The Old Souls of Monterey

Home Country

Lester Boronda

1886-1953

Circa 1870.

We see a small group of adobe-brick houses—“adobes,” in common parlance—nestled in a field of late summer grasses toned golden-gray. The nearest dwelling, several yards distant, shows us a door and a single small window, both set in shaded alcoves. A plume of dark gray smoke wafts from the chimney.

A copse of magnificent oaks stands nearby, the tops of their canopies deep green, the undersides touched, here and there, with red. The trees cast their shade over a gate leading through a split-rail fence, beyond which sits the houses, and beyond them a panorama of the great bay stretching from Monterey to Santa Cruz. In the foreground stands a woman clad in flowing crimson: this symbol of Gilded Age splendor standing in a quiet pasture in rustic Monterey is intriguing, and thought-provoking.

It is an oil painting by Monterey’s Lester Boronda, titled “Home Country.” Boronda’s painting has much to tell us, but it is the adobes that capture our attention. We think of them as “the old souls of Monterey.”

Their bricks were constructed of the most basic of earth’s raw materials: a mix of straw-packed mud, sand or crushed seashells, and pure elbow grease. Pressed into wooden molds, they dried under the hot southwestern sun.

Now, our small city tends not to experience much of the “hot south-western sun” part of this recipe, and Monterey’s Spanish founders might well have made use of the pine and other timber that grows here in abundance—they brought with them saws and adzes and hammers-and-nails and the skills to use them. So, why did they build with bricks made of mud? The answer is inescapable: coming mostly from arid environments they knew all about adobe construction and here they found plenty of raw building material lying, quite literally, at their feet. It was inevitable, really, that Monterey begin its life as an adobe village.

The mud was high in clay content: suck-your-shoes-off-sticky when wet, rock-hard when dry. The dried bricks were large and heavy, weighing 30 pounds, or perhaps double that and more, depending on the buildings’ architectural requirements: two-story adobes required much larger bricks below in order to support the bricks above.

Rudimentary, you think? Yes, we’ll accept that, but not primitive. Despite their unrefined material compositions, they present a notable degree of visual and practical sophistication:

Mottled textures layered upon their surfaces by time and weather add character to their exteriors. When atmospheric conditions cooperate the walls display hints of luminous color the moonlight picks out of the environment and spreads upon them.

Darkly shadowed portals create mystery.

Wooden doors and windows, weathered to mixed shades of gray, add contrast and interest—adornment enough, though several have been decoratively carved and fitted with artfully sculpted iron hardware.

Moonlight dancing on the variegated clay tiles animates rooftops. In daylight, the pairing of burnt-red and cream-white resonates aesthetically with other pleasing architectural features. The iron content in the fired clay turns the tiles varying shades of red, while trace elements add hints of grays and buffs and yellows and browns. Monterey’s moist climate contributes some mossy green.

Wide verandas and inviting balconies promise cordial welcomes.

Arched gates call us into adobe-walled Spanish courtyards displaying native botanicals and sculpted fountains.

Indoors, floors are covered with warm wood or reddish-brown terra cotta tile, and door jambs reveal the exceptional thickness of the walls.

An adobe dwelling feels snug. A low ceiling contributes to its cozy feel. It is dimly lit, in daylight hours because the windows are small, and at night because the chief sources of light are candles or oil-fed lamps. It is a pleasant place to snooze away a warm afternoon, or to find protection from the creeping fingers of a chilling Monterey fog. One finds solitude here, serenity, and the opportunity for soulful reflection.

More than twenty adobes dating back to California’s Spanish and Mexican eras survive in the city of Monterey. They are distant cousins of adobes built in other regions of our Southwest, though some of their architectural features differ markedly. We find second stories with cantilevered balconies, and long covered wrap-around porches below. We notice the windows are larger, and there are more of them, symmetrically positioned. And pitched roofs...

Yes, pitched roofs, covered with tiles fired to hardness in kilns designed in ancient times. These are crucial to the adobes’ survival. In arid regions adobe roofs are typically flat, but Monterey’s climate calls for pitched roofs to shed the driving rains. Without good cover the mud-brick structures would soon melt into surreal shapes, and then into mere mounds of their earthy components. The term "adobe melt" aptly describes this process.

These features call up visions of New England architecture, which makes sense when we recall Monterey was a vibrant seaport for much of the 1800s: a welcoming place for settlers who brought memories of homes constructed elsewhere. Today their architecture is commonly described as Monterey Colonial Style.

They have sheltered famous authors, early governors, young vaqueros, old soldiers, fine craftsmen, tamale makers, fisher folk and whalers, tavern keepers and rowdy sailors, outlaws, bawdy women, and rustic farmers. Their walls have heard things that will never find their way into our history books, though if we tilt our heads just so and purse our lips in concentration, we can hear them whisper their secrets. Or is it only the soughing of the wind?

Sadly, the landscape surrounding them has lost its bucolic appeal. The structures have been hemmed in by hardscaped modernity. Very little topographical context remains. It requires a strong imagination to visually place them in the hills and hollows of 1800s Monterey.

The adobes captivate us most completely when we view them through the eyes of California’s early plein air painters. These artists connected with them in the intimate ways fine art painters ought to relate to their subjects: respectfully, and soulfully.

Look for paintings by M. Evelyn McCormick, Charles Rollo Peters and Will Sparks. These early artists portrayed Monterey’s old adobes as they visualized them in their original architectural configurations, whether in their most well-maintained states or in their decrepitude. They presented them in perspectives that include the dirt pathways and wild grasses and other natural features of Monterey’s frontier era, and from these we get a feel for the ambience of historic Monterey, the one populated by adventurers and unencumbered by cars, crowds and concrete.

