HomeMy WebLinkAbout3/4/2025 Item 6a, Papp
James Papp <
To:E-mail Council Website
Subject:Item 6.a. Appeal of Planning Commission decision re 466 Dana
Attachments:Simmler Adobe and Simmler Garden HRE Papp.pdf
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Council Members:
I write attaching the original report commissioned by the Peace Project and Smart Share Housing
Solutions, which I wish to enter into the City Council's record, as it was subsequently suppressed
because it did not reach the conclusions Smart Share wanted. This speaks to the dangers the Cultural
Heritage Committee addressed during the five years I served on it, of developers simply shopping reports
to firms that will give them the results they want.
The long and short of my 88-page report is that
(1) the 1870s Simmler Garden deeded to the city by Mary Gail Black is one of only three designed
landscapes from before the twentieth century surviving in San Luis Obispo (the others being the 1880s
Jack Garden and 1870s San Luis Cemetery); as such, it is incredibly rare and qualifies as a California
State Landmark, the highest state designation; the historical significance of the garden was recognized
both by Mary Gail Black and the City when the City accepted the gift under her terms; and cutting down
trees and erecting prefabs throughout the garden will violate Secretary of the Interior Standards both by
destroying 6 of the 7 Aspects of Historic Integrity—design, setting, workmanship, materials, feeling and
association—and, worse, by making irreversible changes to this incredibly rare historic landscape.
(2) The Simmler Adobe and Garden, including the adobe's later additions, are historically significant for
their association with early and leading lesbian journalist, political operative, and community organizer
Mary Gail Black and with Second Wave Feminism as the headquarters of the effort to establish the
County Commission on the Status of Women. There are few LGBTQ landmarks in the state or nation and
there is no other physical landmark in San Luis Obispo associated with LGBTQ history (currently under
attack at the national level) or feminist history (currently under attack at the national level). This one
happens to already have been designated a Master List site. Ignoring that association and the Master
Listing to build a high-density development on the site is expedient but short-sighted. Historical listing is
for the purpose of reminding people of the historical sacrifices made for our progress. Already we have
seen Stonewall revised by the Trump administration. Why should San Luis join in obliterating LGBTQ and
feminist history because it is convenient? At least the Trump administration has an ethos, however
loathsome. The City's approach seems essentially nihilistic.
(3) The building of a development of prefabricated houses could take place on any city property; it is not
a zero-sum game. There are graded sites that are not in a flood plain, will not require expensive
foundations, and will not irreversibly impact open space and a rare historic landscape. Why on earth are
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those not first in line for this development, by a group that has no record of successful development and
will do irreparable harm if they fail? Indeed a well-organized and responsible for-profit developer (and
they do exist in this town) would have rejected the site long ago as too expensive, problematic, and prone
to failure and switched to a better site. Alternatively, a single apartment building, rather than a series of
prefabs squeezed into the historic landscape, would have far less impact on the greenspace and historic
integrity of the site.
When I wrote the attached report, I assumed the clients, like the responsible for-profit developers I have
worked with, would be interested in its results, rather than simply seeing it as a means to an end or
standing in the way of that end. The Peace Project was interested; Smart Share was not. When the City in
the past has ignored rules and reason, and bent over backwards to favor unreliable developers, the
result has been large holes, empty lots, and abandoned buildings.
Sincerely,
James Papp
--
James Papp, PhD | Historian & Architectural Historian
Call/text 805-470-0983
Sauer Adams Adobe
964 Chorro Street, San Luis Obispo, CA 93401
2
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Rosa Butrón de Canet de Simmler Adobe and Garden
Historic Resource Evaluation | Historic Preservation Report
Contents
I. Summary Conclusion 2
A. Development proposal
B. Significance
C. Impact
II. Chronology 3
A. Simmler Historic Association 3
B. Waterman-Black Historic Association 8
III. History and Documentation of the Simmler Adobe and Garden 17
IV. Historiography and Naming of the Simmler Adobe and Garden 23
V. Significance 26
Summary 26
A. Joint significance of the Simmler Adobe and Garden 26
1. Criterion A: It is associated with an event that has made a significant 26
contribution to the broad patterns of our history: the campaign for the
San Luis Obispo County Commission on the Status of Women in 1975
2. Criterion B: It is associated with the life of a person significant in our past: 30
John Jacob Simmler
3. Criterion B: It is associated with the life of a person significant in our past: 36
Mary Gail Black
B. Significance of the Simmler Adobe 48
1. Criterion C: It embodies distinctive characteristics of a type of 48
construction: Greek Revival
2. Criterion C: It embodies distinctive characteristics of a method of 52
construction: adobe
3. Criterion C: It embodies distinctive characteristics of a method of 55
construction: Western single-wall load-bearing or box frame
C. Significance of the Simmler Garden: Criterion C: It embodies distinctive 58
characteristics of a period of construction: the American Tree-Planting
Movement
VI. Periods of Significance 66
VII. Degree of Significance 67
VIII. Documentation of Significance 68
IX. Character-Defining Features of Garden and Adobe 69
X. Integrity of Garden and Adobe 76
XI. Impacts and Mitigations 81
A. Restoration of the front portion of the Simmler Adobe 81
B. Addition of the Peace Project Studio with connector 81
C. Demolition of the rear portion of the Simmler Adobe 82
D. Demolition of Simmler Garden hardscape and softscape 83
E. Siting of sixteen/twenty manufactured homes plus walkways, a parking lot, 84
and ancillary structures in the Simmler Garden
XII. Alternatives 88
2
I. Summary Conclusion
A. Development proposal The project proposed for the Master List Rosa Butrón de
Canet de Simmler Adobe and Garden comprises (1) restoration of the historic front portion of
the adobe, (2) connection of the straw bale Peace Project Studio to the adobe’s west façade,
(3) demolition of the historic rear portion of the adobe, (4) demolition of selected hardscape
and softscape of the garden, and (5) construction through most of the garden of a complex of
16 or 20 manufactured housing units with ancillary structures and a parking lot
B. Significance Key to predicting impact is understanding the resource’s significance.
The Simmler Garden qualifies for its current Master List status and as a potential California
Historical Landmark as a regionally unique Tree-Planting Movement landscape originating in the
1870s. The Simmler Adobe qualifies for its current Master List status and as a potential
California Historical Landmark as a regionally unique early American Era adobe in its original
designed garden setting. Both garden and adobe qualify for their current Master List and
potential National Register status for association with local nineteenth-century legal history
through Jacob Simmler, local twentieth-century LGBTQ history through Mary Gail Black, and
women’s history as the site of the campaign for the County Commission on the Status of
Women. Any excavation is considered likely to reveal Chumash and Mission Era artifacts.
Both garden and house have been documentably considered historic since 1930. The property
was Master Listed in 1983; the city negotiated in 1986–1988 for the property’s donation for
public recreation as a historic house and historic garden; and the 1998 Gil Sanchez report
recognized historic status for both garden and house.
C. Impact The restoration of the front of the adobe has too few specifics to assess.
The Peace Project Studio—an architect-designed structure on a location chosen with careful
planning for minimum impact—is nonetheless a challenge for placement next to an adobe and in
a garden with statewide historic significance. It meets Secretary of the Interior (SOI) Standards
for Rehabilitation, however, and its impact can be mitigated to less than significant.
In contrast, construction of a dense complex of manufactured housing through most of the
Simmler Garden would violate SOI Standards and render the garden unable to communicate its
significance as a historic landscape, ineligible for its current Master Listing, unqualified for
potential California Historical Landmark designation, and unusable for public recreation.
Demolition of the rear of the Simmler Adobe would violate SOI Standards and remove the
adobe’s current Master List and potential National Register significance for association with
Mary Gail Black and the campaign for the County Commission on the Status of Women.
Abutting the Simmler Adobe with structures would render it unqualified for California
Historical Landmark designation for its surviving original designed setting. The property would
present as a manufactured housing complex with vestigial historic house and old trees, and the
adobe would become ineligible for most aspects of its current Master Listing.
No practical mitigation for the housing complex would prevent significant impact. Alternatives
include siting the housing complex on city land that is not a historic landscape, does not include
a historic building, was not donated and accepted for recreation, and is not in a flood zone.
James Papp, PhD | architectural historian, City and County of San Luis Obispo
Peace Project | Smart Share Housing Solutions | 9 Sep. 2022
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II. Chronology
A. Simmler Association
1809/1810 Rosa María Butron is born at Monterey.1
1826 July 18 John Jacob Simmler is born in Mulhouse, France, in a formerly Swiss part of
Alsace.2
1828 May 14 Rosa Butron marries Vicente Canet, a Spanish seaman in his late thirties who
stayed in Monterey after participating in a mutiny on the Spanish warship Asia in
1825 (ibid. and 1–6).
1840 Feb. 11 Vicente Canet is granted the 4,379-acre Rancho San Bernardo at the northwest
end of the Chorro Valley by Governor Juan Alvarado (8).
1841–1844 Simmler apprentices as a house painter in Mulhouse (Angel, op. cit., 314).
1844–1846 Spends post-apprenticeship Wanderjahre in France, Germany, Switzerland (ibid.).
1847 Feb. Emigrates to Texas, landing in May and settling in San Antonio (ibid.).
1852 May Travels across Mexico to Mazatlan to take ship for San Francisco and the
California Gold Rush (ibid.).
Sep. 7 Passengers force the captain to land at Port San Luis after a disabled or becalmed
voyage in which seven have starved.3
1853 Oct. With Jacob Scheiffarley, Simmler raises a posse to pursue a band of accused
robbers, horse thieves, and murderers (Angel, op. cit., 305–306). One of the
band is killed on the way, three are found guilty by vigilante trial in Los Angeles,
sent by mail steamer to Port San Luis, and hanged on the beach. A fourth is
hanged by a mob in the Mission San Luis Obispo after escaping from the town jail
in that building, reported on the front page of the nascent New York Times).4
1855 Simmler attempts hog raising John Price’s land but is ruined (Angel, op. cit., 314).
1856–1859 Manages the St. Charles, San Luis Obispo’s only hotel, with Peter Hemmi (ibid.).
Henry Miller, in his 1856 journal of his tour of the California missions, mentions
1. Rita White and Virginia Lee White, “Rosa María Buitrón and Vicente Cané,” Antepasados, vol. 4 (1980–1981), p.
7, give the date of 30 Aug. 1812, based on Marie E. Northrop, Spanish-Mexican Families of Early California, 1769–
1850 (New Orleans: Polyanthus, 1976), pp. 84–86. Rosa Simmler’s tombstone, however, lists her age as 81 on 13
Dec. 1890, and the US Census lists her age as 40 in September 1850.
2. Myron Angel, History of San Luis Obispo County (Berkeley: Howell-North Books, 1966), p. 314.
3. Ibid. and “His Home Fifty Years,” San Luis Obispo Tribune, 9 Sep. 1902, p. 4.
4. “From the South,” “From San Luis Obispo,” Daily Alta California, 11 Oct. 1853, p. 3; “A Catalogue of Crime,” San
Joaquin Republican, 13 Oct. 1853, p. 2; New York Herald, 10 Nov. 1953, p. 2; “Exciting Scene in San Luis Obispo—
Another Outlaw Hung,” New York Times, 29 Nov. 1853.
4
“the only hotel in the place, which is kept by two Alsacians near the ancient
Mission Church.”5
1857 Simmler runs for San Luis Obispo County treasurer, his first known political
race, when he receives 4 votes to W. J. Graves’ 173 (Angel, op. cit., 142).
1858 Apr. 11 Vicente Canet dies, leaving his wife one half of the Rancho San Bernardo’s land,
house, and cattle (White, op. cit., 11–12).
1858 May Simmler is 1 of 15 signing the Vigilance Pledge “to discover the truth and punish
the guilty” in the murders of the Frenchmen Bartolo Baratie and José Borel and
1 of 146 enrolled as members in the San Luis Obispo Vigilance Committee.
Simmler & Co. is 1 of 35 entities making a Vigilance Subscription (Angel, op. cit.,
302–303). Walter Murray chronicles the activities of the committee in a series of
letters to the San Francisco Evening Bulletin published June 14–30.
1859 Mar. 28 Simmler marries Rosa Butrón de Canet at Rancho San Bernardo. They appear to
live on the Rancho San Bernardo through the Civil War, according to a 1934
interview with Virginia McMann, Rosa’s niece, who was adopted after being
orphaned and lived at the rancho and later at the Simmler Adobe.6
1860 Simmler takes over from his wife as administrator of Vicente Canet’s estate.
Canet’s children sell their portions of the Rancho San Bernardo back to their
mother. J. J. Simmler sells portions of the rancho to David Mallagh (1860),
Domingo Pujol (1862), and Esteban Quintana.
Nov 7 Simmler comes in last of 4 in the race for county justice of the peace at San Luis
Obispo with 37 votes (Angel, op. cit., 146).
Dec 14 Blas Castro purchases from Board of Trustees of the Town of San Luis Obispo
the lot “Commencing on the line of Monterey Street, at the South Corner of the
Lot of Nicolas Ames: then running a distance of Fifty yards towards the fork of
the Creek thence at right angles with Monterey St to the middle of the Arroyo
de la Huerta Vieja thence up said Arroyo to the West Corner of the lot of the
said Nicolas Ames, thence following the Southern boundary line of the lot of said
Nicolas Ames in a straight line to the place of beginning.”7
5. Henry Miller, California Missions: The Earliest Series of Views Made in 1856 (Santa Barbara: Bellerophon, 2000), p.
29.
6. Rebecca Deleissegues, “Virginia McMann, San Luis Obispo, Calif.,” 6 May 1934 (History Center Rosa Butrón
Adobe vertical file)
7. County deeds, Book A, p. 371
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1861 Sep. 4 Simmler polls last of 4 for county assessor with 21 votes (Angel, op. cit., 148).
1865 June 29 J. J. Simmler purchases from Blas Castro the lot commencing on the line of
Monterey Street to the south corner of the lot of Mrs. A. Limas formerly owned
by Charles H. Johnson and N. Ames, etc., as above (op. cit, p. 743).
Sep. 6 Simmler polls second of 4 for county superintendent of schools with 104 votes
(151).
1867 Sep. 4 Wins in a 4-way race for county justice of the peace at San Luis Obispo
Township with 120 votes, 28 percent of votes cast.
1869 Simmler sells Rancho San Bernardo section with main house to H. Y. Stanley.
Oct. 20 Re-elected county justice of the peace as a Republican nominee, having become a
Republican when Lincoln was shot. First of 4 for expanded 2 seats, with 172
votes, or 28 percent.
1870 The Harris and Ward Map of San Luis Obispo (detail below) shows J. Simmler’s
land on the north and south sides of the west end of Dana Street, at the
confluence of the Arroyo de la Huerta and the Arroyo de San Luis Obispo.
1870 Leon Trousset signs and dates to this year a portrait of George Washington as a
Mason, long in possession of San Luis Obispo’s King David’s Lodge, plausibly
painted for the lodge’s founding in June of that year.
This is the probable date of Leon Trousset’s panoramic oil of San Luis Obispo in
the Mission Museum, confirmed by the presence in the left foreground of the
town school, commenced December 1869, and the absence, in the right-central
middle ground, of construction on the County Courthouse, excavated by August
1872. Green grass suggests spring. A letter waiting for Trousset in San Francisco
in October indicates he was expected to return to the Bay Area by then.
