Added to the National Register of Historic Places on April 19, 1978

Here’s a tip: if ever you are asked by a stranger to visit their historic adobe home, and they lure you in with the offer of a proper Devonshire Tea, the correct response is “YES THANK YOU I WILL BE THERE POSTHASTE.” I have only done this once, at the invitation of Bill and Leonie Crouch, two of the loveliest people I’ve ever met. Now I dream regularly of warm scones served with clotted cream and jam. We’ll return to the Crouches later on. But first, some background on that adobe they own.

Let’s say you’ve recently acquired 7,500 acres of land in the Pomona Valley. It’s more space than you need for grazing sheep and cattle, and you’ve got the ambition to build a local community, maybe develop some business ties to the small but growing city of Los Angeles to the west. There are plenty of Native Americans living nearby to conscript as a labor force. It’s a nice setup. So what do you do? 

If you’re the Pomona ranchero Ygnacio Palomares, you invite your pals to take advantage of your bounty. That’s what happened in 1840, after Palomares and his friend Ricardo Vejar had split up the 15,000-acre Rancho San José, granted to them by California Governor Juan Bautista Alvarado.

Palomares carved out 40 acres of his half of the rancho and invited his brother-in-law Ygnacio Alvarado (no known relation to the governor) to settle there and build the subject of this article, Casa Alvarado. It’s one of the oldest homes in LA County that has been continuously occupied as a house, if not the oldest.

As a condition of accepting the 40 acres, Ygnacio Alvarado agreed to erect a chapel to accommodate monthly religious services. Locals would fill the benches inside the spacious 18′ x 42′ sala (living room) while a visiting padre from Mission San Gabriel Arcángel led Mass. After services were done, they’d turn the altar around and start the fiesta, often accompanied by a barbecue, singing and dancing. That spacious sala was used for church services, baptisms and wedding ceremonies for some 45 years, until St. Joseph Catholic Church was established in Pomona in 1886. The same sala also hosted the very first public school in Pomona Valley in 1870, the same year that the Palomares School District was formed, with Ygnacio’s son-in-law Francisco Palomares as one of the trustees.

Who Was Don Ygnacio Alvarado?

Not much is documented about Ygnacio Alvarado’s early life. We know that he was born at Mission San Gabriel Arcángel in 1807, and that his first wife Maria Ricarda Alanis Alvarado died at just 18, leaving him with two toddlers to take care of. 

Soon after Ygnacio settled at Casa Alvarado with his second wife Luisa and their kids, he became engaged in the civic life of both Los Angeles and the ranchos to the east of LA. The two Ygnacios (Palomares and Alvarado) were named first and second Justice of the Peace, respectively, in 1841 during a three-year window when the office of alcalde (mayor) of Los Angeles was abolished. He was named Judge of the Plains for San Bernardino in 1851, with duties that included gathering a volunteer fire brigade whenever something was on fire, and making sure that no cattle was butchered without the approval of its legal owner. Throughout the 1850s, Alvarado also served as Rancho San José’s official Inspector of statewide and local elections, all of which took place at the home of Ricardo Vejar. 

This was a transformative time in California history. Think about everything that happened in under a decade: the Mexican-American War took place from 1846-1848, ending with California’s transition to American statehood; just a week before the two sides formally ended the war with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill in 1848, kicking off the Gold Rush and opening up a new market for ranchers; then in 1851 a US Land Commission was created, forcing Mexican-American landowners to prove their legal right to their land, in proceedings that could last decades.

While the Alvarado family would have been impacted by all of these transitions, I haven’t uncovered much documentation that shows how – or even much about how Ygnacio ran the ranch and earned his income. The 1850 census lists him as a “Farmer,” and a separate Schedule of Production of Agriculture from the same year lists the cash value of his farm at $300, with 20 horses, eight work oxen, 100 head of cattle and 50 bushels of “Indian corn.” Not inconsequential, but small potatoes compared to the other ranches nearby.

An 1854 story in The Sierra Citizen tells about a band of Paiute Native Americans stealing 43 horses from Alvarado (he got 40 of them back). Then in mid-1862, we have a letter to the editor of the Los Angeles Daily News from one John Brown, Esq. of San Bernardino, reporting from the Colorado mines, that “Various parties have lately passed here with cattle…Don Ignacio Alvarado is here with 90 head, intending to go by Fort Yuma.” One wonders if Alvarado was trying to find a drier climate after the floods of late 1861 and early 1862 that ravaged the SoCal cattle industry.