These painters went out in search of mood, and they captured serenity, and passed their feelings down the decades on their canvas, board and paper. Their paintings are sumptuous, and we cannot help but view them with our creative energies fully engaged—we enjoy them most when we take the time to share our thoughts and personalities with them:

Sherman Residence

M. Evelyn McCormick

Circa 1938

Here is the Sherman Residence, a favorite of ours, tucked into Monterey’s lush vegetation. Built in 1834, it is a one-story snuggery, quite small and quite charming. Today it looks just as it did when Sherman sailed into Monterey 180 years ago. It calls out to us, inspiring us to dig into its history, and to learn about its most illustrious occupant. So we do the digging, and we read Sherman’s memoirs, and he fascinates us with his many adventures throughout Monterey following his arrival here in 1847.

Old Whaling Station

(Detail)

M. Evelyn McCormick

1938

A short horseback canter north of Sherman’s place sits the two-story Old Whaling Station, built in 1847. As we walk by it in the dusky-dark hours our mind conjures up a comforting image: windows aglow in soft amber, and a Portuguese whaler sitting beside a kerosene lamp, reading Melville. “Call Me Ishmael,” his book begins. We do some more digging, and stumble upon Monterey’s beach-whaling history, and we write a short piece about a poor beach-stranded sperm whale.

McCormick's skill in capturing the mood of a balmy afternoon filtered through Monterey's renowned atmospheric light are on full display here.

Nocturne Adobe

(Detail)

Charles Rollo Peters

Date unknown

Peters’ nocturnal adobes are at their best when set against blue indigo skies and bathed in nearly indescribable blue-green reflected moonlight.

This painting has a barren, war-torn look about it. The juxtaposition of ashy desolation with the mesmerizing colors above is unsettling, yet we cannot look away. The dwelling captivates us. It is boldly rendered, intricately detailed, and—here’s that word again—sumptuous.

After the Storm

(We contrived this title)

Will Sparks

Date unknown

Sparks presented his adobes in bold, saturated colors. This house pulls us into the painting, inviting us to explore with our eyes and our hands its rich, crusty moonlit wall.

Much of Sparks’ work evokes the prospect of approaching storms or their aftermaths. In this painting, the lingering damp following a passing squall has scattered the long blue lightwaves out of the range detectable by human eyes. Shorter lightwaves have fought their way through the weather and presented us gifts of luminous red-oranges and rich oxblood reds.

Our imagination carries us along. Monterey’s adobes have this effect on us. Each one inspires a poem, a story, or at the very least, a warm thought.

Now, most people would reject the suggestion that an object, an old adobe in this case, can have a soul, and we are not here to argue the point…well, not forcefully, anyway. The soul is a notional human invention, resistant to definition, and that thought opens to each one of us the opportunity to define it in personal terms. Here are ours:

When inanimate things call to us, inspire us, we are influenced by the universal human tendency to personify them—that is, to infuse in them personalities of which we have intimate understanding, and those would necessarily be our own personalities. In other words, we can only know the souls we carry within ourselves, so we tend to endow things with the values which are important to us. Of course our treasured adobes have souls. They are the souls we give them.

We have developed an enduring fondness for these simple but graceful structures. They are invaluable from historical, artistic, and, to us, emotional points of view. We take pleasure in sharing our souls with them. They, in turn, represent the soul of Monterey: they are the most tangible expressions of the city’s consequential history and culture that we can imagine. They cast an aura of timelessness and romance upon our community, and we are privileged to be able to walk among them.

One may search long for an apt description of the form and function of an adobe dwelling in Alta California. This one has served well for over 140 years:

“The house was of adobe, low, with a wide veranda on the three sides of the inner court, and a still broader one across the entire front, which looked to the south. These verandas, especially those on the inner court, were supplementary rooms to the house. The greater part of the family life went on in them. Nobody stayed inside the walls, except when it was necessary. All the kitchen work, except the actual cooking, was done here, in front of the kitchen doors and windows. Babies slept, were washed, sat in the dirt, and played, on the veranda. The women said their prayers, took their naps, and wove their lace there. Old Juanita shelled her beans there, and threw the pods down on the tile floor, till towards night they were sometimes piled up high around her, like corn-husks at a husking. The herdsmen and shepherds smoked there, lounged there, trained their dogs there; there the young made love, and the old dozed; the benches, which ran the entire length of the walls, were worn into hollows, and shone like satin; the tiled floors also were broken and sunk in places, making little wells, which filled up in times of hard rains, and were then an invaluable addition to the children's resources for amusement, and also to the comfort of the dogs, cats, and fowls, who picked about among them, taking sips from each.

“The arched veranda along the front was a delightsome place. It must have been eighty feet long, at least, for the doors of five large rooms opened on it. The two westernmost rooms had been added on, and made four steps higher than the others; which gave to that end of the veranda the look of a balcony, or loggia. Here the Señora kept her flowers; great red water-jars, hand-made by the Indians of San Luis Obispo Mission, stood in close rows against the walls, and in them were always growing fine geraniums, carnations, and yellow-flowered musk…

“Besides the geraniums and carnations and musk in the red jars, there were many sorts of climbing vines,—some coming from the ground, and twining around the pillars of the veranda; some growing in great bowls, swung by cords from the roof of the veranda, or set on shelves against the walls. These bowls were of gray stone, hollowed and polished, shining smooth inside and out. They also had been made by the Indians, nobody knew how many ages ago, scooped and polished by the patient creatures, with only stones for tools”.

Helen Hunt Jackson in “Ramona” (1884)