6
The Simmler Adobe’s current street façade of portico and wings appears at the
far left middle ground of the painting (detail above, with barn; Limas House and
Dana Street at right), the first documentation of the adobe’s existence and form.
May 1 Simmler is elected to a two-year term on the Town of San Luis Obispo Board of
Trustees, the second of 9 candidates for 5 seats, with 102 votes.8
1871 Appointed postmaster of San Luis Obispo, Walter Murray having served 1870–
1871 in succession to his brother Alexander Murray, who died in the role the
previous year. Simmler will serve for almost 19 years, till March 1890.9
Oct. 18 Re-elected justice of the peace as first in a field of 4 for 2 seats, with 238 votes,
or 33 percent (Angel, op. cit., 155).
1873 Oct. 15 Re-elected county justice of the peace for San Luis for the last time (157).
1874 June 27 Elected to a 3-year term to the 3-person Mission School District Board of
Trustees in the same election that defeats a $10,000 bond for a new school.
1876 Apr. Elected police judge of the new City of San Luis Obispo.10
June The Mission District trustees award an $8,750 contract for construction of the
new Court School (below, circa 1907), to be completed in early 1877.11
8. “Town Election,” weekly San Luis Obispo Tribune, 7 May 1870, p. 2.
9. “A Petition,” weekly San Luis Obispo Tribune, 17 Sep. 1881, p. 5; “J. J. Simmler,” advertisement, weekly San Luis
Obispo Tribune, 20 July 1872, p. 2; “The postoffice,” daily San Luis Obispo Tribune, 5 June 1889, p. 3.
10. “The Election,” weekly San Luis Obispo Tribune, 8 Apr. 1876, p. 4.
11. “Contract Let,” weekly San Luis Obispo Tribune, 1 July 1876, p. 5.
7
1877 Simmler is listed as city recorder January through March, presumably having been
chosen in the election for town recorder in 1875.12
1880 Aug. 8 Elected president of new county Swiss Society.13
1887 Succeeds in getting a post office established in the Carrisa Plains, which—with
the surrounding community—is named Simmler in his honor.14
1890 Mar. 14 Last reference to Simmler as postmaster; replaced by W. S. Canon by April 4.15
Dec. 13 Rosa Simmler dies at age 81.
1891 Sanborn Map shows front section of Simmler Adobe.
Apr. 2 Jake Simmler, now 64, marries the Swiss-born 25-year-old Mary K. La Franchi.16
1892 Simmler is selected as Republican candidate for City Board of Trustees but does
not run, instead moving to Cayucos as cashier of the new bank there.
1895–1897 Justice of the peace in Cayucos.
1898 Leaves Bank of Cayucos. Runs unsuccessfully as independent for justice of the
peace in San Luis.
1905 Sanborn Map shows full Simmler property for the first time, including the adobe
core of the house, box frame wings and rear, and outbuildings (108 below).
1906 Feb. 12 John Jacob Simmler dies.
1926 8 July Mary La Franchi Simmler Yeager and Burton Yeager sell the Simmler Adobe and
Garden to J. W. and Lottie McMillan (San Luis Obispo County Land Records).
12. Weekly San Luis Obispo Tribune: “Notice,” 3 Apr. 1875, p. 4; “City Directory,” 27 Jan.–24 Mar. 1877, p. 1.
13. “Swiss Celebration,” weekly San Luis Obispo Tribune, 14 Aug. 1880, p. 1.
14. Elliot Curry, San Luis Obispo County Telegram-Tribune: “Simmler: The Phantom Town of Carrisa Plains,” 10 July
1967, p. 12; “Texan Seeks Clues to ‘Jake’ Simmler,” 2 Mar. 1973, p. 16.
15. “List of Letters,” daily San Luis Obispo Tribune, 14 Mar. 1890, p. 3.
16. “Judge Simmler,” daily San Luis Obispo Tribune, 3 Apr. 1891, p. 3.
8
B. Waterman-Black Historic Association
1881 Nov. 7 Mildred Waterman is born in San Luis Obispo to dairyman W. F. and wife Emma
Waterman.17
1898 June 13 Mary Gail Black is born in Big Piney, Uinta County, western Wyoming, the
daughter of rancher Joseph A. Black, originally from Indiana, and Mary C. Black,
originally from Illinois. Mary Gail has two sisters and two brothers 5–11 years
older than she is (US Census 1900).
1900 Mary Gail Black’s father Joe is elected to the first of two terms as Wyoming
State Representative from Big Piney on the Republican ticket.18
Nov. 6 Joe Black is elected to a four-year term as Uinta County commissioner on the
Republican ticket.19 He later twice runs unsuccessfully as state representative, in
1910 and 1912.
1913 Jan. The Blacks winter in Salt Lake City for Joe Black’s health.20
1914 Mar. 30 Joe Black is appointed chair of the Lincoln County Republican Party Central
Committee (Uinta County had been split into 5 counties in 1911).21 Probably
soon after, Joe and Mary C. Black and Mary Gail move to South Pasadena, as Joe
Black, regularly appearing in Wyoming newspapers up to this point, is not
mentioned again till the Big Piney Examiner reports “Mr. and Mrs. Black and
youngest daughter now reside at Pasadena, Cal” in December 1917
(“Reminiscences of Pioneer Settlers and Customs”). Three of the Black children
stay in Wyoming and one daughter, Ida Rogers, has moved to Oceano.
Circa 1915 Mary Gail Black graduates from high school in South Pasadena and goes to work
as a reporter for the South Pasadena Record.22
1920 Jan. 5 The US Census shows Mary Gail Black, newspaper reporter, 21, living with her
father, 56, and mother, 54, in a bungalow in South Pasadena.
1921 Sep. After leaving the Pasadena Evening Post as the only woman reporter on its staff
and taking her mother to live with her sister at Oceano, Mary Gail Black
interviews with publisher C. L. Day for work at the San Luis Obispo Daily
Telegram (ibid.). Day does not hire her (Black, Profile of the Daily Telegram, 2).
Black’s father Joe appears to have died in this year.
Dec. 29 Black begins work for the Telegram after business manager Mildred Waterman
encourages Day to consider “that brash young woman at Oceano” (3).
17. California Death Index, 1940–1997; “Superior Court,” weekly San Luis Obispo Tribune, 4 June 1881, p. 8; “Family
Dairy,” advertisement, weekly San Luis Obispo Tribune, 8 July 1882, p. 1.
18.
19. “Tuesday’s Election,” Wyoming Press, 10 Nov. 1906, p. 4; “Reminiscences of Pioneer Settlers and Customs,” Big
Piney Examiner, 6 Dec. 1917, p. 7.
20. “Locals and Personal News,” Big Piney Examiner, 16 Jan. 1913, p. 1.
21. “J. W. Sammon Now State Committeeman,” Kemmerer Examiner, 3 Apr. 1914, p. 1.
22. Mary Gail Black, Profile of the “Daily Telegram”: A Story of San Luis Obispo, 1922–1923 (Morro Bay: Tabula Rasa
Press, 1988), p. 2.
9
1922 Mar. 2 Black receives her first Telegram byline, on the front page above the fold, for
“New School Building a Civic Asset,” a piece on the opening of the Fremont
School.
1923 June 7 & Publishes byline series on the filming of Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten
11, July 9 Commandments at the Oceano Dunes, still used by historians.
1923 Dec. 6 C. L. Day announces the sale of the Telegram to the San Luis Obispo Morning
Herald (Black, Profile of the Daily Telegram, 109).
1924 June Black leaves the Telegram staff and attends summer school at UC Berkeley (111).
Fall Joins Waterman and other Telegram alumni at Day’s newly purchased Porterville
Daily Recorder (ibid.).
1926 Mary C. Black dies. Mary Gail Black and Mildred Waterman return briefly from
Porterville and are referred to by the Telegram as “very close personal friends.”
Black begins full-time study at UC Berkeley (ibid.).
8 July J. W. and Lottie McMillan purchase the Simmler Adobe and Garden from Mary
La Franchi Simmler Yeager and Burton Yeager. Shortly after, the McMillans buy
property in Santa Maria and settle there instead.23
1927 Jan. 21 J. W. and Lottie McMillan sell the Simmler Adobe and Garden to Mildred
Waterman and her father W. F. Waterman (San Luis Obispo County Land
Records). Mildred, W. F., and Emma Waterman move into the Simmler Adobe.
1928 Dec. Mary Gail Black is recorded as a houseguest at 466 Dana over the Christmas
break and appears also to have been staying and entertaining with Mildred
Waterman the previous summer.24
1930 Edith Gragg photographs the “Simmler Adobe and Grape Arbor,” presumably
during the summer when the vines are in full leaf but have not produced fruit
and the roses are also in full flower.
Apr. 11 The US Census shows Mildred Waterman and her parents as the sole residents
at 466 Dana, with Mildred working as a service station bookkeeper.
Sep. Black, one of 58 UC Berkeley juniors and seniors elected to Phi Beta Kappa, is
awarded a scholarship for her senior year.25
23. County land deed; “Berros Briefs,” Arroyo Grande Herald Recorder, 11 Nov. 1926, p. 1.
24. San Luis Obispo Daily Telegram: “Miss Black Is Guest,” 24 Dec. 1928, p. 5; “Breakfast Guests,”16 July 1928, p. 3.
25. “31 U of C Co-Eds, 27 Men Elected to Phi Beta Kappa,” Oakland Tribune, 11 Sep. 1930, p. 23; “Robert Steiner
Is Scholarship Winner,” San Luis Obispo Daily Telegram, 16 May 1930, p. 7.
10
1931 May Graduates from UC Berkeley with highest honors in English.26
July Fills in as social editor of the Telegram-Tribune while the regular editor, Grace
Brown, takes a month-long trip to the East Coast.27
July 29 Publishes byline interview with Irish poet and folklorist Ella Young of Halcyon,
breaking the story of her application for US citizenship after newspapers across
the US picked up her being blocked from re-entry from Canada.28
Black with city editor Tracy Byers, early 1920s (Profile of the Daily Telegram)
1931–1932 Mildred Waterman is on the staff of the Santa Paula Chronicle.29
1931–1933 Black earns a master’s degree at Smith College, Massachusetts. On completion
she is offered a job with Time magazine but turns it down to return to Mildred
Waterman, who has lost her Chronicle job.30
26. “More Men Win Honors Than Fair Co-Eds,” Oakland Tribune, 13 May 1931, p. 20
27. “Brown to Black,” San Luis Obispo Daily Telegram, 30 June 1931, p. 5.
28. “Famous Irish Poetess Asks Citizenship,” San Luis Obispo Daily Telegram, 29 July 1931, p. 1.
29. “Miss Waterman to Visit Parents Here,” San Luis Obispo Daily Telegram, 3 July 1931, p. 3.
30. Kathy Johnston, “The Butrón Adobe—Giving Us a Sense of Our Roots,” SLO Magazine, May 1999, p. 17;
Conversation with Carol McPhee (26 Apr. 2022)
11
1933 Jul–Aug. Black spends the summer after having completed Smith College, apparently
staying with the Watermans.31
Dec. Mildred Waterman and Mary Gail Black visit Berkeley together from San Luis.32
1935 June Waterman is working as the clerk in the County Health Office at a monthly
salary of $40, by far the lowest posted by the county—20 percent less than the
Sunny Acres housekeeper and the Avila wharfinger.33 Her 1969 obituary,
presumably written by Black, suggests she was working there from 1933. She will
remain with the office till her retirement in 1958, by 1940 working as deputy
registrar of deaths and births. Mary Gail Black will join her in the office after
World War II.
Dec. W. F. Waterman, Mildred’s father, dies after an extended illness.34
1936 Edith Gragg photographs the rear of the Simmler Adobe.
Oct. Black is teaching in the Emergency Educational Program in Berkeley.
1938 Feb. 28 Emma Waterman, Mildred’s mother, dies after an extended illness.35
Dec. 29 Black, of Sacramento, is mentioned as the houseguest of Mildred Waterman.36
She is working for the state’s textbook office.
1940 The US Census shows Mildred Waterman, deputy registrar of the Health Office,
and Toshi Eto living at 466A Dana Street, Ruth Kelsey, social worker, living at
466B, and Williams Preet, house gardener, exchanging work as a gardener for
lodging at 466 Rear, with wife, daughter, and brother-in-law.
Lodgers will appear in the city directories at 466 Dana in the 1940s–1950s but
not in the 1960s–1980s.
Mar. 9 Waterman hosts a St. Stephen’s Altar Guild tea at “the historic old Simmler
Adobe,” the entrance flanked by “huge bouquets” of California poppies and
California lilac, the interior a “vivid mass of color” from wildflowers collected
from the Nipomo Mesa.
1943 Black is mentioned in sister Ida Rogers’ death notice as living in Sacramento.37
1945–1989 Black lives at the Simmler Adobe with Mildred Waterman.
31. “Around the Town,” San Luis Obispo Daily Telegram, 6 July 1933, p. 8.
32. “Personals,” San Luis Obispo Daily Telegram, 13 Dec. 1933, p. 8.
33. “Present Salaries in County Offices,” San Luis Obispo Daily Telegram, 22 June 1935, p. 6.
34. San Luis Obispo Daily Telegram: “About Town,” 6 June 1933, p. 3; “Masons Attention,” 9 Dec. 1935, p. 4.
35. “Services Held Wednesday for Mrs. Waterman,” San Luis Obispo Daily Telegram, 2 Mar. 1938, p. 1.
36. “News Briefs,” San Luis Obispo Daily Telegram, 29 Dec. 1938, p. 2.
37. “Mrs. Ida Rogers Called by Death,” San Luis Obispo Telegram-Tribune, 18 Nov. 1943, p. 3.
12
1946 Black participates with Waterman in a tea honoring public health volunteers, the
first documentation of her return to San Luis Obispo.38
1952 Works in San Luis Obispo county component of Adlai Stevenson’s presidential
campaign.
1953 Feb. Waterman and Black purchase the Castro Adobe at 669 Chorro Street.39
1954 Boy Scouts interview the owners of city adobes in a Historical Society
competition. Some confusion results. Gregory Morris, who photographs the
bare grape arbor leading up the front path and writes that the adobe “has a
beautiful grape arbor around it,” calls it the Dana Adobe and writes it was built
by John Dana in 1830, adding, “It is believed that at one time the Mission
grounds extended down to his property,” a belief Black will persist in till her
death. Morris continues, “It was bought by a Judge Simmler … and some people
refer to it as the Simmler Adobe.”40 James P. Jones, age 11, retails the story that
it was part of “the Canet estate” and Judge Simmler “married a Canet.”41 Both
Morris and Jones recount an association with the Castro Adobe on Chorro
Street, presumably given by Waterman, of “Three-Finger Jack” or “Three-
Fingered Jack Powers” and “his lady love,” which the Telegram-Tribune reportage
then attributes to the Waterman Adobe on Dana Street.42 (“Three-Fingered
Jack”—a name invented for the body of an associate of someone claimed to be,
by his killers, the bandit referred to as Joaquin Murieta, both shot by a posse
near present-day Coalinga in 1853—was distinct from Jack Power or Powers,
accused by San Luis Obispo’s Vigilance Committee of banditry in 1858.)