The Alvarado family also planted olive trees and kept sizable orchards of “deciduous fruits” according to historian F.P. Brackett; an LA Evening Express journalist touring the area in 1875 marveled at the “perfectly formed oranges,” mulberries and figs that grew abundantly around the Alvarado estate. Given their relatively small acreage, it’s unlikely that agriculture was a major source of income at Casa Alvarado, as it was for the Workman ranch further west. But one of Casa Alvarado’s later owners Isabel Lopez de Fages reports that there was a small winery attached to the north wing in the Alvarados’ day. Grape pressing must have been part of daily life, even if the vino was never sold commercially. 

Don Ygnacio Alvarado died on May 6, 1876 after a long illness that left him paralyzed and bedridden for several years. A notice of his death stayed in the Spanish-language newspaper Las Dos Republicas from May 17 – September 6 of that year, signed by one of his sons, Juan de Dios Alvarado.

Casa Alvarado in the Beginning

Casa Alvarado is located just 300 yards southwest of Ygnacio Palomares’s first permanent home, Casa Primera, from 1837. When the Palomareses first moved to the area, they erected a simple two-room adobe as a temporary home, while Casa Primera was under construction. Some accounts say the two adobe rooms were dismantled after the Palomareses moved into their permanent home, with its adobe bricks used for other buildings. In a footnote in her book Windows in an Old Adobe, historian Bess Adams Garner (see my Padua Hills Theatre writeup for more on her) suggests that the temporary house may even have been incorporated into Casa Primera itself.

But there is a compelling theory, advanced by Bill Crouch in an unpublished essay, that the Palomareses’ temporary digs were actually the kernel of Casa Alvarado, and are still part of the home today. The above photo shows a baseball game taking place in the pasture just west of Casa Alvarado, sometime between 1860 and 1883. You can see both the long chapel wing that runs north-south, and a smaller structure off the northwest side of the chapel. Could that be the original two-room adobe where both the Palomares and Alvarado families waited out the construction of their new homes? 

Crouch points to the current kitchen, comprising two rooms extending west from the chapel wing, with a door punched through the wall between kitchen and chapel. The construction methods and flooring of the two sections differ; if you look inside the roof, you can clearly see how the original hipped roof was meant to cover just those two rooms, before an extension was created to connect it with the chapel wing. If Crouch is correct, it means that he and his wife prep lunch every day in the same spaces where the Palomareses laid their heads, in their earliest days in the Pomona Valley.

Casa del Cambio

The current quadrangular layout of Casa Alvarado is the result of more than a century of additions, remodels and restorations. We may never know exactly how the original 10-room home looked during the Alvarado family’s time here, but we do know that the chapel wing dates from their day, its adobe bricks baked out in the open on-site. The den appended to the northeast side (used by mission priests during their monthly Mass here) was also there in the mid-1800s, and is highlighted by an adobe hearth, still raised high off the ground as it was back then. 

There was some kind of extension from the northwest side of the chapel – likely living quarters at first, if Crouch’s theory is correct. At some point, the Alvarados added another bedroom wing on the south side of the chapel (the National Register application claims it extended to the east; Crouch says it extended west). 

Lugarda Alvarado de Palomares (the daughter of Ygnacio & Luisa) deeded Casa Alvarado to her adopted daughter, Juana Alvarado de Preciado in 1883. Four years later both Casa Alvarado and Casa Primera were sold to Vermont natives Asahel and Mahala Parsons Storrs, whose son Harry was a civil engineer for the Pomona Land & Water Company. Within a year, it was again sold to Mr. & Mrs. Benjamin S. Nichols, President of the Pomona Land & Water Company, who renamed the entire thing “Cactus Lodge.” 

The Nichols Era

The 1880s were a period of growth for Pomona. The recent arrival of the Southern Pacific railroad made the town much more accessible, which spurred a huge population bump (from a few hundred in the 1870s to 3,634 in 1890, two years after it was incorporated) and brought in developers with the cashflow to build up Pomona’s infrastructure. Benjamin Nichols and the Pomona Land & Water Company were major drivers of these changes. The company bought 12,000 acres of land to subdivide, laid down miles of pipe and concrete channels to carry water from San Antonio Canyon, and drilled dozens of artesian wells to irrigate the valley.

As Pomona evolved, Casa Alvarado evolved right along with it. The Nichols family made a series of remodels over the 60+ years they occupied it, many of which are still preserved today. They demolished the adobe bedroom wing extending from the south side, and replaced it with three wood-framed bedrooms with Victorian fireplaces, extending west from the chapel. They added timber floors wherever the Alvarados hadn’t done so already (e.g. the two-room adobe wing at the north). 

