 1888 and flourished in the early 1900s, its fields of chaparral transformed into countless acres of citrus. The town of Spadra, on Louis Phillips’s land, now had a grocery store, a meat market, a drugstore and blacksmith shop, lining newly graded streets. 

Following a particularly frigid winter that destroyed much of their nursery business, the Meserves moved out of the Palomares Adobe to Los Angeles and the property went untended for decades. Nobody wanted to live in an old adobe home when you could build a new one in a contemporary style with high-quality wood, shipped in via train. 

There are stories recounted in Bess Adams Garner’s Windows in an Old Adobe of Mexican laborers squatting there for a few months at a time; of artists painting its walls; of a Japanese immigrant who covered one of the walls in Japanese newspapers from 1905. In the early 1920s a couple bought the plot of land with the Palomares Adobe on it, stacked up the broken adobe blocks and made repairs to the roof. But they couldn’t make it out of escrow, so the place was again abandoned. By the 1930s the only thing thriving on the old Palomares property was a wisteria vine, so large that the roof sagged under its weight. 

Finally in 1938, the City of Pomona announced plans to restore the Palomares Adobe, with the Historical Society of Pomona Valley as steward. At first the idea was to do the job entirely with local funds. By the end of the year the Society had pitched it to the feds as a Works Progress Administration project, and after sufficient funds had been raised from local citizens, the WPA joined in, beginning in 1939.  

While only some timber and sections of the 24-inch-thick adobe walls could be salvaged from the original structure, the restorers kept as faithful to the original building and landscaping as they could. 70 WPA workers crafted some 30,000 new adobe bricks out of mud and straw, and re-laid them in accordance with the original home’s dimensions. Door locks, hinges and latches were all made on site. New wooden shingles were crafted for the roof, in the same style as the originals, and a new well was dug out in front of the property, in nearly the same location as the old one. 

Cherry, walnut, pomegranate and poplar trees, all part of the landscaping during Don Ygnacio and Doña China’s day, were all re-planted in their original locations. The colossal wisteria vine that nearly collapsed the roof was moved to the rear yard, stretching over a pergola. 

Many of the furnishings and objects that fill the restored adobe were donated by families with ties to the area. An 18th-century wardrobe was loaned by Miss Ramona Vejar, a descendant of both Ygnacio Palomares and Ricardo Vejar. From Elias Forster came an old copper key that once unlocked a chapel in the Vejar home in Walnut. Behind a display case you’ll find a hat tree made of polished horns from the cattle of the Alvarados, close friends and relatives of the Palomares family. None of this stuff was actually used by the Palomareses in their home on San Bernardino Road, but all the four-poster beds, dressers, bedroom sets and other furniture that you see today are authentic to the period.

A formal dedication ceremony for the restored Palomares Adobe took place on April 6, 1940. A Franciscan priest blessed the house. The mayor of Pomona turned over the keys to the president of the Historical Society of Pomona Valley, Bess Adams Garner (also co-founder of the Padua Hills Theatre). Three of the late 19th century residents of the adobe were on hand to witness the transfer, as was the movie star Leo Carrillo, a relative of the Palomares family. Don Ygnacio Palomares’s grandson – also named Ygnacio – performed dances that his grandpa taught him, alongside his own granddaughter Hilda Ramirez. 

The restoration was a big enough deal in Pomona that multiple local businesses featured the Palomares Adobe in their print ads the Pomona Progress-Bulletin during the week of the opening ceremony. The following year, artist Frank Stauffacher painted a mural called “Rebuilding of the Palomares Adobe,” which strangely depicts a group of indigenous people restoring the building. The mural adorns the lobby of the Pomona Transit Center at 100 West Commercial Street, though there’s a smaller replica hanging in one of the bedrooms of the Adobe.

In the years following the restoration, one of Don Ygnacio’s grandsons Porfirio was chosen to live there as a caretaker and host, along with his wife Hortensia Yorba Palomares. After Porfirio died in 1942, Hortensia continued to tend to the home until her own death in 1958. 

Even though nobody lives there any more, the Historical Society of Pomona Valley still operates the Palomares Adobe as a house museum. You see where the family and their guests ate and slept and prayed, where their Native American servants cooked and tended the gardens, where travelers bought their whiskey and flour. 