1957 Black becomes International Affairs officer of the local American Association of
University Women.43
1958 Becomes county publicity chair for the American Cancer Society.44
May 3 The Simmler Adobe (referred to as the Waterman Adobe and Canet Adobe) is
included with two others (Andrews and Hays-Latimer) in the Historical Society’s
Adobe Tour and Tea. Press features photos and descriptions of the interior and
garden, and an article by Historical Society director Louisiana Clayton Dart,
largely devoted to documentation on ownership, repeats the claim that the land
“was a part of the old Mission gardens.”45
38. “Public Health Nurses Give Tea Honoring Volunteers,” San Luis Obispo Telegram-Tribune, 10 Apr. 1946, p. 2.
39. “Deeds Recorded in the Courthouse,” 11 Feb. 1953, p. 16.
40. “Adobe Buildings of San Luis Obispo” (History Center San Luis Obispo Adobes vertical file).
41. “Report on the Old Adobe of San Luis Obispo, California” (History Center San Luis Obispo Adobes vertical
file).
42. “Scouts Learn SLO History in Reporting on Old Adobes,” San Luis Obispo County Telegram-Tribune, 5 June 1954,
p. 3. Three-Fingered Jack and Jack Power or Powers were two different persons, the former invented to explain a
body with three fingers shot in the pursuit of Joaquin Murieta in 1853, the latter a noted horseman and
troublemaker wanted by the 1858 San Luis Obispo Vigilance Committee and later murdered in New Mexico.
43. “AAUW Installs Officers at Honor Dinner,” 15 May 1957, p. 7.
44. “Cancer Drive Over Quota; Officers Elected at Dinner,” 18 Sep. 1958, p. 3
45. “Waterman Adobe to Be Scene on Historical Tour,” San Luis Obispo County Telegram-Tribune, 18 Apr. 1958, p.
5.
13
1959 Black is elected recording secretary of the San Luis Obispo Democratic Club.46
Black and Waterman serve as hosts at the Dallidet Adobe.
1959–1965 Black heads 20 county volunteers monitoring 414 subjects for the American
Cancer Society’s Cancer Prevention Study I (CPS I) on living habits and
environment.47 The national study involves nearly a million male and female
subjects, plus 68,000 volunteers in 25 states, becoming a major factor in the War
on Cancer.
1960 Dec. 10 The Historical Society schedules candlelight tours of the Simmler Adobe, once
again asserting its provenance as “once part of the old Mission gardens,” with a
photograph framed, unseasonably, in blossoms.48
1962 Black chairs county campaign for Bill Stewart, Democratic nominee for the 12th
Congressional District (below left, with Black, center, and then–state attorney
general, later California Supreme Court justice Stanley Mosk, Telegram-Tribune 8
Oct. 1962).
46. “Democrats Urge ‘Education’ on Voting Machines, San Luis Obispo County Telegram-Tribune, 23 Nov. 1959, p. 1.
47. “Cancer Society to Conduct Study of Local Families,” Arroyo Grande Valley Herald Recorder, 20 Nov. 1959, p. 5;
“County Residents Benefit from Work of Cancer Society,” Grover City Press, 24 Dec. 1964, sec. 1, p. 3.
48. “Waterman Adobe Slates Mexican Christmas for Tour,” San Luis Obispo County Telegram-Tribune, 25 Nov. 1960,
p. 4.
14
1964 Black co-chairs county campaign for Sandy Bolz, Democratic nominee for 12th
Congressional District.
Black—the only woman of eight candidates for seven seats on the County
Democratic Central Committee from her supervisorial district—loses.
1965 Becomes education chair for the American Cancer Society, serving for the
remainder of the decade and doing extensive outreach in the press and
elsewhere.49
1966 Receives the Outstanding Service Award from the American Cancer Society’s
San Luis Obispo County branch.50
1966–1984 Appointed to County Democratic Central Committee, re-elected till her
retirement in 1984.51
1968 Treasurer of county’s McCarthy for President campaign, which later reorganizes
as the Cranston for Senator Club, with Black as secretary.52
1969 May 18 Mildred Waterman dies at 87 after a car accident. Black inherits the Simmler
Adobe. To pay taxes (as she cannot be legally a spouse), she is forced to sell
their jointly owned Castro Adobe, which is soon demolished.
1971 Black leads effort to find 200 of the original subjects to resume CPS I.53
A wedding announcement records that “the afternoon ceremony was held in the
gardens at the San Luis Obispo residence of Mary Gail Black.”54
1972 Chair of county campaign for Suzanne Paizis, one of the first two women to be
nominated by their party for California State Senate. Both were Democrats
battling incumbent Republicans, and both lost. A woman would not join the State
Senate till Democrat Rose Ann Vuich in 1976.55
1973–1976 Black and Carol McPhee co-publish the Central Democrat, a newsletter
attempting to bring Second-Wave Feminism to a broader audience, produced
from the Simmler Adobe.56
1974 Black introduces the idea of a San Luis Obispo County Commission on the
Status of Women, modeled on the 1961–1963 President’s Commission on the
Status of Women, chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, on subsequent state
commissions, and on the Santa Cruz County commission being chaired by Paizis
49. “‘Never Too Late’ to Stop Smoking Says Cancer Unit,” Grover City Press, 15 Dec. 1965, p. 5.
50. “Kickoff Dinner Opens Annual Cancer Crusade,” Pismo Times, 21 Apr. 1966, p. 3.
51. “Appointments Fill Democratic Committee,” Arroyo Grande Volley Herald-Recorder, 4 Aug. 1966, p. 13.
52. “McCarthy Committee Chairmen,” San Luis Obispo County Telegram-Tribune, 8 Apr. 1968; “Cranston Backers
Organize,” Arroyo Grande Volley Herald-Recorder, 3 Oct. 1968, p. 9.
53. “Cancer Researchers Back on the Job for County Unit,” Five Cities Times-Press-Recorder, 11 Nov. 1971, sec. 3, p.
3.
54. “Wheeler-Williams Vows Exchanged in Garden Rites,” Chula Vista Star News, 19 Aug. 1971, C11.
55. Terry Conner, “Candidates Outnumber Spectators at Forum,” Five Cities Times-Press-Recorder, 26 Oct. 1972, p.
16.
56. Carol McPhee, A Small Town Women’s Movement: A Memoir (Morro Bay: Coalesce Press, 2017), p. 37–38.
15
(McPhee, Small Town Women’s Movement, 45–46). The AAUW agrees to look
into it.
1974 Sep. Black sets up the first meeting of the Ad Hoc Committee to Establish a San Luis
Obispo County Commission on the Status of Women in the large adobe room
at 466 Dana Street (50–56). McPhee presses her to expand the invitees beyond
“professional and middle-class club women, and the meeting draws 17 attendees,
including Virginia Black, Ethel Cooley, Anne Cruikshanks, Elinor Grant, Martha
Jenkins, Melba Moe, Liz Regan, Frances Reynolds, and Dona Smoak. Mary Gail
Black explains the historic context of the president’s and the subsequent state
commissions, turns down the nomination to be chair and Carol McPhee accepts
it, causing dissension between Black and McPhee that is later resolved.
Oct. 17 The second meeting at the adobe of the Ad Hoc Committee draws more than
50 women (61–64). McPhee is confirmed as chair; 15 Feb. 1975, Susan B.
Anthony’s birthday, is confirmed as the date to agree on a proposal; and four
subcommittees are formed: Housekeeping, Research, Grassroots, and Speakers’.
Mary Gail Black and Carol McPhee at Coalesce Bookstore, 1980s (A Small Town Women’s
Movement). Daniel Ellsberg and Mary Gail Black share the front page of the Lompoc Record as the
latter scales the Diablo Canyon fence in 1977 at age 79
1975 Feb. 4 McPhee makes and receives calls to, from county supervisors at the adobe (92).
Feb. 15 For the final lobbying push for the April 14 County Board of Supervisors hearing
to vote on a commission, a Steering Committee is created that meets 3 times a
week at the adobe (98).
Apr. 14 The Board of Supervisors votes to establish a County Commission on the Status
of Women with requested $3,000 budget; Richard Krejsa, Kurt Kupper, and
Milton Willeford are in favor, Hans Heilman, Howard Mankins against (112).
Black recruits Dorothy Gates to sway Willeford the night before the vote (110).
16
June 16 A last meeting of the Ad Hoc Committee is called in the adobe room at Black’s
house to prepare members to help the new commission, of which McPhee will
become chair from 1975 to 1976 (112–114).
1977 Aug. 7 Mary Gail Black, at age 79, becomes iconic as the oldest among 46 arrested in
the first mass arrest event at Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant and is pictured
on the front page of the Lompoc Record scaling a barbed wire fence.57 (Her age is
given as 77. Her arrest is also featured in the Telegram-Tribune, Times-Press-
Recorder, and San Francisco Examiner, in each of which her age is given as 73.)
Ultimately, mass arrests at Diablo Canyon will reach 2,000, surpassing those at
Seabrook for the highest number of the Anti-Nuclear Movement.
1984 Black retires from the County Democratic Central Committee after 18 years, at
age 85. Rep. Leon Panetta notes her accomplishments in the Congressional
Record and Sen. Alan Cranston writes “with admiration and the hope that
others will follow her example.”58
1986 Black agrees to make a gift of the Simmler Adobe and Garden to the City of San
Luis Obispo, with conditions for their preservation.59
1988 Oct. 10 Gift is announced to the community in “Canet Adobe Deal Struck: SLO, House
Owner in Accord over Future Museum,” Telegram-Tribune.60 Article discusses
grape arbor, vine supposedly brought from Spain by mission fathers, and
mulberry tree also supposedly planted by the fathers. City Recreation Director
Jim Stockton quoted as saying grove of trees at rear of property is among finest
in the city, grounds will be used as a park, and house will be restored and used
like Jack House and Dallidet Adobe. Ends quoting Black: “Never underestimate
the power of woman.”
1989 July 30 Mary Gail Black dies at age 91.61
1999 Sep. 21 The San Luis Obispo City Council unanimously approves that La Loma Adobe
will be used as a museum housing exhibitions on the Mexican and early American
periods, the Rodriguez Adobe will be used as a museum and community building,
and “the Rosa Butron de Canet de Simmler Adobe will become a museum and
meeting space with the gardens available for special events.”
2017 Sep. 5 The city council unanimously adopts the Downtown Concept Plan, which
specifies that “the City-owned Rosa Butrón Adobe property is opened to the
public and managed as a park” and a “Creek Walk will connect to Higuera Street
at several points and to Dana Street across from the improved Rosa Butrón
Adobe.” Included in its Implementation Plan: “Develop and implement a master
plan for the public use of the Rosa Butrón Adobe property.”
57. Sue Edelman, “Demonstrators Arrested at Diablo Nuclear Plant,” Lompoc Record, 8 Aug. 1977, p. 1.
58. Five Cities Times-Press-Recorder: “Roberti to Speak to Demos,” 18 Apr. 1984, p. 11; Beverly Haynes, “Mary Gail
Black Honored by Democrats,” 4 May 1984, p. 8.
59. Andrew Merriam, copy of 26 Mar. 1986 letter in 466 Dana Street address file, San Luis Obispo Community
Development Department.
60. David Eddy, 10 Oct. 1988.
61. Jill Duman, “Writer, Historian Dies,” San Luis Obispo County Telegram-Tribune, 1 Aug. 1989, p. 4.
17
III. History and Documentation of the Simmler Adobe and Garden
The most plausible early history of the house is that the central adobe core and its milled
redwood truss roof were constructed soon after the land’s 14 December 1860 purchase by
Blas Castro from the town trustees, and the low and low-pitched box frame wings and portico
were added after the property’s 29 June 1865 sale to Jacob Simmler (who had a wife and
orphaned niece to house) and before the adobe appears in an 1870 painting by Leon Trousset.
1860 coincided with a boom in town land sales and adobe construction. Though it is possible
the adobe pre-existed Castro’s purchase, there would have been no clear reason for a house’s
construction on unassigned land. As well, the truss roof resembles other roofs of circa 1860
adobes in San Luis and seems unlikely to have been needed to replace an earlier roof. In other
words, the prevailing evidence points to an early American Era adobe, expanded soon after, and
dendrochronology undertaken by the city would probably settle the question.
Survey of the Mission lands in San Luis Obispo, prepared for the Public Land Commission
In 1854, the Public Land Commission rejected San Luis Obispo’s claim to have been a pueblo
and thus entitled to four square leagues (about twenty-seven square miles) of land. In 1859,
however, President James Buchanan signed the patent for the Mission, Mission Orchard, and
Mission Garden land claims, and the town trustees—apparently considering contiguous areas to
be up for grabs—sold over a hundred lots between 1859 and 1862, well before the commission
18
assigned it 640 acres as a town in 1871. The Hays-Latimer Adobe and Dallidet Adobe date from
circa 1860, the former on a lot sold by the town trustees, the latter on a Mexican era land
grant of the family of Asencion Zalazar, Pierre Dallidet’s wife, that adjoined the Mission Garden
and similarly needed confirmation of the extent of diocesan land before it was safe to build on.
The Simmler Adobe’s street façade in current form with portico and wings is documented in
Leon Trousset’s 1870 panoramic painting of San Luis.62 The rear of the box frame surround is
unclearly documented in E. S. Glover’s 1877 engraving, clearly documented in an early 1890s
photograph from Cerro San Luis, but was likely constructed at the same time as the wings.
Simmler Adobe and barn at left in Trousset’s 1870 painting, the Limas House and Dana Street at right
Everything in this detail has been demolished but the Simmler Adobe, upper far left, and Hays-Latimer
Adobe at 642 Monterey Street, upper far right. The newly built Nipomo Street School with bell tower is
in the lower left foreground; this and two later schools at the site have all been demolished.
E. S. Glover’s 1877 engraving shows two extensions, possibly separate sheds, at the rear of the
adobe, which may be incorporated in today’s structure or have been removed. The current
northeast extension consists, in part, of a box frame former outbuilding on the 1905 Sanborn,
connected to the house by the time of aerial photographs in the late 1940s by way of a board
and batten extension seen in an Edith Gragg photograph of 1936 (p. 57) that could plausibly be
one of the 1870s extensions. The northwest extension in its present form is extant by a 1937
aerial photo. The central back room, which was important to Black as a work space during her
political career, is not shown in the 1956 Sanborn Map but appears in a 1959 aerial photo.
62. The Trousset painting can be dated to between 1870 and 1872 by the presence of the Nipomo Street school
(commenced in December 1869) and absence of the foundations of the County Courthouse (commenced in
August 1872). A portrait of George Washington in Masonic garb, signed and dated 1870 by Trousset and recently
rediscovered in the Masonic Temple basement, suggests spring 1870 for the painting of the panorama by the
itinerant artist.
19
Above: West end of Dana Street from Cerro San Luis, early 1890s. In right foreground is 448 Dana
and neighboring stable, across from 465, 467, and 469 Dana (the 1½-story house at far right and two
1-story houses). At left, on the far side of the street, is the San Luis Obispo Gas Works (workshop and
retort house, presumably topped by coal hopper), and on the near side of the street 484 Dana, the
adobe’s neighbor (in the map below with the bay windows and small porch in front). At center is the
fenced Simmler Garden with a variety of trees, with a white shed in the foreground and the hip roof,
with chimney on the right, of the adobe. The low-pitched rear of the box frame extension to the adobe
is visible. Courtesy of the History Center of San Luis Obispo County. Below: The same section from the
1891 Sanborn Map, to assist with orientation. The white shed is beyond the map boundary but
appears in the 1905 Sanborn. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
The 1870 Trousset painting shows the immediate landscape as grassland, with the nearest trees
probably associated with San Luis Creek. Carleton Watkins’ 1876 photograph of San Luis from
the west shows the grass replaced by trees; E. S. Glover’s 1877 bird’s eye engraving of the town
documents their variation. Photographs and press from the 1890s to the present show the
continuous cultivation and preservation of a varied arboreal landscape with vines, shrubs, and
herbaceous plants, combined—from 1930 and the Monday Club’s first photographic
documentation of the garden—with recognition of the landscape’s historic significance.
