Added to the National Register of Historic Places on December 19, 2003

The historic adobe at Campo de Cahuenga is in the running for LA’s most significant, non-existent landmark. Some consider this site to be the birth of California, or at least a crucial crossroads where California’s Mexican past intersected with its American future. History was made here on January 13, 1847 when General Andrés Pico leading the Mexican army, and Lt. Col. John C. Frémont representing the Americans, signed the Treaty of Cahuenga – a capitulation that ended the fighting in California in the Mexican-American War. You can visit the humble table where some believe the signing took place at the Becoming LA exhibit at the Natural History Museum of LA County (see visit #123).

And yet the adobe where Pico and Frémont met is a ghost. What we see now, in the thoughtfully landscaped memorial park right across from Universal Studios, is a reconstruction of the building that used to be here. It was built in 1950, half a century after the original was demolished. And while it was designed to replicate the original adobe, based on the best evidence they had at the time, we know now that it’s far from accurate. The original was much larger, may have had a second story, and was situated at a different angle. Even the ruins on the grounds of Campo de Cahuenga are imitation ruins, covering up the excavated tile and foundations that still remain from the original adobe house.

There is a reason why this site’s first nomination for the National Register was rejected in 1973, and again in 1974. “We do not dispute the importance of the historical event which took place at this site,” wrote Charles A. Herrington, Acting Keeper of the National Register in a 1974 letter to William Penn Mott, Jr., Director of California’s Department of Parks & Recreation. “But…subsequent developments appear to have destroyed the historical integrity of the site…Once the integrity of an historic site has been extensively altered or destroyed, nothing remains to which the protection offered by the National Register can extended.”

The Treaty of Cahuenga was just one milestone of many in the war. Fighting continued in Mexico for eight months after Pico and Fremont did their business, and it wasn’t until the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed on February 2, 1848, that the war was officially over. As part of the terms of Guadalupe Hidalgo, America took control of California, Nevada, Arizona and Utah, parts of Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico. It was a massive expansion of American territory, some 525,000 square miles in all, or about 64% as much as the Louisiana Purchase.

For an agreement drawn up by the victors of a war, the terms of the capitulation were generous in their treatment of the Californian Mexicans (aka Californios). The Californios agreed to surrender their weapons to the American forces, and release any prisoners and parolees; in exchange, Californios were afforded equal rights as Americans, received protection from the American forces, and retained the freedom to leave the country should they so desire. 

Several accounts point to the influence of Doña Bernarda Ruiz on the peaceful tenor of the Treaty. Ruiz was a Santa Barbara matriarch from a respected family, the owner of a Pony Express-style mail service and the mother of four sons with Mexican sympathies. One winter night at the tail end of 1846, she was granted a 10-minute audience with Frémont, who was staying at the San Carlos Hotel in Santa Barbara (he had also requisitioned some of Ruiz’s horses). That 10 minutes extended to two hours. While Frémont’s memoirs are light on details of the conversation, the Campo de Cahuenga Historical Memorial Association believes that Ruiz shaped the outcome of the war by selling Frémont on the strategic wisdom of being magnanimous: “…it is likely she appealed to his ego by convincing him the support of the Californios would further his dreams of a political career. Enemies made, on the other had, [sic] might forever put his life in danger.” Indeed, Frémont was elected one of the first two California senators after it achieved statehood in 1850. Doña Ruiz got her horses back. 

The Memorial Association puts Doña Ruiz among the small group of onlookers who witnessed the signing (this is disputed by others). For her role in bringing about a dignified end to the Californio involvement in the Mexican-American War, Ruiz is honored with a prominent plaque at Campo de Cahuenga, affixed to the central fountain. 

By the time that table cemented its place in California lore, Campo de Cahuenga already had a long history. This land was inhabited by the Gabrielino-Tongva/Kizh people for several thousands of years before the Spanish came in the late 1700s. They had a village nearby named “Kaweenga” – the namesake of the Cahuenga Pass that surrounds the Campo. While we don’t know exactly where the village was situated, excavations have turned up pottery and pestles that suggest that the Tongva lived or worked at Campo de Cahuenga, though it’s unclear in what context. 