They uncovered a closed fireplace in the sala, and installed a new Victorian mantel. Out on the west side of the home, they added a wood-framed cottage, fully enclosing the courtyard, and added a porch that still wraps around three sides. They also moved another cottage just north of the chapel wing, meant to house their live-in servants.

In the 1890s, the Nicholses knocked down the winery and blacksmith on the north wing and constructed a two-story water tower with a craftsman-style den on its bottom floor, dark wood lining its walls and ceilings. In later years they would convert the upper floor into living space, and in 1906 they added a sleeping porch over the original east wing that was recently enclosed.

Hervey J. Nichols, who took the reins of the Pomona Land & Water Company from his father Benjamin, passed away inside Casa Alvarado in 1925. His brother Allen, Dean of the Pomona Valley Bar Association, began subdividing Cactus Lodge in 1941. Around this time Casa Primera was sold to Roscoe L. Hart, the former co-owner of a dry cleaning business turned Pomona Police Commissioner. By that time the entire Cactus Lodge property had hit its centennial year, and we start seeing it included in the itineraries for tours of historic Pomona landmarks.

The Fages Family Arrives

The next important phase in the Casa Alvarado’s history began in 1951, a year after Allen P. Nichols’s death, when Alphonse and Isabel Lopez de Fages bought the house from the Nichols family. This couple’s connections to the land ran deep: Isabel’s great-aunt was Doña Luisa Avila Alvarado, Ygnacio’s wife and original lady of the house; Alfonso was a descendant of Ricardo Vejar, co-grantee of Rancho San José in 1837, alongside Ygnacio Palomares. Both Isabel and Alphonse could trace their family lines back to Ygnacio López, a soldier who participated in the early expeditions of Southern California with Gaspar de Portolá and Junípero Serra, back in 1769.

Just as important, Alphonse & Isabel were local history buffs. The pair previously lived in the Casa de Adobe of the Southwest Museum, where Isabel conducted research into adobes and wrote books and articles about California’s backstory. After moving to Pomona, she became president of the Pomona Valley Historical Society and helmed the Rancho San José parlor of the Native Daughters of the Golden West.

The Fageses began a slow rehabilitation process of Casa Alvarado, stabilizing the adobe walls, refinishing the original pine floors and painting the redwood siding on the Nichols additions. They also filled Casa Alvarado with antiques and family heirlooms that honored its history:

Above the sala mantel hangs a lovely eighteenth century oil painting of the Blessed Virgin flanked by two old cathedral candle sticks – the gift of Norman Nuerenburg, who assisted with the restoration of several rooms at San Fernando Mission.

An office of Holy Week printed in Salamanca Spain in 1582 was given to us by Theodore A. Willard with whom we both worked for many years.

A cylinder piano with wooden dancing figures handed down in the López family since 1864; chairs and dresser brought around the Horn by the Waite family, my maternal grandparents in 1850; a 120-year-old four-poster bed presented by Clara Haydock, upon the death of her mother, Luisa López de McAlonan, and many other treasures are included…we continue to look for additional authentic furnishings and are grateful for many gifts and loans.

-Isabel Lopez de Fages, 1961, “La Casa Alvarado (Casa de Ayer)” in The Historical Society of Southern California

Soon after the Fages family moved in, Casa Alvarado resumed its long tenure as a lively community space. Beginning in October of 1951 we start seeing small classified listings for Casa Alvarado that describe it as “available to small groups for regular meetings, teas or receptions.” The Native Daughters of the Golden West held their annual Pioneer Silver Tea at Casa Alvarado for many years, and dedicated a bronze plaque there in 1954 (the Fageses’ daughter Nancy played an ancient instrument called the salterio as part of the festivities). Nancy, a local Girl Scouts leader, regularly invited groups of Scouts over and would later take over her mom’s role as President of the local chapter of the Native Daughters of the Golden West. 

In 1970, the Pomona City Council denied a request to have part of the neighborhood surrounding Casa Alvarado and Casa Primera re-zoned to allow an office building for dentists. The leader of the effort, dentist Harry E. Whyte, promised that he would purchase Casa Primera from its owner Roscoe Hart and deed it to the Pomona Valley Historical Society. Despite support from both Hart and the Fages family, the rezoning effort fell apart. The following year Hart sold it at auction to the City of Pomona, who delegated day-to-day management responsibilities to the Historical Society. 

Casa Alvarado, however, remained a private home, and during that period the Fages family would rent out the rooms they didn’t need. In 1976 the great watercolorist Milford Zornes and his wife Pat moved into the bottom floor of the old water tower, and eventually took over the entire thing, with Milford’s studio up top. Eventually he set up a makeshift tent studio outside where he continued to paint into his late eighties. You can see his “jungle camp,” as he called it, in this interview with Huell Howser from 1996. 