20
Above: Detail of Carleton Watkins’ 1876
photograph of San Luis Obispo from the west,
showing, at far left, the Simmler Adobe roof, as a
lighter horizontal rectangle, rising from a dark
clump of trees beyond a fence and Dana Street,
with grassland beyond. Rows of crops stand in the
foreground before the Norcross House; pastured
animals and a haystack are on the right (south)
side of Higuera, with a primitive fenced garden in
the foreground. Marsh Street is still marsh (the
line of brush on the right). Courtesy of the
Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Above left: Blowup showing the west side of the Butron Adobe’s hip roof among trees in middleground
at far left; a pale wall of the side-gabled Limas House next to it at center, also among trees; and, to the
right, the pale-walled, front-gabled 465 Dana on the south side of Dana Street in a treeless lot. Dark
foliage marks the course of the Arroyo de San Luis Obispo in the foreground.
Dana Street from Cerro San Luis, 1877, detail from well-known bird’s-eye
engraver E. S. Glover. The Simmler Adobe, second to last house on the near
side of Dana (blowup at right) appears to have two rear extensions or sheds
and at near right the shed that appears in the 1890s photo and 1905
Sanborn map. Tall trees line the south-facing street frontage; shorter trees at
back and sides are likely fruit-bearing; there are bushes on the west side.
21
1891 Sanborn Map: front of Simmler Adobe above numeral 108; Limas House to immediate right
1905 Sanborn Map: full Simmler property shown for the first time
1926–1956 Sanborn map book, backlit to show paste-over additions and subtractions
22
Aerial Photographs 1937–2022, UC Santa Barbara Library
1 Feb. 1937
1 Jan. 1949
13 Feb. 1969
16 June 1941
6 Nov. 1959
5 Aug. 1987
22 Mar. 1947
3 May 1965
1 July 2022 Google Satellite
23
IV. Historiography and Naming of the Simmler Adobe and Garden
The earliest reference to the house and garden at 466 Dana as named is in Edith Drennan
Gragg’s handwritten legend “Simmler Adobe and Grape Arbor 1930,” for two separate
photographs of the adobe and grape arbor in an album of photographs of San Luis Obispo
County adobes taken on documentary journeys with fellow Monday Club members Constance
Van Harreveld, Erna P. Marsh, and Rose Dallidet. This documentation happened as attention
was expanding from the historic significance of the California missions to domestic adobes, and
it was three years after Mildred Waterman and her father purchased the property. The first
press use of the name is in a 1940 Telegram-Tribune article about a California-themed tea that
Mildred Waterman hosted for St. Stephen’s Altar Guild at “the historic old Simmler adobe.”63
Right: Copy of a circa 1950s album with a
photograph of Mildred Waterman next to the
adobe fireplace with her version of the adobe’s
and garden’s history: the adobe dating from 1830
in the Rancho Era and the garden dating even
earlier from the Mission Era. History Center of
San Luis Obispo County.
Left: Gragg’s 1930 photo of the Simmler Grape
Arbor, with inscription; above: the separate photo
of the Simmler Adobe pasted above. History
Center of San Luis Obispo County.
In 1958 Mildred Waterman and Mary Gail Black appear to have convinced Louisiana Clayton
Dart—director of the County Historical Society and writing for the Telegram-Tribune—to refer
to it as “the Canet Adobe (Waterman)” and declare it had been built in 1830 during the
Rancho Era.64 By 1960 the deed research on its passage from the Town of San Luis Obispo to
Blas Castro to Jacob Simmler had been done, and an unsigned Telegram-Tribune article (probably
63. “Altar Guild Party Tribute to California,” San Luis Obispo Telegram-Tribune, 11 Mar. 1940, p. 2.
64. Louisiana Clayton Dart, “Historical Society’s Tour of Adobes Scheduled May 3,” San Luis Obispo Telegram-
Tribune, 12 Apr. 1958, p. 2.
24
written by Dart) referred to it as “the Waterman Adobe (first called the Canet and later the
Simmler).”65 Nonetheless, Waterman and Black persisted in the Canet name for the next three
decades, Black writing in 1986 to Andrew Merriam—who as chair of the Cultural Heritage
Committee had thanked her for her gift of “the historic Simmler-Waterman Adobe”—with the
request to “designate it as the Canet Adobe. Simmler had no connection except he married the
widow Canet.”66
This was demonstrably false. Though J. J. Simmler married the widow of Vicente Canet in 1859,
county deeds show he purchased the Dana Street property in 1865 from Blas Castro, who
purchased it in 1860 from the trustees of the Town of San Luis Obispo. There is no evidence of
Canet ownership; the Canet’s Rancho San Bernardo was at the ocean end of the Chorro Valley.
The land sold by the trustees to Castro in 1860 was outside the 5.82 acres of the Orchard of
the Mission San Luis Obispo south of the Arroyo de la Huerta, also of the 44.66 acres of the
Vineyard of the Mission San Luis Obispo south of the Arroyo de San Luis Obispo, at least as
established by the Public Land Commission. These were both returned to the church by the
United States Government on 2 September 1859, so the land in the crook of the two arroyos,
apparently claimed by no one else, reasonably belonged to the town, whose claim would have
been the default once the mission claims were settled, even though the Land Commission had
not assigned the town pueblo status or pueblo rights over the land.
The 1983 Historic Resources Survey DPR523 correctly identified John Jacob Simmler as the
adobe’s historic association and referred to the house as the Waterman-Simmler Adobe,
combining the contemporary name with the historic name. The DPR523 did not discuss the
garden, but historic landscapes were not discussed in the survey, whose volunteers received
training only in architectural styles. (The National Park Service would publish its first guide to
identifying, evaluating, and managing cultural landscapes in 1984.) After Black’s gift, the Canet
name stuck for awhile, until an elaborate compromise with accuracy crept back in, culminating
in the city council adopting on 2 March 1999—at the recommendation of the Friends of Las
Casas de Adobe (FOCA)—the official name Rosa Butrón de Canet de Simmler Adobe, also
used in reference to the garden.
This name has the quadruple disadvantage not only of (1) being so ungainly as to be unusable
but of associating the property with someone who (2) was not historically significant by the
National Register Criterion of having “gained importance within her profession or group”; (3) is
not documented as originating or ever owning the Dana Street property; and (4) was not
known by that name, having been referred to in contemporary deeds as Rosa Simmler, in the
contemporary press as Rosa M. C. Simmler, and on her tombstone as Rosa M. Simmler. The
abbreviation Rosa Butrón Adobe, used by FOCA perhaps in order to promote a romantic
association with an aristocratic Rancho Era figure, is misleading as to both the property’s origin
and significance.
Common practice is to name historic resources after their creators or significant associations:
the goal is—as with physical integrity—to communicate significance. The current name came
about through a compromise with a fictional origin story related to Vicente Canet.
65. “Waterman Adobe Slates Mexican Christmas for Tour,” San Luis Obispo Telegram-Tribune, 25 Nov. 1960, p. 4.
66. Undated letter stamped received 17 Apr. 1986, 466 Dana address file, San Luis Obispo Community
Development Department.
25
It may seem that disagreement over the name of a threatened resource is tantamount to
arguing about whether the furniture on the Titanic should be referred to as deck chairs or
steamer chairs. But the Simmler Adobe and Garden are threatened only because the City of
San Luis, having gone to considerable trouble to acquire them, quickly lost interest and chose
not to maintain them. The city administration lost interest during a period of declining
attendance at historic sites tracked by the National Endowment for the Arts from 1982 to
2008.67 But it is possible the loss of interest came from an inability to define a historic
significance relevant to a broader community.
A site that is a living demonstration of a nineteenth-century environmental movement, the
surviving canvas of a twentieth-century gender non-conforming feminist activist, and the
headquarters of a major event in the Women’s Movement is potentially more interesting to
current audiences than if it is defined only as happening to have been owned by the daughter
and widow of rancho grantees. (Until last year’s landmarking of the Phyllis Lyon–Del Martin
House in San Francisco, no lesbian-associated site had been landmarked in the State of
California.) Beyond relevance, of course, recreation at historic sites is successful if it takes the
form of how people wish to recreate rather than how recreation is thrust upon them (compare
the thriving historic schoolhouse that hosts the Baileyana tasting room to the chained and
empty Jack House and Garden). But history starts with relevance to the present.
67. Bohne Silber, Tim Triplett, et al., A Decade of Arts Engagement: Findings from the Survey of Public
Participation in the Arts, 2002–2012 , NEA Research Report #58 (Washington, DC: National Endowment for the
Arts, 2015), fig. 1–16.
26
V. Significance
Summary The Simmler Adobe and Garden are unusual in fulfilling—in tandem and
separately—seven criteria of significance of the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP)
and City of San Luis Obispo Historic Preservation Ordinance.
Under NRHP Criterion A, both the Simmler Adobe and Garden are associated with a historic
event: (1) the 1974–1975 campaign for the County Commission on the Status of
Women—the most defined and best documented event of local Second Wave Feminism—for
which Mary Gail Black’s property served as the headquarters and main gathering place.
Under Criterion B, both the Simmler Adobe and Garden are associated with historic persons:
(2) nineteenth-century vigilante and later justice of the peace, judge, and postmaster John
Jacob Simmler, who lived at the property till his death in 1906, and (3) twentieth-century
journalist, community organizer, and feminist political operative Mary Gail Black, a gender
non-conforming woman in a same-sex partnership, who lived there periodically from 1928 and
continuously from the end of World War II to 1989.
Under Criterion C, the Simmler Adobe alone embodies (4) the Greek Revival style, (5) the
adobe method of construction, and (6) the Western single-wall load-bearing or box frame
method of construction.
Under Criterion C, the Simmler Garden alone embodies (7) the period of the American
Tree-Planting Movement, active in San Luis Obispo and producing a revolutionary
landscape form for the American West.
Neither original private owner and likely builder of the adobe core Blas Castro, Jacob Simmler’s
two wives Rosa Butrón Canet Simmler and Mary La Franchi Simmler, nor Mary Gail Black’s
partner Mildred Waterman fulfills Criterion B for a historic person as having “gained
importance within his/her profession or group.” Persons whose sole role is as “a member of an
identifiable profession, class, or social or ethnic group” or “an important family” are explicitly
excluded from Criterion B significance.
Although the resource is regarded as a potential site of archaeological finds, due to its
proximity to the described first Mission San Luis Obispo site and possible inclusion in the
Northern Chumash settlement of tiłhini, it has not undergone testing or research sufficient to
make it eligible for the NRHP under Criterion D as having yielded, or being likely to yield,
information important in prehistory or history.
A. Joint Significance of the Simmler Adobe and Garden
1. Criterion A: It is associated with an event that has made a significant
contribution to the broad patterns of our history: the campaign for the San Luis
Obispo County Commission on the Status of Women 1974–1975
National Register Criterion A focuses on definable, documentable events in physical places that
contributed to larger movements and trends.
The Second-Wave Feminism of the 1960s through 1980s tried to undermine traditional
hierarchies and organizations in a variety of ways. This counter-cultural trend can offer a
challenge to historic definition and documentation. Second Wave Feminist distribution of
leadership, for instance, can make it more difficult to pin a specific structure to a specific
27
historic person. Public and political acts were important elements of the movement, but so
were collective moments of consciousness-raising that were intentionally more private and less
directed in their outcome.
The local campaign to create a San Luis Obispo County Commission on the Status of
Women—analogous to the 1961–1963 President’s Commission on the Status of Women that
helped launch Second Wave Feminism—pursued a specific political goal, but it also embodied
distributionist leadership, thus fulfilling two senses of the word significant: important but also
representative of the movement. That campaign was centered in the living room—the then
110-year-old central adobe room—of Mary Gail Black’s house, but it encompassed rooms in
the back of the house and also the garden.
The Kennedy administration’s Commission on the Status of Women was chaired by Eleanor
Roosevelt until her death in 1962 and then by Assistant Secretary of Labor Esther Peterson,
and it comprised leaders of organizations and senior professionals, both men and women. The
commission’s 1963 report, American Women, was a serious examination of issues ranging from
discriminatory federal and state laws to unequal education, inadequate daycare, and the added
dimension of racism. In the dispute over the Equal Rights Amendment between women’s
organizations (which advocated equal treatment) and organized labor (which advocated gender-
specific protective legislation), the commission punted, claiming the 5th and 14th amendments
already provided the Constitutional protection necessary (44–45)—presuming the all-male
Supreme Court would so rule.
An important secondary impact of the federal commission was the creation of state
commissions on the status of women. Out of the Third National Conference of Commissions
on the Status of Women in 1966, the National Organization for Women was born, partly out
of frustration with the limits of what the state commissions were allowed to do.
In early 1974, Mary Gail Black heard from Suzanne Paizis of the successful effort to establish a
county commission on the status of women in Santa Cruz.68 In 1972 Paizis had become one of
the first two women to be their party’s nominee for the California State Senate, and Black, then
in her mid seventies, had managed Paizis’s San Luis Obispo County campaign (18). By
November, Paizis was bested by the 17th District Republican incumbent, Donald Grunsky, by
more than 3 to 1 in fundraising and not quite 2 to 1 in votes.69 The other woman Democratic
candidate, Catherine O’Neill in the 25th District, was also beaten by the male Republic
incumbent, and it would be another 4 years before the first woman would be elected to the
California Senate.
Black, whose interest in Feminism focused on political action, was determined to pass a county
commission in San Luis Obispo, where it could concern itself with women’s issues but retain
nonprofit status (McPhee, Small Town Women’s Movement, 45). She told her friend Carol
McPhee, who recoiled at Paizis’s campaign for the Santa Cruz commission, composed of “a tight
committee of professional and middle-class club women”: “It sounded to me as if the women
who would be appointed to the commission would be drawn from the same class.”
68. Carol Alma McPhee, A Small Town Women’s Movement: A Memoir (Morro Bay: Coalesce Press, 2017), p. 45.
69. San Luis Obispo County Telegram-Tribune: Richard Schmidt, “Grunsky, Nimmo, MacGillivray Win,” 8 Nov. 1972,
p. 1; Mark Gladstone, “MacGillivray Tops Campaign Spenders,” 15 Dec. 1972, p. 1.
28
Black took the project to the local American Association of University Women, but organizing
it was given to someone else, who for an initial meeting forwarded to Black a list of “middle-
class, mostly affluent, people with a record of having served as officers or on boards of
women’s clubs” (46, 50). After a number of quarrels, McPhee convinced Black to broaden the
invitation list (and to include McPhee herself). When the evening meeting of seventeen women
took place in Black’s large adobe room in September 1974, there was indeed a broader
spectrum, including younger, more radical, and less organization-based participants.
Black explained the historical background, starting with Eleanor Roosevelt and the presidential
commission, but then she reluctantly conceded to McPhee’s distributionist insistence that she
“allow […] the ideas to come from the floor” (54). At the end of the evening, Black was
nominated to chair the group but, out of respect for distributionism, declined; then McPhee
was nominated and accepted, to Black’s chagrin (55–56). The torch had been passed, but
McPhee had to work through Black’s feelings of betrayal. It was not till later that she
understood Black’s long local history of being considered different and passed over. McPhee
made sure to include Black at the core of the campaign.
