THE CARRILLO ADOBE, C. 1890. The Carrillo Adobe was the first non-Indian dwelling in the Santa Rosa area. Its history is long and wide, and deserves special recognition in this book. In 1837, Doña Maria Ignacia López de Carrillo, mother-in-law to General Mariano Vallejo, built the adobe on 8,800 acres along Santa Rosa Creek. On a current map those boundaries would be approximately as follows: northeast to slightly east of the Maria Carrillo High School campus at Montecito Avenue and Calistoga Road, northwest to Guerneville Road at Stony Point Road, southwest to Stony Point Road at Hearn Avenue, and southeast to Hoen Avenue ending at Annadel State Park.

By the 1850s the adobe housed a store, an inn, and a post office. Later, from 1860 to 1950, the building was owned and operated by the Feodor Hahman family. In the mid-1940s a wing of the adobe collapsed. Six years later the remainder of the building and the surrounding 17 acres became the property of the Roman Catholic Diocese of San Francisco. In 1960, the control of the land passed to the Diocese of Santa Rosa.

Most of the efforts in the past have failed to arrest the building’s decay or indeed to resolve its future. There is hope that the Friends of the Carrillo Adobe, together with the cooperation of the Diocese, can move forward quickly with plans to save this treasure from complete annihilation.