Casa Alvarado in the 21st Century 

By the 1990s, Alphonse & Isabel Fages were both dead and Casa Alvarado was losing its luster. Fortunately the home’s fourth steward was a professional preservationist: Bruce Coons, Executive Director of San Diego’s Save Our Heritage Organization, who purchased the house in 2000 and moved in with his wife and mother.

“You should have seen this garden. It was knee-deep in junk. Refrigerators, stoves, motor parts, carpets, a mess,” Coons told the Los Angeles Times in 2003. One of the adobe walls in the priest’s room was falling apart. The Coonses rebuilt it by creating 12 new bricks out of the crumbly bits of the old ones. Bruce’s wife Alana re-planted the garden with California natives, including cactus, olive trees, lemon verbena, Mexican sage and pomegranates.

There was still much work to be done on Casa Alvarado when Bill and Leonie Crouch bought it from the Coonses in 2013. Bill’s a retired architect who was appointed Urban Designer for the City of Beverly Hills and later became Community Development Director for the city of Orange. He brings both a preservation mindset and construction know-how to his current role as Casa Alvarado’s restorer-in-chief. 

Over the past decade and change, the Crouches have repaired weathered siding and flooring, replaced incompatible aluminum window frames with wood to match historic photos, and re-roofed the whole place. They turned the overgrown courtyard into an inviting, livable space, with stone pavers and a fountain at its center. They remodeled the kitchen, and replaced the window screens in the upstairs sleeping porch with double-glazed windows of the same size. That room is in the process of transforming into a bedroom for their granddaughter.

The Crouches have definitely modernized the house to fit their needs – for example the old box-frame cottage on the west side is now a fully-kitted out laundry and lounge wing for Leonie, and they’ve added a sound system and screen to the courtyard so they can hold impromptu movie nights. An enclosed section of an old veranda is now dedicated to candy and milkshakes for younger visitors. 

But the Crouches were also careful to preserve traces of every era of Casa Alvarado. There is mid-19th century hardware and original adobe bricks still embedded in these walls, and Victorian-style furniture and wallpaper in the bedrooms that the Nicholses added in the late 1800s. There’s a small hole in the beautifully refinished kitchen floorboards where you can see through to the original timber flooring below, some 140 years old by now. 

Milford Zornes’s watercolors adorn the dark wood walls of the water tower where he once lived (hanging nearby are his wife’s sketches of Casa Alvarado) and a flap in the sala swings open to reveal pencil marks, indicating the heights of dozens of kids who grew up or spent time here, dating back to the early 1900s.

Outside on the southeast corner of the house, Bill showed me a vertical strip on the wall where he had peeled back inches of exterior plaster to expose the home’s original color, a dusty salmon. It’s wild how much historic fabric is still here if you know where to look for it. 

In one sense, Casa Alvarado is a private museum of California history. The artifacts and building materials here thoughtfully reflect the evolution of the house and the communities that surrounded it. But more than that, Casa Alvarado is a home. The Crouches are the latest in an unbroken line of owners who have lived and entertained here, prepared and consumed countless meals here, tended to the animals and fruit trees here. Dining at Casa Alvarado with the Crouches, devouring warm scones and tea in the same room where the Alvarados once laid out their family feasts, we were partaking in a 185-year-old tradition.

Endless gratitude to Bill Crouch for sharing his voluminous knowledge and research archives with me. Thank you also to Leonie Crouch for preparing the first ever Devonshire Tea that my family has experienced during our unforgettable visit to Casa Alvarado.

Thank you to Jonathan White, a descendant of the Alvarado family,  for explaining in great detail how the Alvarados, Palomareses and Whites intertwined, and for answering some of the thornier research questions I encountered. 

Thank you to Marilyn Van Winkle for approving the use of images from The Autry’s collection, and to Diane St. Germain for granting permission to use the Milford Zornes watercolor of Casa Alvarado that she owns.

Sources & Recommended Reading

+ “1459 Old Settlers Ln, Pomona, CA 91768” (Zillow.com)

+ “Benjamin Smith Nichols (1824 – 1908)” (wikitree.com)

+ Brackett, F.P.: History of Pomona Valley California (Historic Record Company, 1920 – via Internet Archive)

+ Buckley, Winifred: “Old Adobe’s Historic Days Recalled Here” (Progress-Bulletin, October 19, 1951 – via Newspapers.com)

+ Canary, Peyton: “Rezoning Denied at Nichols Adobe Site” (Los Angeles Times, June 7, 1970 – via ProQuest)

+ “CASA ALVARADO Now available to small groups…” (Progress-Bulletin, October 20, 1951 – via Newspapers.com)

