José Maria de Jesus Alviso Adobe and Rancho Milpitas (one)

Since the opening of the José Alviso Adobe Park in 2013, the Milpitas Historical Society has been conducting docent-led tours of this historic site to help the community appreciate its importance. Prior to that time, we have been providing historical information about the José Alviso Adobe, built nearly two centuries ago, and about Rancho Milpitas at two websites: Steve Munzel’s milpitashistory.org as well as ours at milpitashistoricalsociety.org.

Lately, in preparation for the opening of the Adobe as a museum by the City of Milpitas, I intensified my research into the site’s past to ensure the accuracy of information about it. This effort has yielded both new insight as well as corrected a few “facts” in its orthodox history. We hope you enjoy the resulting article.

The José Maria Alviso Adobe in Milpitas is the only remaining original Monterey Colonial style building in the San Francsico Bay Area. It is also historic in another sense – it is the oldest continuously occupied adobe house in California (about 150 years, until the 1980s).

Its architectural style features such elements as a hipped roof in which all sections meet the roofline (refer back to first photo) in contrast with a peaked roof, hand-split wood shingles rather than Spanish tile, wood balconies, paired French doors, multi-panel windows, interior fireplaces for heating, and a symmetrical layout (typically three rooms downstairs and three rooms upstairs).

The Monterey Colonial style, which combines Hispanic and Anglo architectural traditions, was originally developed by Thomas Oliver Larkin, a merchant who immigrated from Boston, Massachusetts in 1832 to Monterey, then capitol of Mexican Alta California. He began construction of his own house in 1835, which was completed in 1837. In 1843, twenty-two years after Alta California switched from Spanish to Mexican administration, Larkin was appointed the region’s only American Consul, and in 1849 he was a signer of the first California Constitution in preparation for its imminent statehood.

José Maria de Jesus Alviso (1798-1853) was the son of Francisco Xavier Alviso (1765-1803), and the grandson of Domingo Alviso (1739-1777). Domingo was one of thirty-eight soldados in Juan Bautista de Anza’s expedition of 1775-1776 to colonize Alta California; Francisco Xavier was one of four Alviso children in that migration of mostly military and four civilian families. By authorizing this colonization, the Viceroy of New Spain, Antonio Maria de Bucareli y Ursúa, was strengthening Spain’s claim on Alta California in order to thwart settlement by foreign powers.

As a young adult, José enlisted in 1819 as a soldado in the San Francisco Company, continuing in the military tradition of his father and grandfather, but he left after a short career of eight years in 1827. He became a ranchero as early as 1828 with a herd of two hundred cattle grazing on rangeland he did not own but had obtained permission to use; his post-military life also included a brief foray in civic service in 1836 when he was elected Alcaldé (magistrate and lay judge) of El Pueblo de San José de Guadalupe.

On September 23^rd, 1835, “the tract of land named Milpitas” on which the Alviso Adobe was built was granted to “Don José Maria Alviso” by then Estados Unidos Mexicanos’ Acting Governor of Alta California, Lt. Colonel José Castro. At first, the grant provided land measuring 1 Castilian league north-south by one-half league east-west, which amounts to about 2,228 acres, but nine days later, on October 2^nd, Castro doubled the grant to a full square league of 4,457.66 acres. José Alviso had always petitioned for one square league, but it was repeatedly being cut it half. Today we know his persistent effort to secure a rancho for himself had been an arduous, labyrinthine pursuit because Alviso’s original application was filed five and one-half years earlier on March 1^st, 1830 with the Mission of Santa Clara de Asis, well before the Secularization Act of 1833 that transferred authority regarding land ownership from the Church to civic authorities. Numerous applications followed until he was successful.

Later, another life-reshaping complication arose. All early Spanish and post-1821 Mexican land grants were affected by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the 1846-1848 war between Mexico and the United States. All of Alta California — in today’s terms, all of California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, and the western half of New Mexico (the eastern half became part of Texas) — was ceded to the United States as part of this treaty, which officially attempted to respect Hispanic ownership rights by stipulating that early landholders would retain their property if they could legally prove their ownership, a task which proved to be both difficult and very expensive.