Around 1795, a retired Spanish soldier named Mariano de la Luz Verdugo was granted grazing rights to the pastures around Universal City, then called Rancho Portezuela. It’s quite possible that the original adobe building was constructed during the Verdugo era, but it may also have been built by the Mission San Fernando Rey de España (see visit # 17), which reclaimed Verdugo’s land by 1810. Either way, archaeological and historic research suggests that the roof and floor tiles came from mission kilns, and that Tongva laborers most likely built the adobe.

An 1842 land claim document described the Campo adobe as “somewhat dilapidated,” while John C. Frémont himself called it “abandoned” when he met Pico there five years later. By that time, Mexico had declared its independence from Spain and secularized the missions, distributing their vast land holdings to Californio ranchers and settlers. The year before the Treaty of Cahuenga, Alta California’s governor Pio Pico (brother of Andrés) had sold nearly the entire San Fernando Valley – 120,000 acres of former mission land – to a Spanish rancher and politician named Eulogio de Celis. 

The story of the Campo de Cahuenga didn’t end when the ink dried on the Treaty. At the end of the 1850s, the adobe became a stop on the Butterfield Overland Mail route, a stagecoach line operating from 1858 until 1861. Butterfield would take mail and passengers from St. Louis or Memphis, all the way west through Los Angeles and up to its western terminus in San Francisco. During the Civil War, the Campo served as an encampment site for volunteers from Santa Barbara, heading south to join the Union army at the Drum Barracks in Wilmington. 

According to a second-hand report, John Frémont described the site of the signing as “ruins” when he revisited the Campo de Cahuenga in the late 1880s, late in his life. The adobe was demolished around 1900, and the rest of the area was leveled in the 1910s, during the subdivision and development of Universal City – apparently without any care for (or perhaps knowledge of) the significance of the site. 

A series of private businesses occupied the Campo de Cahuenga site in the early 1900s, including a small veterinary office. Pictures from that era show a pueblo-style building close to Lankershim, with a short, thick wall parallel to the street, and a grassy courtyard with a fountain at the center. 

Even during the nadir of the Campo’s history, it had its champions, none as indefatigable as Mrs. A.S.C. Forbes. She was a historian and preservationist who had spent years documenting the California missions and mapping the route of El Camino Real. It was Forbes’s own foundry that produced the original mission bells that line the route today and mark many California landmarks, including the Campo itself. To top it all off, Forbes located the original copy of the Treaty after it had gone missing for 70+ years. It was in the private papers of José Antonio Carrillo, the man who wrote out the document longhand, held at UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library. 

Forbes collected affidavits from witnesses to the Treaty signing, and petitioned the City of LA to purchase and preserve the Campo. That they did in 1923, formally dedicating it as a memorial park in 1924. They eventually razed the old veterinary office, with the intention of rebuilding the original adobe as a museum. 

The contemporary phase of the Campo de Cahuenga’s story begins with an archaeological excavation, undertaken by high school students at the John C. Fremont High School in South Los Angeles (whether the high school’s clear connection with the Campo’s history was a deliberate one or a fateful coincidence, I don’t know, but it’s a cool detail either way). In 1931, one J. Marshall Miller of the Historical Society of Southern California led an expedition “for the purpose of assembling and organizing all available facts regarding the Cauenga [sic] house, in preparation for the anticipated restoration, hoping thus to eliminate the inaccuracies which often occur in hasty research.” He brought along with him a faculty member from Fremont High, Elmer R. King, along with several of his students. 

Miller’s report, published in 1932 in the Historical Society of Southern California’s annual publication, provided archaeological evidence of the size and layout of a main house with six rooms, cobblestone and lime mortar foundations, tiled floor and roof and a porch and a corridor lined with columns. All very typical of the mission-era architecture of the time. That 1931 excavation was the basis of the museum we see today, designed by architects Spencer and Landon in the late 1940s and opened in 1950. 

Fast forward to 1995. The LA County Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) was planning the Universal City stop for the Red Line rail system, just southwest of the Campo de Cahuenga memorial park, and as soon as workers started digging trenches along the sidewalk, they encountered cobblestone and floor tiles in parts of the site that hadn’t been excavated before. More excavations took place in the late 1990s and in the early 2000s, both outside and (on a limited basis) inside the park. Archaeologists were able to confirm that the foundations of the adobe extended northwards into the parking lot, and eastwards underneath Lankershim Blvd. They also found Native American pottery, early 19th century edgeware and fragments of tile with animal footprints in them. 