News of the campaign (at far right), and eventually of the commission itself, was relegated to the Social
and Family pages—small columns of print generally surrounded by large pictures of brides
At the second, 17 October 1974 meeting of the Ad Hoc Committee to Establish a San Luis
Obispo County Commission on the Status of Women, more than fifty women showed up at
the adobe, most unknown to McPhee (62). “Just before eight o’clock women began to file down
the bricks under the light on the wisteria arbor. … That night the adobe seemed especially
welcoming, as if it were my home, my natural place. The lamps filled it with warmth, the faces
of women crowded onto chairs and on the floor made it friendly” (62–64).
Four subcommittees were formed, the Housekeeping or Administrative Committee meeting at
the adobe at noon so women with full-time jobs could attend (73). There was also a Research
Committee, Grassroots Committee, and Speakers’ Committee. McPhee used the adobe as a
base of operations, calling the county supervisors’ staff from there and receiving supervisors’
calls back (92). Discussions took place between McPhee and Black in the living room but also in
the less formal back room (82). The kitchen, between the two rooms, supplied the coffee to
fuel the meetings (48, 56).
On 15 Feb. 1975, the day (Susan B. Anthony’s birthday) that the Ad Hoc Committee approved
their proposal for a county women’s commission—to be considered by the all-male Board of
Supervisors on 14 April—McPhee proposed a small Steering Committee to respond to the
urgency of the upcoming schedule (98). The eight members met three times a week at the
adobe at staggered times that could accommodate various jobs. Petitions, press, appearances,
outreach, and lobbying of the supervisors rolled forward. Strategy was considered, including
avoiding the appearance of controversy, such as quashing the idea of a march to the board
chamber (106).
29
The grassroots campaign, which McPhee and Black first struggled over but ultimately
cooperated on, succeeded—once Black got a politically connected friend, Dorothy Gates, to
call the sole supervisor on the fence, Milton Willeford, the night before the vote (110). Richard
Krejsa, Kurt Kupper, and Willeford voted for the commission and its $3,000 budget; Hans
Heilman and Howard Mankins voted against (112). (The budget was initially unfunded, then
refunded, not without controversy [from men].70)
McPhee was appointed to the commission by Kurt Kupper
and would become its chair for the first year. Black was not
appointed, but the friend she tapped to lobby Willeford was.
On 16 June 1975 the Ad Hoc Committee met at the adobe
one last time to rally support among “the mothers of the
commission” to help support the commission’s work (113).
Black, who three days before had turned 77 (though she was
wont to shave a few years off her public age), would become
a citizen volunteer on the commission’s task forces on
Affirmative Action–Employment and Education (123). Many of
the other members of the Ad Hoc Committee would also
join the task forces.
The Ad Hoc Committee had considered asking the
supervisors to make the commission membership all women
but decided against it. In the event, however, the male
supervisors appointed only women, and all the volunteers on
the task forces were women—a sea change from the original
presidential commission.
Morro Bay: Coalesce Press, 2017
The creation of the San Luis Obispo County Commission on the Status of Women made a
significant contribution to Second Wave Feminism locally, both for the commission’s
accomplishments and for creating the multi-generational, multi-racial, and multi-class campaign
necessary to will the commission into being. The commission produced a February 1976
interim report and June 1976 report on its efforts to improve the status of women in the
county (118–150). It established a women’s talent bank; sponsored a rape crisis center; worked
with county schools, including Cuesta College, on Title IX compliance; educated county
agencies and private employers on gender discrimination; did outreach in the media; produced
programs, brochures, and films; and cooperated with commissions on the status of women in
other counties (143–150).
After almost half a century, the commission remains active, meeting once a month and
undertaking projects on women’s health, careers, financial management, and discrimination and
in 2021 changed its name to the County Commission on the Status of Women and Girls.71
The campaign for the county commission was a definable contribution in a complex, often
amorphous movement whose culture-shifting and law-revising accomplishments have been so
successful that they now tend to be taken for granted, though the overturning of Roe v. Wade
70. San Luis Obispo County Telegram-Tribune: “Voters League Assesses Budget Cuts,” 25 July 1975, p. 11; Donald J.
Curtis, “Letters: $3,000 Will Be Misspent,” 13 Aug. 1975, p. 16.
71. Commission on the Status of Women and Girls, County of SLO, lowomen.org
30
calls both the cultural shift and legal revisions—and the taking of them for granted—into
question. The campaign and its association with Mary Gail Black’s adobe also happen to be
extremely well documented by Carol McPhee’s A Small Town Women’s Movement: A Memoir.
The survival of a physical landmark, and the documentation to associate it with a historic event,
are the practical sine qua nons in historic preservation. Such physical landmarks make an
incalculable contribution to our ability to recall our history, as anyone who has been on an
urban walking tour or toured a historic site can attest—be it Stonewall, Independence Hall, or
Manzanar; Mission San Luis, the Monday Club, or Eto/Brook Street.
2. Criterion B: It is associated with the life of a person significant in our past: John
Jacob Simmler Though interesting as a member of a ranchero family of mixed Indian
and European heritage, and the subject of descendants’ oral history,72 Rosa Butrón does not
appear to have been a person who “gained importance within her profession or group,” with
no evidence of political, economic, or social impact. Even her executorship of her first
husband’s estate she ceded to her second husband and his legal skills (12–13).
John Jacob Simmler from Myron Angel’s 1883 History of San Luis Obispo County, California
In contrast, that second husband, John Jacob Simmler, did gain importance within his profession
or group. He had important roles in three eras and aspects of justice in San Luis Obispo City
and County: (1) as a leader of the 1853 and 1858 vigilance movements, (2) as a long-serving
72. Rita White and Virginia Lee White, “Rosa María Buitrón and Vicente Cané,” Antepasados, vol. 4 (1980–1981),
pp. 1–33.
31
county justice of the peace, and (3) as the new City of San Luis Obispo’s first police judge. He
also served on the town board of trustees and on the Mission School District Board of
Trustees when it built the Court School. His eighteen-year tenure as postmaster culminated in
the establishment of a Carrizo Plain post office, for which, and for the surrounding
unincorporated area, the name Simmler was chosen in gratitude.
Arrival in California Born in 1826 in Mulhouse, France, in a part of Alsace previously
part of Switzerland, Simmler apprenticed as a house painter, spent two journeyman
Wanderjahre in France, Switzerland, and Germany, and at the age of twenty emigrated to
Texas.73 In 1852 he joined the California Gold Rush, traveling across Mexico to Mazatlan, where
he boarded a ship for San Francisco that became disabled or becalmed and on which seven
people starved to death before it landed at Port San Luis. Simmler debarked with a horse pistol
and derringer in his possession: clearly ready for business beyond house painting.74
He stayed in the county, initially painting, then ruined himself financially hog farming, then
managed the St. Charles Hotel, San Luis Obispo’s only hostelry, with a Swiss partner, Peter
Hemmi, who three decades later was hanged with his son for murder from the railroad bridge
in Arroyo Grande, by a mob that did not even avail itself of the formality of a vigilante trial.
The Vigilante Movement Introduced by Anglos coming to the Old West through the
Old South, the Vigilante Movement was as foreign to Californios as trial by jury but became so
significant a part of the state’s early judicial and political makeup that Hubert Howe Bancroft
devoted 2 volumes of his 11-volume History of California to the topic, under the name Popular
Tribunals (San Francisco: History Company, 1887). Bancroft distinguishes between mob justice
without benefit of trial, vigilantism with a popular tribunal held by a vigilance committee, and
the government court system (sometimes all three acting simultaneously, as in Jackson,
California in 1852 [v. 1, p. 467]).
The Vigilante Movement was local in its expression and hence multifaceted. San Francisco’s
famous Vigilance Committee of 1851 focused on the stamping out of the Sydney Ducks, a gang
largely of Australian immigrants (Australia being a British penal colony), while its 1856 Vigilance
Committee focused on political corruption. Other vigilance committees responded to specific
crimes, particularly murder and horse stealing, horse borrowing having been a common pre-
American Californio practice. Bancroft observes, “In one year, that of 1855, there were no less
than forty-seven arbitrary executions in California; and of these, twenty-four were for theft and
nineteen for murder, the other four being for minor offenses” (v. 1, p. 423).
Early California judges and juries were often rough and impatient in their proceedings,75 but
vigilance committees were even more so, and additionally distrustful of the efficacy of
government proceedings. In 1856 in San Luis Obispo, Henry Miller recounted, “I was informed
by a young and very intelligent American that the American government was very badly
sustained here and a jury could not be found to convict a criminal” (op. cit., 29–31). Juries were
subject to outside intimidation and internal ethnic distrust. Even in San Luis Obispo’s 1851
73. Myron Angel, History of San Luis Obispo County (Berkeley: Howell-North Books, 1966), p. 314.
74. “Opening of the Fair: Curios and Historic,” daily San Luis Obispo Tribune, 27 Sep. 1899, p. 2.
75. J. M. Guinn, “Pioneer Courts and Judges of California,” Annual Publication of the Historical Society of Southern
California, vol. 8, no. 3 (1911), pp. 174–179.
32
Vigilance Committee, there was a Californio and an American judge, and the jury was equally
divided between Californios and Americans.76
Bancroft covers San Luis Obispo’s 1851, 1853, and 1858 episodes (v. 1, pp. 485–489). Simmler’s
first essay in vigilantism was 1853, a year after his arrival in the county.
A band, accused of having murdered a peddler north of San Miguel, allegedly tried to plunder a
store in San Luis but were scared off in the attempt and escaped south with stolen horses.
“Messrs. J. J. Simmler and J. J. Schieffarley, then of the very few ‘foreign’ residents of the town,
endeavored to form a party” to arrest them (Angel, op. cit., 306). Simmler, Schieffarley (who
was Swiss), and party followed the band to Los Angeles, killing one in a gunfight and capturing
another along the way, who was left in Santa Barbara to be collected later.
Four, including one woman, were captured in Los Angeles; tried by a vigilante court; and found
guilty of horse stealing and also strongly suspected of the murder of the peddler. Accounts
from various contemporary newspapers suggest that as the American and Californio
contingents in Los Angeles were unable to agree on whether to execute them (the Americans)
or not (the Californios), so the men were sent back to San Luis Obispo by mail steamer, with
some of the San Luis posse on board. The Americans in San Luis, doubtful that the Californios
would agree to hang the fugitives if they were brought back to town, met the steamer on the
beach and hanged the three from the branch of one tree, using a wagon as a scaffold.77
The previously captured prisoner was committed to the jail in the west end of the Mission
buildings; escaped; fled up Cerro San Luis; and was recaptured, taken back to the Mission, and
hanged from a joist inside. This episode of mob justice made the front page of the New York
Times—next to the masthead (headline above).78
In 1858—after the murders of the French-Basque cattle dealers Pedro Obiesa and M. Graciano
and French ranchers Bartolo Baratie and M. J. Borel—J. J. Simmler was one of only 15 to sign
the Vigilance Pledge and 35 to subscribe funds to the Vigilance Committee among the 146 who
enrolled as Vigilance Committee members. The 1858 Vigilance Committee seems to have been
formed to achieve some formality after a mob lynched the first imprisoned suspect, but it went
on to pursue and capture a number of people of dubious guilt, to shoot 1 and hang 7 of them,
along with the shooting deaths of 2 vigilantes and 1 bystander. (After the Vigilance Committee
disbanded, an additional suspect was captured and tried in a regular court and sentenced to
prison, where he died. Another, Jack Powers, escaped to New Mexico and was murdered there
by his ranch hands.)
Although Walter Murray, a leader of the Vigilance Committee and its public apologist to San
Francisco and Los Angeles newspaper readers, claimed the it helped tamp down the endemic
76. “Relic of Old Times,” San Luis Obispo Tribune, 23 July 1870, p. 3.
77. “From the South,” “From San Luis Obispo,” Daily Alta California, 11 Oct. 1853, p. 3; “A Catalogue of Crime,”
San Joaquin Republican, 13 Oct. 1853, p. 2; New York Herald, 10 Nov. 1953, p. 2.
78. “Exciting Scene in San Luis Obispo—Another Outlaw Hung,” 29 Nov. 1853.
33
violence in the Central Coast, evidence suggests the violence continued unabated till the
population increased, the justice system took hold, and the transition from Californio to
Yankee ascendancy was complete.
Later in 1858, Murray was elected to the State Assembly on the Vigilance ticket (running against
another candidate also on the Vigilance ticket) with 139 votes.79 In 1860, however, Jake Simmler
came in only fourth in the race for county justice of the peace at the Town of San Luis Obispo,
with 37 votes (Angel, op. cit., 146). The third-place candidate in Simmler’s election had been
among the 146 members of the Vigilance Committee, and the two leading candidates had had
nothing to do with it, suggesting that the political force of the Vigilante Movement had
diminished. When Murray published and edited the San Luis Obispo Tribune from 1869 to 1871,
he roundly condemned vigilantism, including in the Tribune’s account of the 1851 committee.80
Simmler’s 1860 result was significantly better, however, than in his first recorded political race,
for San Luis Obispo County treasurer in 1857, when he received only 4 votes to W. J. Graves’
173 (142). In the meantime he had married Rosa Butrón de Canet and was now effectively a
ranchero, which may have had something to do with his improved electoral stature.
Justice of the Peace In 1861 Simmler came in fourth for county assessor, with 21 votes
(148). In 1865 he gained 104 votes for superintendent of county schools, but that was only
enough to put him in second place (151).
Finally, in 1867, resistance to J. J. Simmler holding office wobbled, as he squeaked into first place
for county justice of the peace at San Luis Obispo, with 120 votes to Horatio B. Palmer’s 113,
H. W. Little’s 98, and Jose Mariano Bonilla’s 96—or 28 percent of the votes in a four-way race
(152). Palmer was a wagon maker in his first known election, but Bonilla had been admitted to
the bar of Mexico City, had been elected the first county judge in 1850, and had also been
district attorney (284). He and Little appear to have both served on the vigilance jury of 1851,
but neither was involved in the 1858 Vigilance Committee.
Simmler’s marriage to a woman of landed wealth and his acquisition of a property in the town
where he hoped to adjudicate perhaps increased his vote share. He was re-elected on the
Republican ticket in 1869 (he had become a Republican after Lincoln was shot), when a second
justice of the peace was added at San Luis. He gained 172 votes out of 609 cast—again 28
percent, but further outpacing a closer pack, with a Democrat winning the other seat.81
Murray’s Republican Tribune opined that “J. J. Simmler, the old judicial warhorse of this
neighborhood, is entirely the most fitted for our peculiar population”—an odd endorsement,
when Simmler had only two years on the bench, but perhaps Murray was factoring in his
vigilante experience of the previous decade.82 In 1871, in another four-way race for two
positions, Simmler came first with 238 votes, for an increased 33 percent of the total. In 1873
he was also re-elected.
County justices of the peace were the third rung of a local judicial hierarchy that included the
judge of the 1st Judicial District of Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo Counties, as well as the
county judge. The San Luis Obispo county judges during Simmler’s terms as justice were first
79. “Election Returns—Official,” Sacramento Daily Union, 11 Sep. 1858, p. 2.
80. “Vigilance Committees,” 24 Dec. 1870,
81. “Election Returns,” weekly San Luis Obispo Tribune, 25 Oct. 1869, p. 3.