On March 3, 1856, the California Land Commission confirmed Alviso’s land title, but this decision was legally contested by Nicholas Antonio Berryessa Jr. (1789-1873), whose son Carlos Antonio in 1841 had married Juana Francisca Josefa Maria Galindo, sister of José Maria Alviso’s wife. This challenge was undertaken by Nicholas Berryessa because in April 1834 he had been granted ownership by the Alcaldé of El Pueblo de San José to some land adjoining the tract of land being requested by José Alviso, thus the legal boundary became a point of contention later. Ultimately, the Berryessa’s heirs failed in their claim to Rancho Milpitas when, on October 16^th, 1865, the Land Commission rejected their appeal and reaffirmed José Alviso’s original land grant from Acting Governor Castro. On June 30^th, 1871, a final patent was issued to Alviso’s estate, José himself having died in 1853.

With the advent of the Gold Rush and the growing groundswell of westward migration to California, Oregon and Washington states in the 1850s, incoming settlers started a small but thriving community called “Penitencia” named after the nearby Penitencia Creek (it is today’s straightened flood control canal on the west side of Abel Street), but the township also appeared on some maps as “Milpitas Village,” after its namesake, Rancho Milpitas.

Although early maps consistently identify the tract of land as Rancho Milpitas or Milpitas Rancho, José Alviso also named this property Rancho San Miguel, in my opinion in honor of his grandparents who were born and married in San Miguel de Horcasitas, Sonora, New Spain before their migration to Alta California in 1776. This “alternate” name appears on several deeds to various individuals, including one dated February 14^th, 1856 for a northwestern portion of land sold to Milpitas township pioneer Michael Hughes.

According to the history described in the National Register of Historic Places Registration Form filed in 1997 by the City of Milpitas, the original Alviso Adobe was built in 1837 as a single-story Spanish-style adobe. It is worth noting that by then, the Alviso family was comprised of José, his wife Juana Francisca Galindo, as well as six children ranging in age from 12 years to 2 years. This raises a substantive question in my mind: Was the family residing in another location before 1837, such as in El Pueblo de San José de Guadalupe, where José had been Alcaldé the year before, or, instead, was the Alviso Adobe actually built earlier than 1837?

A major clue is contained in José’s second petition dated November 1^st, 1834 to the Town Council of Pueblo de San José asking again for a grant of the tract of land that eventually became Rancho Milpitas. In it in part he declares (in the following translation from the original Spanish), “I herewith present for the purpose of asking for the concession of the said tract of land in ownership within the limits described on the map, in consideration of the stock (author’s note: his earlier herd of 200 cattle by then had grown into a herd of 600 cattle and 30 mares) I possess as set forth and the improvements I have on said place, consisting of two walled houses, an orchard of sixty fruit trees, and a vineyard of six hundred vines, and other lands enclosed and cultivated.” Such extensive “improvements” were offered frequently as proof that the prospective grantee was acting to utilize the land productively as an upstanding member of the community and not let the land be idle as a personal instrument of land speculation. Given this fairly detailed documentation, I ask, were either of these “two walled houses” actually the same one (albeit upgraded years later to two stories) that currently exists? If yes, which I believe is certainly possible and even likely, then today’s adobe actually was built in 1834 or earlier and not in 1837 or later.

As José’s children grew up to raise their own families, several additional adobes were built to the south along Piedmont Road, but they were demolished in the early 1900s after those Alviso descendants no longer owned these partitions of land.

Originally Rancho Milpitas had been part of the outlying area of El Pueblo de San José de Guadalupe. Indeed, proof of this is that almost all of José’s grant applications for “the tract of land named Milpitas” had been carefully reviewed and recommended to the Governor by the Ayuntamiento (i.e., Town Council) of the Pueblo. The time-consuming procedure even required the testimony of three upstanding citizens to certify his worthiness as a member of the community.

(Page Two—click here)