In the corner of one of the rooms on the south wing, you’ll see Don Ygnacio Palomares’s tombstone, resting against a wall. It originally stood in the old Palomares family cemetery, just southeast of the Adobe. That cemetery had been condemned in the 1930s, and was known as a hotspot for robberies and vandalism. Ygnacio’s grave was found in the middle of North San Antonio Avenue, after falling out of a vandal’s car. Thankfully it ended up with the Historical Society, a chunk missing at the bottom but otherwise in good condition. Even in death, Don Ygnacio’s presence still fills his former home.

Thank you to Alice Gomez of the Historical Society of Pomona Valley for the tour, and to the Society’s Director Michael Schowalter for answering my volley of questions. 

The Palomares Adobe is open for tours on select Sundays throughout the year. Visit the tours page at PomonaHistorical.org for more info. 

Resources & Recommend Reading

+ “Changing Boundaries of Los Angeles County 1850-Present.” Los Angeles Almanac. © 1998-2025 Given Place Media, publishing as Los Angeles Almanac. Accessed October 5, 2025.

+ Felix, Samira: “Adobe de Palomares: A Symbol of Community and History” (La Verne Magazine, June 14, 2024)

+ Garner, Bess Adams: “Our Adobe” (Pomona Progress-Bulletin, June 3, 1938 – via Newspapers.com)

+ Garner, Bess Adams: Windows in an Old Adobe, Third Edition (The Historical Society of the Pomona Valley, 2003)

+ “Historic Adobe in Pomona to Be Reopened” (Los Angeles Times, June 22, 1958 – via ProQuest)

+ “Historical General Population City & County of Los Angeles, 1850 to 2020” (Los Angeles Almanac. © 1998-2025 Given Place Media, publishing as Los Angeles Almanac – Accessed October 5, 2025)

+ “Historical Society’s Program Worthy of Support (Pomona Progress-Bulletin, March 29, 1939 – via Newspapers.com)

+ “Historic Old Palomares Adobe Soon to be Restored” (Pomona Progress-Bulletin, January 24, 1938 – via Newspapers.com)

+ “Historic Palomares Adobe Rapidly Being Restored” (Los Angeles Times, July 26, 1939 – via ProQuest)

+ Historical Society of Pomona Valley: “Adobe de Palomares”

+ Kitazawa, Yosuke: “The Rise and Fall of Henry “Don Enrique” Dalton, the British Ranchero of the San Gabriel Valley” (PBSSoCal.org, November 25, 2013)

+ “Launch Drive for $1038 to Rebuild ‘Dobe” (Pomona Progress-Bulletin, October 7, 1938 – via Newspapers.com)

+ Luk, Cody: “Family legacy lives on: Pomona houses are representation of colonial history” (La Verne Magazine, September 9, 2016)

+ “Palomares Adobe Retains Memories of Days of Dons” (Los Angeles Times, November 16, 1952 – via ProQuest)

+ “‘Palomares’ Is Theme of Poem” (Pomona Progress-Bulletin, October 21, 1913 – via Newspapers.com)

+ Perry, Charles: “The return of an old L.A. flame: No wonder pit barbecue once ruled…” (Los Angeles Times, November 1, 2006 – via ProQuest)

+ “Pomona Relives Romantic Past in Palomares Ceremony” (Los Angeles Times, April 7, 1940 – via ProQuest)

+ “Restored Adobe Previewed at Pomona” (Los Angeles Times, April 3, 1940 – via ProQuest)

+ “Restored Palomares Adobe to be Opened Tomorrow” (Pomona Progress-Bulletin, April 5, 1940 – via Newspapers.com)

+ Robinson, W.W.: “Early Folk Once Owned Fair Areas” (Los Angeles Times, September 17, 1937 – via ProQuest)

+ Spitzzeri, Paul: “Sharing History at the Phillips Mansion in Pomona” (The Homestead Blog, June 29, 2019)

+ Spitzzeri, Paul: “The Homestead at the Fiesta del Rancho San José, La Casa Primera, Pomona” (The Homestead Blog, March 23, 2019)

+ Walker, Mrs. Harry E.: “Pomona Adobes Scrapbook” (Pomona Public Library Digital Collections)

+ Welts, Allen W., Department of Parks and Recreation: Palomares Adobe’s NRHP nomination form

+ Willman, Minor: “Historic Adobe Links Pomona With Past” (Los Angeles Times, October 11, 1964 – via ProQuest)