82. “Our Candidates,” weekly San Luis Obispo Tribune, 7 Aug. 1869, p. 2.
34
William Beebee, who seems to have no legal training but had been an associate judge on the
county’s Court of Sessions in 1851, appointed to the County Board of Supervisors in 1852, and
run unsuccessfuly for a number of offices before being elected judge in 1863, and then
McDowell Reid Venable, who had studied law at the University of Virginia, is not known to
have graduated (his studies perhaps interrupted by service in the Confederate Army), but
practiced as a lawyer in San Luis.
The judge of the 1st Judicial District was Pablo de la Guerra, who had no legal or indeed
postsecondary education but was the scion of a prominent Californio family in Santa Barbara
and seems to have been highly regarded, having served as the customs inspector at Monterey in
Alta California at the age of 19 and in the state’s first Constitutional Convention, in the State
Senate, as president of the Senate, and as lieutenant-governor, being admitted as an attorney
and counselor of the State Supreme Court in 1861 and elected judge in 1863.83 Walter Murray,
Simmler’s asociate in the Vigilance Committee of 1858, ran against De la Guerra in 1869 and
lost but was appointed to replace him in 1874, after De la Guerra was taken fatally ill (as indeed
Murray would be the following year). In Murray’s favor for this office was his claim—apparently
fictional—of legal training in England, which allowed him to practice as a lawyer at San Luis.
Simmler claimed only to have trained as a house painter. Murray trained, in fact, as a printer.
The type of proceedings Simmler presided over included a fracas between John McManus, who,
in building a shed for his employer, cut a limb from a tree belonging to Thomas Moss, who
struck McManus with a pine board. McManus cut Moss on the left arm below the shoulder and
was fined twenty dollars by Mr. Justice Simmler.84 Simmler sometimes acted as coroner;
committed people to trial by higher courts; approved sheriff’s sales; and, of course, officiated
over marriages.
Police Judge In April 1876, a year after his last term as a county justice of the peace in
the Town of San Luis Obispo, J. J. Simmler was elected police judge of the new City of San Luis
Obispo.85 He served only 1 term of 1 year, which seems to have been the pattern for the next
8 incumbents, until the ninth was re-elected. But Simmler did lead his community from the era
of vigilante justice through county justice to city justice.
Administrative development In the midst of Simmler’s judicial activities, in 1870 he
was elected with 4 others to the Town of San Luis Obispo’s Board of Trustees, coming in
second with 102 votes.86 There is no indication that he ran for re-election, but in June 1874 he
was chosen for the 3-person Mission School District Board of Trustees, in the same election
that voters turned down a $10,000 bond for construction of a second school.87 The trustees
did manage to get the $8,750 Court School built while he was on the board. In 1875, running as
an independent against a Republican and Democrat for County Clerk, he came in third (Angel
158). In 1877 he was listed as the city recorder, presumably having been elected as town
recorder in 1875.88
83. J. M. Guinn, Historical and Biographical Record of Southern California, (Chicago: Chapman, 1902), p. 221.
84. “A Cutting Affair,” weekly San Luis Obispo Tribune, 16 Aug. 1869, p. 2.
85. “The Election,” weekly San Luis Obispo Tribune, 8 Apr. 1876, p. 4.
86. “Town Election,” weekly San Luis Obispo Tribune, 7 May 1870, p. 2.
87. “The Result,” weekly San Luis Obispo Tribune, 4 July 1874, p. 2.
88. “City Directory,” weekly San Luis Obispo Tribune, 27 Jan. 1877, p. 1.
35
Simmler succeeded Walter Murray as postmaster in 1871 and continued till 1890, keeping the
post office open seven days a week and operating a bookshop, newsstand, and stationery store
in the same location.89 He managed to establish a post office in the Carrizo Plains, inspiring the
locals to designate that office and the surrounding community Simmler, a name that has outlived
the post office itself.90 He became ticket agent for the coastal steamers until the completion of
the Pacific Coast Railway line to San Luis Obispo in 1876.91 He was also an agent for the Home
Insurance Co. and appears to have received the town’s first Sanborn Map.92
Simmler’s ability to juggle multiple city, county, and federal offices is impressive: simultaneously
town trustee, county justice of the peace, and federal postmaster (1871–1872); school trustee,
justice of the peace, and postmaster (1874–75); and city recorder, city police judge, and
postmaster (1876–1877). From 1877 to 1890 he seems to have been satisfied with being
postmaster, apart from Swiss patriotic activities in the 1880s, doubtless encouraged by the
influx of Swiss-Italian dairy ranchers.
Left: Simmler’s last extra-judicial
adventure, San Francisco
Examiner; above: Simmler’s
tombstone, San Luis Cemetery
Last years Three and a half months after his 81-year-old wife Rosa died in December
1890, the 64-year-old Jake Simmler “profoundly astonished his old friends,” as well as the
Tribune, by marrying the 25-year-old Mary K. La Franchi.93 In 1892, despite Simmler’s being
selected as Republican candidate for the San Luis Obispo Board of Trustees, the Simmlers
89. “J. J. Simmler,” advertisement, weekly San Luis Obispo Tribune, 23 Nov. 1872, p. 3; “The postoffice,” daily San
Luis Obispo Tribune, 5 June 1889, p. 3.
90. “Simmler,” daily San Luis Obispo Tribune, 4 Aug. 1888, p. 3; Elliot Curry, “Texan Seeks Clues to ‘Jake’ Curry,”
San Luis Obispo County Telegram-Tribune, 2 Mar. 1973, p. 16.
91. “New Arrangements,” weekly San Luis Obispo Tribune, 9 Dec. 1876, p. 1.
92. “Insurance Map,” weekly San Luis Obispo Tribune, 20 Feb. 1875, p. 3.
93. “Judge Simmler,” daily San Luis Obispo Tribune, 3 Apr. 1891, p. 3.
36
moved to Cayucos, where J. J. Simmler took over management of the tiny new Bank of Cayucos
under president James Cass.94 At the same time the childless Simmler successfully petitioned to
take over the education and support of two motherless sisters of 12 and 13 from their blind,
deaf, and destitute father.95 Shortly after the bank opened, the county sheriff learned of a plan
to rob it, warned Simmler, and told him to comply with the robbers’ demands, in an apparent
attempt to catch them in the act. Simmler—responding more in his 4-decade-old role as
vigilante, or indeed by the standards of mob justice, than in his subsequent career as justice of
the peace and police judge—assembled a force in the lumber yard across from the bank and
“wanted to shoot the bandits as they rode into town, without waiting for the formality of being
robbed.”96 “The sheriff demurred to this very strenuously”; Simmler was implacable; and a
young clerk was brought in to undress and impersonate Simmler in bed. When the robbers
showed up, the clerk went with them to the bank and opened the vault, and the resulting
ambush left one robber dead and a undersheriff wounded and made the news in San Francisco.
From 1895 to 1897 Simmler served as justice of the peace in Cayucos.97 In 1898 he returned to
Dana Street, ran for Justice of the Peace in San Luis as an independent, lost, and thereafter
volunteered for minor civic roles.98 In 1902 he took a party of friends to the place where he
had landed after his ill-fated voyage from Mazatlan and showed them that the work he had done
painting the interior of the Avila House in 1852, which “looked as well as if done yesterday.”99
Period of Association J. J. Simmler purchased the property that included the later 466
Dana Street on 29 June 1865 and died there on 12 February 1906. He lived elsewhere only
during a brief period in the early 1890s, when he managed the Cayucos branch of the First
National Bank of San Luis Obispo and also served as that town’s justice of the peace.
Simmler’s service as justice of the peace in the Town of San Luis Obispo took place in four
terms from 1867 to 1875 and as police judge for the City of San Luis Obispo from 1876 to
1878; as member of the town board of trustees from 1870 to 1872; as member of the school
district board of trustees from 1874 to 1877; and as postmaster from 1872 to 1890: all during
his occupation of the adobe and its garden. His only historically significant roles to take place
before he moved to the Dana Street property were his documented leadership in the 1853 and
1858 vigilance movements.
3. Criterion B: It is associated with the life of a person significant in our past: Mary
Gail Black
Mary Gail Black’s local historical contribution is threefold: as a journalist, a community activist,
and political operative, where success was made more challenging by discrimination against her
gender and her gender preference as it showed in her mode of life.
94. Daily San Luis Obispo Tribune: “The Republican Nominating Convention and Democratic Primaries,” 9 Mar.
1892, p. 3; “New Bank at Cayucos, 24 Mar. 1892, p. 3.
95. “Probate,” daily San Luis Obispo Tribune, 27 Jan. 1892, p. 3, and 7 Feb. 1892, p. 5.
96. “Death Their Only Spoil,” San Francisco Examiner, 1 Sep. 1892, p. 3.
97. “Married,” Daily San Luis Obispo Tribune, 21 Apr. 1895, p. 4; “Washed up by the Waves,” Daily San Luis Obispo
Tribune, 19 Dec. 1897, p. 3.
98. “J. J. Simmler,” campaign advertisement, Daily San Luis Obispo Tribune, 29 Oct. 1898, p. 2.
99. “His Home Fifty Years,” Daily San Luis Obispo Tribune, 9 Sep. 1902, p. 4.
37
a. Black gained importance in her profession as a pioneering woman reporter who was unique
in earning local bylines in an era when journalism was at the cusp of being personalized.
b. When the center of gravity of local organizing moved from fraternal organizations (on the
male side) and general social and civic clubs (on the female) to issue-based campaigns, Black
gained importance in her group as the leader of the county’s participation in the American
Cancer Society’s groundbreaking Cancer Prevention Study I (1959–1965), leading 20 volunteers
in monitoring over 400 subjects for 6 years, then leading the resultant education efforts, and
ultimately taking over the resumption of the study in the 1970s.
c. As a political operative, she spent nearly two decades on the county’s Democratic Central
Committee; led two county campaigns for the local Democratic Congressional nominee, as well
as the county campaign for Suzanne Paizis, who in 1972 became one of the first two women
party nominees for California State Senate. Black introduced the successful campaign to
establish the San Luis Obispo County Commission on the Status of Women and later (at age
79) had an iconic role in the first of three mass-arrest protests over Diablo Canyon Power
Plant in the Anti-Nuclear Movement.
Above: M Black, 1930s. Profile of the Daily
Telegram. Right: Waterman at her 1958
retirement tea (Telegram-Tribune, 29 Nov. p. 1.
Mildred Waterman (1881–1969) and Mary Gail Black (1898–1969) met each other as colleagues
in 1921 and soon formed a same-sex partnership that was recognized during their lifetimes but
never fully accepted, either legally or socially. To accept it now—in relation to the historic
38
adobe and garden they preserved in concert and that Mary Gail Black gave to the community of
San Luis Obispo for its recreation and to honor her partner, but also in relation to the
association Black herself added to the adobe as a historically significant person—would be a
huge step forward in the city’s landmarking, which has for forty years maintained an almost
exclusively white, male, and heteronormative focus.
Black was not of a generation to talk of intimate matters nor to label herself, but for nearly five
decades, Waterman and Black lived together, traveled together, camped together, entertained
together, owned real estate together, and shared each other’s interests and family tragedies.
Black was also the executor of Waterman’s estate.100 Indeed the reason for Black’s donation of
the Simmler Adobe to the city was the destruction of their co-owned Castro Adobe on
Chorro Street, after Black was forced to sell it to pay taxes after Waterman’s death: a situation
that arose because their relationship could not be recognized by law as a family until Obergefell
v. Hodges in 2015.
The local newspapers almost invariably paired their names in social contexts, e.g., “Mr. and Mrs.
Paul Franklin, Mr. and Mrs. Bruce Murrell and baby, Miss Mildred Waterman, Miss Mary Gail
Black and Mr. and Mrs. Edwin Bennett, were among those from SLO who attended the Gay 90s
Harvest Festival.”101 The closest the local press ever came to describing Mildred Waterman and
Mary Gail Black’s relationship was in explaining Waterman’s return with Black from Porterville
to San Luis on the occasion of Black’s mother’s death in 1926: “Miss Black and Miss Waterman
have not only been associated together for a number of years in newspaper work for C. L. Day
here and in Porterville, but are very close personal friends.”102
Carol McPhee knew both Black and Waterman, and in A Small Town Women’s Movement: A
Memoir—which is simultaneously a political account and the narrative of McPhee and Black’s
friendship—McPhee refers to Black and Waterman as “the pair” and leaves it at that.103 McPhee
confirmed in telephone interview (26 Apr. 2022) that in her book she did not characterize
Black and Waterman’s relationship because Black never characterized it herself. But in that
conversation she referred to it—as others have done—as a “Boston marriage.”
In her book, McPhee suggests its impact: “As Miss Waterman’s longtime companion, as an
unconventional woman trying to be active in politics … she was at a disadvantage and was often
subordinated to people with much less talent than she” (51).
By the time lesbian became a publicly self-spoken word in San Luis Obispo County (though still
a word with intense prejudice directed at its bearers), Black had lost her partner, had decades
of engrained privacy, and had a somewhat acerbic lack of sympathy with the more amorphously
personal and nonpolitical aspects of Feminism (not least because it involved sitting on pillows
100. Camping: Mary Gail Black, Profile of the Daily Telegram: A Story of San Luis Obispo, 1921–1923 (Morro Bay:
Tabula Rasa, 1988), 10; traveling: daily San Luis Obispo Tribune: “To Valley,” 16 June 1925, p. 5; property ownership:
“Deeds,” San Luis Obispo Daily Telegram, 15 Dec. 1925, p. 7 and San Luis Obispo County Telegram-Tribune: “Recorded
October 3, 1952,” p. 13 and “Deeds Recorded in the Courthouse,” 11 Feb. 1953, p. 16; bereavement: “Newspaper
Women to Leave for Valley,” San Luis Obispo Daily Telegram, 21 Apr. 1926, p. 3; executor: “No. 14260 Notice to
Creditors,” San Luis Obispo County Telegram-Tribune, 31 Aug. 1971, p. 9.
101. “SLO Folk Enjoy Festival,” Arroyo Grande Valley Herald Recorder, 4 Nov. 1955, p. 1.
102. “Newspaper Women to Leave for Valley,” San Luis Obispo Daily Telegram, 21 Apr. 1926, p. 3.
103. “In those days she shared one of San Luis Obispo’s few adobes with Mildred Waterman … . Mary Gail
seemed to me to be the formidable one of the pair, brusque and sometimes arrogantly sarcastic” (16–17).
39
on the floor, to which by then, in her seventies and arthritic, she was disinclined [Small Town
Women’s Movement [32–33]).
Nevertheless, McPhee deftly characterizes the prejudice against which Black had to struggle to
become,” in the words of Criterion B, “individually significant within a historic context,” to
become a person who “gained importance within his or her profession or group.” McPhee
recounts Harold Miossi’s warning to her—years after Black had become a colleague of Miossi’s
and a stalwart in county Democratic leadership—that Black “sometimes acted like a man”
(McPhee, A Small Town Women’s Movement, 25). This is what we would recognize now as
homophobic marginalization, but among today’s San Luis Obispans there is still a tendency to
look away from this relationship and leave it unacknowledged, not least in the landmarking of
the adobe and garden and the neglect of Black’s gift and ignoring of its conditions.