+ “Christmas Traditional in 120-Year-Old Adobe” (Progress-Bulletin, December 24, 1960 – via Newspapers.com)

+ “City Mourns Passing of Allen P. Nichols” (Progress-Bulletin, June 2, 1950 – via Newspapers.com)

+ “The Colorado Mines.” (Los Angeles Daily News, June 11, 1862 – via Newspapers.com)

+ “County of Los Angeles. The Board of Supervisors direct…” (Los Angeles Star, October 16, 1852 – via Newspapers.com)

+ Crouch, Bill: “The Mystery of Palomares’ Lost Adobe” (unpublished draft, 2025)

+ “Defuncion. Don IGNACIO ALVARADO…” (Las Dos Republicas, May 17, 1876 – via Newspapers.com)

+ “Dr. B.S. Nichols Has Gone Out of This Life” (The Pomona Daily Review, January 27, 1908 – via Newspapers.com)

+ “Election Notice.” (Los Angeles Star, August 15, 1857 – via Newspapers.com)

+ Fages, Isabel Lopez de: “Four adobe homes in valley are still identifiable” (Progress-Bulletin, August 17, 1975 – via Newspapers.com)

+ Fages, Isabel Lopez de: “LA CASA ALVARADO (Casa de Ayer)” (The Historical Society of Southern California Quarterly, Vol. 43, No. 2, June, 1961)

+ Frank, Ann: “Owners Take Pride in Adobe, 120 Years Old” (Los Angeles Times, October 9, 1960 – via ProQuest)

+ “Funeral of an Old and Esteemed Resident” (The Pomona Daily Review, November 4, 1914 – via Newspapers.com)

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

+ “Hervey J. Nichols, Foremost Citizen, Suddenly Stricken” (Progress-Bulletin, November 5, 1925 – via Newspapers.com)

+ “Historical Old Adobe Restored” (Progress-Bulletin, January 6, 1963 – via Newspapers.com)

+ Howser, Huell: “Artists | Visiting with Huell Howser” (VIDEO – @PBS SoCal on YouTube, originally aired in 1996; uploaded August 6, 2018)

+ “Ignacio Maria Alvarado” (Ancestry.com)

+ “Indian Depredations.” (The Sierra Citizen, August 5, 1854 – via Newspapers.com)

+ Inland Empire Museum of Art: “Milford Zornes Chronology” (iearts.org)

+ “Isabel Clair Lopez” (familysearch.org)

+ “Judges of the Plains.” (Los Angeles Star, May 24, 1851 – via Newspapers.com)

+ Kheel, Rebecca: “Orange hires an Aussie” (Orange County Register, June 16, 2015)

+ Maddison, Jacqueline: “Los Angeles Conservancy Awards A+” (Beverly Hills Magazine, March 12, 2014

+ Manson, Bill: “In the Rancho Spirit” (Los Angeles Times, September 25, 2003 – via ProQuest)

+ Munday, Marian: “Early California Descendants Attend Casa Alvarado Marker Dedication” (Progress-Bulletin, October 26, 1954 – via Newspapers.com)

+ “Old Tract to Be Subdivided” (Progress-Bulletin, July 10, 1941 – via Newspapers.com)

+ “Pioneer Woman of Pomona Dies” (Progress-Bulletin, November 3, 1914 – via Newspapers.com)

+ “Pomona.” (Los Angeles Evening Express, November 12, 1875 – via Newspapers.com)

+ “Roscoe Hart is Named New Police Commissioner; All Dep’t. Heads Retained” (Progress-Bulletin, April 21, 1943 – via Newspapers.com)

+ Sanborn Map Company: Sheet 2 of Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Pomona, Los Angeles County, California (1928 – via ProQuest)

+ “The San Jose Rancho Title.” (Los Angeles Herald, April 2, 1886 – via Newspapers.com)

+ “Senior Troop Plans Beach Gathering” (Progress-Bulletin, June 25, 1961 – via Newspapers.com)

+ Sitton, Tom: Casa Alvarado’s NRHP nomination form, 1977

+ “Sueltos Locales.” (Las Dos Republicas, May 13, 1876 – via Newspapers.com)

+ “Tour of Landmarks Slated on Historical Society’s Pilgrimage Wednesday” (Progress-Bulletin, June 13, 1938 – via Newspapers.com)

+ Williams, Mary: “NDGW Will Dedicate Old Adobe” (Los Angeles Times,  October 22, 1954 – via ProQuest)

+ “Woman of the Week: Pomona Helps Restore California Landmarks” (Progress-Bulletin, November 21, 1955 – via Newspapers.com)