How best to preserve and interpret a landmark when its remnants are buried underground? After officials met with preservation experts, the decision was made to keep the original foundations and tiles where they were, and cover them up with recreated versions on the surface. The remains were covered with sterile sand and microfiber, then duplicated along the original footprint with cobblestones and tiles made in the same color, texture and size as the original. They even brought in a dog to make a cast so they could imprint random tiles with its paw prints. Adobe bricks were made on site and added in stacks around the corners of the foundation, and interpretive signage now covers the park, unpacking the many layers of history on display here. My personal favorite detail is how they extended a beautifully-rendered outline of the adobe’s foundation across the sidewalk and into the Lankershim, to emphasize just how massive it was. 

The new Campo opened in April of 2004, and since then it’s been open a few days a week as a park and museum. The City of LA rents out space for cultural events and meetings by other organizations, as it has for decades. Most years around the anniversary of the signing, the Campo de Cahuenga Historical Memorial Association runs a re-enactment event with actors dressed in period garb.  

In late 2003, the Campo de Cahuenga was finally added to the National Register of Historic Places, 30 years after it was initially rejected. This time the form was prepared by Roberta Greenwood, whose archaeological firm oversaw the ‘90s and early 2000s excavations for the MTA. She was in a great position to argue persuasively for the value of the Campo de Cahuenga ruins as an archaeological resource. Her work had uncovered rare cultural materials, helped us understand the connections between Mission San Fernando and the secular world, and answered some previously unclear historical questions about the site itself, and the events that took place there. 

A selection of plaques at Campo de Cahuenga

In a commemorative park covered in interpretive signage, plaques and small monuments stretching back a century, the most precious source of information is willfully buried underneath layers of sand and soil.

Thanks to John Cahoon at the Seaver Center for Western History Research, EV Vasquez at the Natural History Museum and Daisy and Paula of the LA Department of Parks & Recreation for their assistance with this post.

Sources & Recommended Reading

+ “Capitulation (1847)” (campodecahuenga.com)

+ Foster, John M., Leonard Pitt & Edna E. Kimbro, Greenwood and Associates: “Second Addendum Report: Archaeological And Historic Investigations At Campo De Cahuenga, CA-LAN-1945H” (March 10, 2000) (PDF)

+ Gilkey, W.O. (1972) & Greenwood, Roberta S. (2003): Campo de Cahuenga’s NRHP nomination form

+ Greenwood, Roberta S.: “When the System Works: the Campo de Cahuenga” (Pacific Coast Archaeological Society Quarterly, vol. 38, no. 2&3, spring & summer, 2002)

+ Hayes, Dade: “MTA Diggers Locate Campo de Cahuenga” (Los Angeles Times, February 4, 1997)

+ History.com Editors: “Mexican-American War” (History.com, updated August 10, 2022)

+ Kondo, Annette: “Archeologists to Plow New Ground for Old Adobe (Los Angeles Times, Jan. 4, 2000)

+ Mallory, Mary: “Hollywood Heights – Campo de Cahuenga, California’s Birthplace” (The Daily Mirror, October 3, 2022 – originally from 2012)

+ Meares, Hadley: “In a State of Peace and Tranquility: Campo de Cahuenga and the Birth of American California” (PBSSocal.org, July 11, 2014)

+ Miller, J. Marshall: “The Fremont-Pico Memorial Park (Campo de Cauenga): The Home of Don Tomas Feliz – Its Excavation and Proposed Restoration” (Annual Publications of the Historical Society of Southern California, 1932 – via Internet Archive)

+ Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHM) on YouTube: “Historian D.J. Waldie on the Cahuenga Treaty Table in Becoming L.A.” (September 2, 2016)

+ O’Neil, Rob: “In 1800s, De Celis Owned Most of the Valley” (Los Angeles Times, July 9, 1997)

+ Rasmussen, Cecilia: “Woman Helped Bring a Peaceful End to Mexican-American War” (Los Angeles Times, May 5, 2002)

+ Waldie, D.J.: “How Did the Mexican-American War in California Actually End? A Table, Cahuenga, and Historical Uncertainty” (PBSSocal.org, October 28, 2016)

+ “Women of the Campo” (campodecahuenga.com)