Journalism Mary Gail Black made a remarkable debut as a “girl reporter”—teenage high
school graduate—in a rough-and-tumble, male-dominated profession in a big-city news market
(Black, Profile of the “Daily Telegram,” 19). From the mid 1910s through the early 1920s, she
worked for the 8-page semiweekly South Pasadena Record; the Scripps 12-page daily Pasadena
Evening Post; and the Scripps Los Angeles Evening Express, the oldest paper in LA, with 24–50
daily pages.104 When Black left the Post for the Central Coast in 1921, she was the only woman
reporter and the only woman on the news staff apart from the society editor (Black, Profile of
the Daily Telegram, 2).
Mary Gail Black brought her invalid mother north (Black’s sister lived in Oceano) and applied
for a job at a small-town evening eight-pager, the San Luis Obispo Daily Telegram. Publisher C. L.
Day interviewed her and decided to go for a safe local person who had worked for him before.
But the safe local person failed to show up. Day asked his business manager, Mildred
Waterman, “What about that brash young woman at Oceano?” (3). Brought back by car the
same day, 29 December, and faced with a pile of galleys an hour and a half from press time,
Black, who had worked on papers where proofreading was jealously guarded by union
proofreaders, fortunately had studied proofreaders’ marks on her own and was able to soldier
through. Within a few weeks she was a full-time reporter (21)—one of two, along with a city
editor and a couple of dozen correspondents sending items from surrounding towns: Arroyo
Grande, Atascadero, Adelaida, Avila, Bee Rock, Berros, Cholame, Cayucos, Cambria, Glenn, Las
Pilitas, Linne, Morro, New District, Nipomo, Oceano, Pozo, Paso Robles, Parkfield, Park Hill,
Pismo, San Miguel, Santa Maria, Santa Margarita, Shandon, Taft, and Templeton.
Black’s first byline appeared in the San Luis Obispo Daily Telegram in March 1922 as Mary Black,
on the front page above the fold, in an article about the new Fremont School. Her brand was
emphasized in the same issue by a third-page announcement that she had returned home from
San Luis Obispo to Oceano after an attack of the flu “but has resumed her work on The
Telegram.” By June 1923 her byline was Mary Gail Black.105 None of the other reporters or
county correspondents who worked for the Telegram, nor the city editor, appears ever to have
been accorded this honor. The Telegram was introducing nationally syndicated byline material as
104. Mary Gail Black, Profile of the Daily Telegram: A Story of San Luis Obispo, 1921–1923 (Morro Bay: Tabula Rasa,
1988), 19.
105.
40
well—Harry Hunt on Washington politics, Billy Evans on sports, and James W. Dean on the
movies (still based in New York instead of Hollywood).
Black’s first byline at far left
Black’s work was not the usual contemporary woman columnist’s fare of social news, gossip, or
advice. She put community news in a serious larger context. As she wrote in her 1988 book
about her two years on the Telegram, in Pasadena she had done her apprenticeship under a city
editor who was a “Hearst man,” and “one thing he taught me was to smell out stories in the
least likely places” (2). Black spent her evenings in the Carnegie Library, and in a 1922 column
on as unpromising a news topic as the library’s new books, she starts by describing William
Jennings Bryan’s Creationism campaign “making a veritable Harold Bell Wright of Darwin and
best sellers of his books on ‘Evolution’ among the people of San Luis Obispo.” Her early byline
work includes economic reporting and theater reviewing.106 Particularly notable is an
eyewitness series giving the nuts and bolts of filming Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments
in the Oceano Dunes, our best source on that historic local event.107 In the 1960s, editor and
historian Elliot Curry revived these and other byline articles in the Telegram-Tribune.
By 1923 most of the national byline material disappeared from the Telegram, but Black’s bylined
columns persisted, particularly notable being a series of eyewitness coverage of Cecil B.
DeMille’s filming of The Ten Commandments in the Oceano Dunes.108 Usually hers was the sole
byline in an issue of the paper or in any surrounding issues and remained the only local byline.
During Black’s two years on the Telegram, it was locked in competition with the declining
Tribune and a new rival, the San Luis Obispo Morning Herald. (The Telegram had been started as a
temperance paper, since the Tribune accepted advertising from bars, and the Herald was the
rebranded Obispan, founded as a more overtly pro-Prohibition paper than the Telegram had
106. “Chauncey Olcott in Delightful Play Well Acted,” 17 Mar. 1922, p. 4; “$300,000 Building Plans in Three
Months Indicate Era of Growth of City,” 1 Aug. 1923, p. 8;
107. Mary Gail Black, San Luis Obispo Daily Telegram: “Military Atmosphere About Camp DeMille in Dunes near
Guadalupe Where Actors Work,” 7 June 1923, p. 8; “Stars and Extras Alike Taking Personal Interest in Filming of
Huge DeMille Picture Scenes,” 11 June 1923, p. 2; “Figures Show Immensity of Task of Producing a Modern Motion
Picture of Super-Feature Type,” 9 July 1923, p. 3.
108. “Stars and Extras Alike Taking Personal Interest in Filming of Huge DeMille Picture Scenes,” 11 June 1923, p.
2; “Figures Show Immensity of Task of Producing a Modern Motion Picture of Super-Feature Type,” 9 July 1923, p.
3.
41
become [Black, Profile of the Daily Telegram, 106–108].) As the result of its zealous reporters—
particularly Black, who during one week when Day and the other reporter were both on
vacation, covered all the news by herself (108–109)—the Telegram fulfilled Day’s slogan of
“Today’s News Today” and won the circulation war. At the of 1923, however, Day sold out to
the losing Herald, which would adopt the Telegram name and in 1925 buy out the Tribune,
before selling out to the Scripps chain.
Day used his profit to buy the Porterville Recorder, where Black, Waterman, and others of the
staff migrated (Black, Profile of the Daily Telegram, 109–111). Three years later, Day sold the
Recorder for three times the purchase price; Black got a scholarship to UC Berkeley, where she
earned her BA; and Waterman moved back to San Luis, where she and her father together
purchased the Simmler Adobe. There Black would spend vacations, in 1929 filling in as the
Telegram’s acting editor of Social and Club News and also writing more byline columns.
After graduating summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in English in 1931, Black returned briefly
to the Telegram, moving into the Watermans’ adobe.109 In a year of national news on Halcyon
poet Ella Young’s being barred from return to the United States as a risk of becoming a “public
charge,” then being readmitted with a lectureship at UC Berkeley, Black broke the story on
Young’s application for citizenship in a thoughtful interview.110
Black went back east with a fellowship for a master’s at Smith, returning in the summer to the
adobe. According to conversation with McPhee (26 Apr. 2022), Black was offered a job on Time
magazine. However, Mildred Waterman lost her job, and in the depths of the Depression, Black
came back to her rescue. Black later taught in Berkeley’s Emergency Education Program, a New
Deal initiative; then worked in the state’s textbook office in Sacramento; finally returning to San
109. “More Men Win Honors Than Fair Co-Eds,” Oakland Tribune, 13 May 1931, p. 20.
110. “Famous Irish Poetess Asks Citizenship,” San Luis Obispo Daily Telegram, 29 July 1931, p. 1.
42
Luis, Mildred Waterman, and the adobe, in her (and the century’s) mid forties, working with
Waterman in the registrar’s office of the County Health Department.111
In the 1950s, Waterman, now in her seventies, was deputy registrar of the department,
recounted by a social notice in the Georgetown News, and though Black was working with her,
she seems to have preferred being described in the notice as a “former newspaper woman.”112
Once Mary Gail Black left journalism, she rarely published, with the exception of co-founding
with Carol McPhee in 1973 a local paid-subscription newsletter called the Central Democrat,
which, under the guise of Democratic centrism, was to introduce its few hundred readers to
Second-Wave Feminism (McPhee, A Small Town Women’s Movement, 37). They published it for
three years until McPhee became too busy chairing the County Commission on the Status of
Women to contribute.
In 1988 Tabula Rasa Press published the second in the Heritage Series, San Luis Obispo County,
consisting of Black’s Profile of the “Daily Telegram”: A Story of San Luis Obispo, 1921–1923. A
rollicking and well-reviewed account of small-town newspaper work and San Luis Obispo in the
early twenties, it is a very rare memoir of an early woman reporter, further confirming her
status as individually significant leader in her profession. The only comparable memoir of an
early-twentieth-century woman journalist that comes to mind is Martha Gellhorn’s Travels With
Myself and Another: A Memoir (1978), which is more international and glamorous in focus.
Community Activism The 1950s was an era when goal-oriented associations were
overtaking fraternal organizations and social clubs even in small town America, and Black
became a consummate San Luis organization woman: chair of an American Association of
University Women public political discussion for the election; International Relations officer of
the AAUW; San Luis attendee of the annual conference of the World Affairs Council of
Northern California; county publicity chair and state delegate of the American Cancer Society;
life member (with Waterman) of the new County Historical Society, for which they hosted
tours of the Simmler Adobe as well as open houses of the Dallidet Adobe.113 (Waterman and
Black had also purchased the Castro Adobe on Chorro Street in 1953, after selling another
property they owned jointly.114)
In the late 1930s, prefiguring this post–World War II associationizing of middle-class America,
particularly of middle-class American women, the American Cancer Society (then the American
Society for the Control of Cancer) had created the Women’s Field Army, a vast corps of khaki-
111. McPhee, “Mary Gail Black”; Winifred Pratt, “Business and Professional Women’s Annual Barbecue Dinner
Very Delightful Affair,” Pismo Times, 25 Aug. 1933, p. 5; “Berkeley EEP Adds Classes,” Oakland Tribune, 12 Oct.
1936, p. 16; “Public Health Nurses Give Tea Honoring Volunteers,” San Luis Obispo Telegram-Tribune, 10 Apr. 1946,
p. 2; conversation with Carol McPhee, 26 Apr. 2022.
112. “Georgetown News,” Auburn Journal, 26 July 1956, p. sec. 2, p. 3.
113. San Luis Obispo County Telegram-Tribune: “AAUW Sets Political Discussion,” 14 Oct. 1958, p. 3; “AAUW
Installs Officers at Honor Dinner,” 15 May 1957, p. 7; “Group Attending World Affairs Meeting,” 30 Apr. 1959, p.
9; “Cancer Drive Over Quota; Officers Elected at Dinner,” 18 Sep. 1958, p. 3; “Local Cancer Society Lists
Officers,” 26 Sep. 1957, p. 1; “Colony Inmates Donate Blood to Cancer Bank,” 13 Sep. 1956, p. 16; Arroyo Grande
Valley Herald Recorder: “Sunday Open Houses Prove Popular at the Dallidet Adobe,” 13 Nov. 1959, p. 5.
114. San Luis Obispo County Telegram-Tribune: “Recorded October 3, 1952,” p. 13; “Deeds Recorded in the
Courthouse,” 11 Feb. 1953, p. 16.
43
uniformed volunteers.115 Immediately after World War II, it undertook a major research
program, and it used its volunteers to recruit a huge statistical base.
As a “former newspaper woman,” Black would have seemed a natural to stay in the American
Cancer Society’s county publicity role, but in 1959 she was selected to head county volunteers
in the society’s multi-year Cancer Prevention Study I (CPS I) on living habits and environment
as epidemiology chair.116 (It is worth mentioning that the county society was being led at the
time by a brigadier general.) The national study involved nearly a million male and female
subjects and 68,000 volunteers in 25 states. Among other results, it showed the increased lung
cancer rate among women to be wholly related to smoking, and was the first study to link
obesity and shortened survival.117 Black led 20 volunteer researchers of 414 subjects for the
county’s component of the 6-year epidemiology study, for which the county branch presented
Black with an outstanding service award in 1966.118
Left: Mary Gail Black, as head of the local AAUW World Problems Study Section, with Ethel Cooley,
back from a trip to the Orient. San Luis Obispo County Telegram-Tribune, 6 Nov. 1963. Right:
Black with Carol McPhee, Coalesce Bookstore, 1980s. A Small Town Women’s Movement, p. 68.
CPS I became a major component of Smoking and Health: Report of the Advisory Committee to the
Surgeon General (1964), which in turn led to the 1971 National Cancer Act, National Cancer
Institute, and the War on Cancer.
Having finished the epidemiology project, Black immediately became the county society’s
education chair for the remainder of the decade and began proselytizing for quitting smoking,
115. “Our History,” American Cancer Society, cancer.org, accessed 25 Apr. 2022.
116. “Cancer Society to Conduct Study of Local Families,” Arroyo Grande Valley Herald Recorder, 20 Nov. 1959, p. 5.
117. “History of the Cancer Prevention Studies,” American Cancer Society, cancer.org, accessed 25 Apr. 2022.
118. “County Residents Benefit from Work of Cancer Society,” Grover City Press, 24 Dec. 1964, sec. 1, p. 3;
“Kickoff Dinner Opens Annual Cancer Crusade,” Pismo Times, 21 Apr. 1966, p. 3.
44
representing the Cancer Society in the “war on smoking” of the Interagency Council on
Cigarette Smoking and Health.119 This resulted in dozens of appearances in the press to
promote an “intensive educational drive” on prevention and early detection, through clubs,
employee groups, radio, television, pamphlets, posters, films, and additional research.120 In 1971
Black led the effort to find 200 of the original subjects to resume CPS I.121
CPS I was followed up by CPS II (1982–2006) and CPS 3 (2013–present). These national
longitudinal studies have all been made possible by local volunteers. Black’s leading role in the
local mobilization for the first study makes her “individually significant within a historic
context.” Her work also represents an era when the collective volunteer labor of women made
a significant impact in tackling societal challenges ranging from diseases like cancer and polio to
voter education and historic preservation. By the 1970s, a combination of new opportunities
and economic necessity was moving this workforce into paid employment, though often in the
same socially responsible areas and at lesser salaries than for men.
Political organizing Black was born in Wyoming, where women had had the vote since
1869 and her father had been a Republican state legislator (McPhee, “Mary Gail Black”). The
first documentation of her political involvement, however, is working on Adlai Stevenson’s 1952
presidential campaign in San Luis.122 It was not till her election in 1959 as recording secretary of
the San Luis Obispo Democratic Club, of which she was a founder, that we can document her
move into leadership of local organizing for local, state, and national politics.123 She never ran
for public office, but she was a leader in the durable political machinery that made campaigns
for public office possible for others.
In 1962 Black, “civic leader and long-time Democrat,” was appointed county chair of the
Democratic nominee for the new 12th Congressional District, William K. “Bill” Stewart, and
hosted an open house for him at 466 Dana.124 Two years later, it took two men—a doctor and
a lawyer—to chair the Democratic Congressional candidate’s county campaign, though Black
later replaced one of the men.125 She took over this role as Congressional campaign co-chair
after the Democratic Central Committee election—involving eight candidates for seven seats in
the Third Supervisorial District—resulted in the seven men winning and Mary Gail Black losing
(with 1,848 votes).126 The winners included Harold Miossi, a friend of Cal Poly president Julian
McPhee’s family, who, according to Carol McPhee, later “took it upon himself to tell me [Black]
sometimes acted like a man” (A Small Town Women’s Movement, 25).
119. “‘Never Too Late’ to Stop Smoking Says Cancer Unit,” Grover City Press, 15 Dec. 1965, p. 5; “War on Smoking
Declared,” Arroyo Grande Valley Herald Recorder, 22 Dec. 1966, p. 11.
120. “Nov. 9–15 Named Cancer Education Week in County,” Arroyo Grande Valley Herald Recorder, 9 Nov. 1967,
sec. 2, p. 2.
