Vernacular Houses in Nineteenth-Century California

Colonists and settlers of nineteenth-century California built simple houses with available materials and skills. This bounded case study of selected Northern California houses for artisans, agriculture workers, shopkeepers, public servants, gold diggers, and industrial workers is informed by Dell Upton’s vernacular housing studies. It explains how specific regional contexts influenced local dwelling design, construction, and amenities, while acknowledging that housing was a part of larger economic, transportation, and information networks. Early Spanish/Mexican pueblo (town) and rancho (cattle ranch) adobes were typically one-room buildings with thatched roofs, dirt floors, and few windows. Construction of adobes was time-consuming and produced high-maintenance structures better suited to Southern California than to the high-rainfall, forested landscapes to which the Gold Rush drew American and international settlers. These newcomers sought shelter in tents or in crudely constructed log- and wood-frame dwellings. As the cultural context evolved from Spanish/Mexican to American/Northern European dominance, trade and immigration increased, with adobe and wood-frame builders taking advantage of the transition from an economy controlled by Spain and Mexico to one shaped by international market forces. Increased economic prosperity, the emergence of a California merchant class, industrialization of lumber production, the arrival of immigrants with building skills, and the growing availability of new and readily available building materials improved California’s housing stock. Interspersed among crude frontier shelters came adobes with stone foundations, wood floors, and interior fireplaces, and redwood cottages framed of dimensional, sawmill-cut lumber. By the end of the nineteenth century, wood structures outnumbered those of adobe. While wood prevailed as a structural material, builders often reproduced the form, massing, and style of earlier adobes, as expressed in the California ranch houses that were twentieth-century America’s most popular housing style.