Ortega Adobe facts for kids
Quick facts for kids Ortega Adobe |
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Ortega Adobe, April 2018
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| Location | 215 West Main Street, Ventura, California |
| Built | c. 1857 |
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The Ortega Adobe is a historic house built in 1857 in Ventura, California. It's made of adobe, a type of sun-dried brick. This house is very special because it's the only example left of a "middle class" home from the late 1800s in Ventura. Many adobe homes once lined Main Street, but only this one remains.
The City of Ventura owns the Ortega Adobe. In 1974, it was named Historic Landmark No. 2 for the city. Today, you can visit it and take a self-guided tour to learn about its past.
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Building the Ortega Adobe
The land where the Ortega Adobe stands used to belong to the Mission San Buenaventura. In 1857, a man named Emigdio Miguel Ortega built the adobe house.
One big challenge for Emigdio was finding enough wood in the Ventura area. He found a solution by getting beams and rafters from an abandoned adobe house. This old house was about 40 miles away, near what is now the city of Fillmore. Emigdio used oxcarts to haul the heavy lumber. This journey took him four days!
The main roof beam of the Ortega Adobe had a long history. It had been used in the older adobe for about 70 years before Emigdio moved it. An archeologist named Robert Browne studied the beams during a restoration project in 1970. He said the main beam was cut from a Jeffrey pine tree in Sespe Canyon. It might have been part of a house built around the time Father Serra founded the mission.
Emigdio also bought roof tiles and bricks from the Mission San Buenaventura. In January 1857, a big earthquake, called the 1857 Fort Tejon earthquake, damaged the Mission. The roof tiles fell off, and the Mission decided to replace them with new cedar shingles. This made the old tiles available for Emigdio to use.
Life at the Adobe
The Ortega Family Home
The Ortega Adobe was home to the Ortega family for over 40 years. Emigdio and his wife, Maria Conception Jacinta Dominguez Ortega, had 13 children! They moved into this adobe from another adobe house nearby.
In 1866, the Ventura River flooded. The flood was so powerful that it swept away one of the rooms on the west side of the adobe. The Ortegas were warned about the flood and moved their belongings, including their pets, to a nearby wooden house. Sadly, their son Emilio later wrote that the wooden house, along with their possessions and pets, was swept out to sea. Even though one room was lost, the adobe house itself survived the flood.
Ortega Chile Business
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In the late 1890s, the Ortega family started a food business right in their adobe kitchen. They roasted chiles there. They also built a wooden shed next to the adobe where they canned their products. Emilio, one of Emigdio's sons, started the Ortega Chile Packing Company at this very spot.
By 1899, Emilio's company had grown. They opened a factory a few miles from Ventura. There, 16 women and four men worked to process 22 tons of chiles. They made 55,000 cans of roasted green chiles and green chile salsa. The cans even had a picture of the old adobe house on them! Even in the 1930s, the company's ads used the image of "The Original Ortega Adobe Still Standing in Ventura, California" to show its history.
Later Uses of the Adobe
The Ortega family's food business moved to Los Angeles in the early 1900s. The Ortega Adobe was sold around 1903 or 1905 to Ung Hing, a Chinese immigrant. Later, in 1913, Ung Hing sold the property to Edgar Carne. Carne then rented it to Lee Leon, who turned it into a Mexican restaurant.
The City of Ventura bought the property in 1921. For many years, from the 1920s to the 1960s, the building was rented out for different purposes. It was used as offices for Shell Oil Company and as a meeting hall for the Veterans of Foreign Wars. From 1952 to 1954, it even served as a police station for the Ventura Police Department! Later, it was a meeting hall for the Ventura Boys' Club. People also say it was once a saloon, a secret bar during Prohibition, and even a potter's home.
Restoration and Historic Status
By the late 1960s, the adobe was empty and starting to fall apart. In September 1969, the city council decided to restore it. They wanted to turn it into a historical museum and a place for tourists to visit.
Volunteers, led by Werner Weile and archeologist Robert O. Brown, helped a lot. They found and donated old household items and furniture that would have been used during the adobe's early days. After two years of hard work, the adobe opened to the public in April 1971. Robert Browne said they were trying to make it look just like it did originally.
However, there was a problem with the restoration. A city official named Richard Senate said in 1985 that the thick adobe walls were covered with cement. This was not a good idea because adobe walls need to be able to expand and shrink with temperature changes. The cement coating caused the adobe to start decaying.
Despite this, the building was officially named the City of Ventura's Historic Landmark No. 2 in 1974. Today, the Ortega Adobe is open for visitors to explore. There are signs that explain the history of the building and the Ortega family. You can see three rooms: a kitchen, a bedroom, and a living room. The front room is part of the original 1857 house. The two rooms at the back were added later, between 1867 and 1890.