121. “Cancer Researchers Back on the Job for County Unit,” Five Cities Times-Press-Recorder, 11 Nov. 1971, sec. 3,
p. 3.
122. Leon Panetta, Congressional Record, 25 Apr. 1984, p. 9977.
123. “Democrats Urge ‘Education’ on Voting Machines, San Luis Obispo County Telegram-Tribune, 23 Nov. 1959, p. 1.
124. San Luis Obispo County Telegram-Tribune: “W. K. Stewart to Appear Here Sunday,” 27 Apr. 1962, p. 2; “Stewart
Group Sets Barbecue,” 13 Sep. 1962, p. 2.
125. “Bolz Names SLO Campaign Leaders,” San Luis Obispo County Telegram-Tribune, 28 May 1964, p. 14; “Dail 544-
2530,” advertisement, San Luis Obispo County Telegram-Tribune, 27 Oct. 1964, p. 9.
126. “Seven Named to Demo Committee,” San Luis Obispo County Telegram-Tribune, 4 June 1964, p. 1.
45
In 1964 Black was one of 3 women among 9 county delegates to the California Democratic
Council, in 1966 one of 6 women among 12 delegates.127 Black was appointed to the County
Democratic Central Committee in 1966 and was re-elected unopposed the following year and
again in 1970 and 1972, ultimately serving till 1984, during a time when it was becoming
increasingly hard to recruit people to the committee.128
In 1968 Black became secretary of the “exceptionally successful” McCarthy for President
campaign in the county, which bested Robert Kennedy by 2,000 votes but in September but
was reorganized as the Cranston for Senator Club, with Black continuing as secretary.129 (Alan
Cranston beat far right candidate Max Rafferty and went on to serve for 24 years and pay
tribute to Black when she stepped down from the county central committee in 1984.)
Black’s father as a Wyoming politician, Mary Gail as a Wyoming baby, and candidate Suzanne Paizis.
Wyoming Press 10 Nov. 1906 and 3 May 1902 and Sacramento Bee 13 Dec. 1972, B4.
Black’s most historically significant role for a candidate, however, was leading the county
campaign for Suzanne Paizis, a schoolteacher and the Democratic nominee for the State
Senate’s 17th District. The California Senate had never, in its 121-year history, had a woman
senator. Paizis was one of two women that year who won Democratic primaries to run against
Republican incumbents, the other being Catherine O’Neill in the 25th District. They appear to
127. “Yesterday’s Pages,” San Luis Obispo County Telegram-Tribune, 21 Feb. 1969, p. 14; “County Delegates Split on
Casady,” San Luis Obispo County Telegram-Tribune, 19 Feb. 1966, p. 1.
128. “Appointments Fill Democratic Committee,” Arroyo Grande Valley Herald Recorder, 4 Aug. 1966, p. 13; “Only
One Contest on Ballot for Central Committee,” Arroyo Grande Valley Herald Recorder, 4 Apr. 1968, p. 8; Warren
Groshong, “Election Interest Slight,” San Luis Obispo County Telegram-Tribune, 26 Mar. 1970, p. 9; “Partisan Offices
Unfilled,” Five Cities Times-Press-Recorder, 23 Mar. 1972, sec. 1, p. 11; “Roberti to Speak to Demos,” Five Cities Times-
Press-Recorder, 18 Apr. 1984, p. 11.
129. “PUC Firebrand Here Saturday,” San Luis Obispo County Telegram-Tribune, 18 Apr. 1968, p. 9; “Cranston
Backers Organize,” Arroyo Grande Valley Herald Recorder, 3 Oct. 1968, p 9.
46
have been the first women State Senatorial party nominees in California history and were
certainly regarded so at the time. Neither Paizis, 47, or O’Neill, 29, had run for office before.
Both lost, O’Neill in a squeaker in what would later become Tom Hayden’s district, Paizis by 59
to 41 percent against a Republican incumbent who had previously run unopposed (Paizis got
91.4 of the UC Santa Cruz student vote, compared to George McGovern’s 94.5, but the north
Central Coast was still predominately conservative).130 The California State Senate would
remain an all-male club till 1977, when Democrat Rose Ann Vuich staged an upset for the
previously Republican 15th District in the Central Valley. She would serve as the sole woman
till Diane Watson from LA’s 30th District joined her in 1979 and Lucy Killea from San Diego’s
39th District in 1989.
After the Paizis loss, Black switched focus to her stealth Feminist newsletter, Central Democrat,
which she co-produced with Carol McPhee (from the adobe [McPhee, Small Town Women’s
Movement, 38]) for three years, and to getting the County Board of Supervisors to create a
Commission on the Status of Women, which Paizis had just done in in Santa Cruz County.
Extraordinarily, as McPhee points out in her book, Black began her career during First-Wave
Feminism and was politically active well into Second-Wave Feminism (20).
As a woman coming of age in the early twentieth century at the end of the first phase of
the American women’s movement, Mary Gail Black believed it was possible for any
woman to seize her own liberty and become successful in the world. She admitted it
hadn’t occurred to her until the recent news about the movement coming from the
cities that a web of laws still kept women subordinate and must be changed.
Under the Criterion A discussion on this effort, I have described how Black stepped back from
leadership of that campaign to allow a more inclusive approach led by a younger Feminist, Carol
McPhee. The pain of that decision, after Black had struggled for nearly two decades as a
woman—and “an unconventional woman” (51), “considered eccentric” (25), a woman who
“sometimes acted like a man”—to break into county Democratic leadership, cannot be
overestimated. McPhee’s appointment to the commission, and her responsibility as chair, was a
role Black would have wanted for herself and had worked hard to attain. It was the role Paizis,
whose campaign she had managed, had in Santa Cruz.
Coinciding with Black’s retirement from the Democratic Central Committee at the age of 85,
Congressman Leon Panetta presented a tribute to her in the Congressional Record, highlighting
her leadership of county campaigns, her co-editing of Central Democrat, and her chairship and
vice-chairship of the county Democratic Central Committee. It was the end of a more than
three-decade involvement in the liberal end of Democratic politics—highlighted by her arrest at
age 79 (the press gave it as 77) for climbing over two barbed wire fences onto PG&E property
in a protest against Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant.131
Notably, after an Avila Beach rally with an estimated 1,000 participants, Black was one of only
46 to invite arrest with their trespassing protest, and she got her photo on the front page of
the Lompoc Record next to Daniel Ellsberg’s. This was the first mass-arrest occupation of Diablo
Canyon, and an appeal of charges went all the way to the California Supreme Court based on
130. Santa Cruz Sentinel: Wallace Wood, “Chairman Says Demos Alive and Well in SC,” 7 Dec. 1972, p. 19; “The
Campus Vote,” 13 Nov. 1972, p. 11.
131. Sue Edelman, “Demonstrators Arrested at Diablo Nuclear Plant,” Lompoc Record, 8 Aug. 1977, p. 1.
47
infiltration of the Abalone Alliance’s legal committee by an undercover sheriff’s officer.132 The
following August, 487 protesters were arrested at a two-day protest.133 The next mass arrest
took place in 1981 as the plant tried to re-open, two years after Three-Mile Island, with a
blockade maintained over two weeks, resulting in over 1,900 arrests, surpassing Seabrook to
become the largest mass arrests in the history of the Anti-Nuclear Movement.134 Even at
seventy-nine, “considered too old to be effective” (McPhee, Small Town Women’s Movement,
51), Mary Gail Black was at the forefront.
Period of Association Mildred Waterman and her father purchased the property at
466 Dana on 26 January 1927. Her father and mother are referred to on 2 February 1927 as
living on the 500 block of Islay Street. The first press mention of the move to the Simmler
Adobe is on 25 February 1928, regarding Fred Waterman “being confined to his home on Dana
Street several days by illness.135
The 1988 Telegram-Tribune article on her donation of the adobe and garden dated Black’s life in
the house from 1927 (Eddy). The first contemporary documentation of her association is 24
December 1928, with the Telegram announcement “Miss Mary Black, former resident here and
now a student at the University of California in Berkeley, is one of the holiday visitors in this
city as the house guest of Miss Mildred Waterman at her home on Dana Street.”136 When a tea
for the Business and Professional Women’s Club of San Luis Obispo was hosted on 9 June 1929
“in the gardens and home of Miss Mildred Waterman, 466 Dana Street,” with tea served in the
arbor and Mildred pouring, Mary Gail Black was listed in attendance.137
The 21 July 1927 Telegram mention of Waterman and Black attending a supper party together
suggests Black spent at least some of her 1927 summer before college with Waterman at the
adobe (Black’s sister still lived in Oceano, but her mother had died there in 1926).138 The 16
July 1928 social item “The Misses Mildred Waterman and Mary Gail Black entertained guests at
Breakfast Sunday morning” presumably locates at the adobe and garden (“Breakfast Guests,” p.
3). Black later recollected renovating the adobe with Mildred Waterman, including using boards
from the yard to cover dirt floors, which suggests that Black was pitching in to make the adobe
livable for Mildred and the older Watermans from soon after purchase.139
In 1931 Black finished her bachelor’s degree at the University of California and was back
working for the Telegram that summer. She got a graduate degree at Smith College and lived at
the adobe for a time during the Great Depression.140 In 1936 she was teaching in Berkeley.141 A
29 December 1938 Telegram item has her visiting Waterman from Sacramento (“News Briefs,”
p. 2), where she was working in the state textbook office (Johnston, op. cit.). Black referenced
132. “Diablo Nuclear Plant Project Nears Crisis,” Berkeley Independent and Gazette, 20 Ja. 1979, p. 5.
133. “Jailer: Diablo Foes Won’t Be Tossed Out,” San Luis Obispo County Telegram-Tribune, 8 Aug. 1978, p. 1.
134. Larry Bauman, “18 Arrested in Downtown SLO Protest,” San Luis Obispo County Telegram-Tribune, 29 Sep.
1981, p. 1; “Arrests at Diablo Canyon Pass Total at Seabrook,” New York Times, 23 Sep. 1981, A16.
135. “City News in Brief,” San Luis Obispo Daily Telegram, p. 6.
136. “Miss Black Is Guest,” 24 Dec. 1928, p. 5.
137. “B.P.W. Garden Tea Successful and Colorful Event of Sunday Afternoon,” San Luis Obispo Daily Telegram, 10
June 1929, p. 2.
138. “Islay Road,” San Luis Obispo Daily Telegram, p. 3.
139. “City News in Brief,” San Luis Obispo Daily Telegram, 14 Feb. 1927, p. 5.
140. Kathy Johnston, “The Butron Adobe—Giving Us a Sense of Our Roots,” SLO Magazine, May 1999, pp. 16–17.
141. “Berkeley EEP Adds Classes,” 12 Oct. 1936, Oakland Tribune, p. 16.
48
additional renovations to the adobe in 1942 (Eddy, op. cit.), but a 1943 death notice for Black’s
sister mentions Black still living in Sacramento.142 In 1946, however, Waterman and Black were
honored as volunteers at the Santa Rosa Street USO, and in 1953 together they purchased the
Castro Adobe at 669 Chorro Street.143 A 1997 profile of Black by her younger friend Carol
McPhee had Black returning to San Luis Obispo only in the early 1950s and working on the
Adlai Stevenson campaign in the county in 1952, but this was when McPhee was a girl and had
not taken note of Black, and the profile was written nine years after the death of Black, who
could not be consulted.144 Once Black was back from Sacramento, she lived the rest of her life
at the Simmler Adobe.
Waterman died in 1969 (not 1958, as the Sanchez report states), at which point Black inherited
the adobe and, to pay taxes (her partnership with Mildred Waterman not being legally
recognized) was forced to sell the Castro Adobe, which they had owned jointly, and which was
shortly after demolished.145 The demolition was sufficiently traumatic for Black to negotiate,
between 1986 and 1988, a gift of the Simmler Adobe and Garden—with the condition of the
preservation and use of both for public recreation—to the City of San Luis Obispo. Black died
in 1989, making her documented association with the adobe 61 years, two decades longer than
Jacob Simmler’s.
B. Significance of the Simmler Adobe
1. Criterion C: It embodies distinctive characteristics of a type of construction:
Greek Revival According to county land records, J. J. Simmler purchased the property
at the confluence of the Arroyo de la Huerta and Arroyo de San Luis Obispo from Blas Castro
in June 1865 (Book A, p. 743). Castro purchased it from the Board of Trustees of the Town of
San Luis Obispo in December 1860 (Book A, p. 371).
It is plausible Castro built a new adobe house on his new property; possible that Simmler and
Butrón built the adobe house on their new property and within 5 years (when it appears in the
Trousset painting) had added wood wings but less plausible than Castro building an adobe and
Simmler extending it for his family. It is also possible that the adobe was extant before Castro’s
purchase, but as the land was unclaimed by anyone other than the city, this seems unlikely.
A building of the correct location and angle and of the adobe’s current street-facing appearance
is at the far left of the panoramic painting of San Luis Obispo from the southeast by the French-
born Leon Trousset. Housed at the Mission San Luis Obispo, this undated painting traditionally
has been attributed to the year 1865 but was painted almost certainly in spring 1870.146 The
142. “Mrs. Ida Rogers Called by Death,” San Luis Obispo Telegram-Tribune, 18 Nov. 1943, p. 3.
143. “Public Health Nurses Give Tea Honoring Volunteers,” San Luis Obispo Telegram-Tribune, 10 Apr. 1946, p. 2.
144. Carol McPhee, “Mary Gail Black: A Lifetime of Service,” 1997.
145. “Mildred Waterman,” San Luis Obispo County Telegram-Tribune, 20 May 1969, p. 10.
146. Between 1856, when a Léon Trousset of the right age shows up in a census in Reims as an apprentice
butcher, and October 1867, when the artist Leon Trousset made his earliest extant dated drawing—of Fort Davis,
Texas—his whereabouts are unknown, though circumstantial evidence suggests he may have been part of the
invasion force of the Second Franco-Mexican War of 1861–1867. The itinerant Trousset is documented in Las
Cruces, Texas in 1869. His earliest surviving dated scenes of California are 1875, though Claudine Chalmers in
Spendide Californie!: Impressions of the Goden State by French Artists, 1786–1900 (San Francisco: Book Club of
California, 2001) attributes a scene of Moss Landing to 1873. His view of San Luis, however, includes in the left
foreground the first San Luis schoolhouse, which was framed in late November 1869, with funds for its completion
being raised in December (weekly San Luis Obispo Tribune: “New School House,” 4 Dec. 1869p. 2), while in the
49
Simmler Adobe had by then its character-defining hip roof extending down to symmetrical
wings and front portico with square columns, all marks of the Greek Revival.
Peripteral Greek Revival in America and Monterey Style Adobes in California
Ashland in Darrow, Louisiana (1840) shows how
the Greek temple was adapted into a house for
America’s warmer climates by surrounding a
domestic block with a two-story portico.
1834 Santa Barbara adobe of Captain Alpheus
Thompson of Maine, demolished in 1913. Note
the Greek pediments topping the upstairs door
and windows and pilasters flanking the door.
The Larkin House, oldest Monterey style adobe in Monterey, built by Thomas O. Larkin of
Massachusetts in 1835. Peripteral and semi-peripteral Greek Revivals, with porticos extending all or
part of the way around the house, were the most extravagant (and coolest). Most had a full-width
portico (like the Dallidet Adobe and Sauer-Adams Adobe) or partial-width portico (like the Simmler
Adobe). Here the columns have no bases or capitals but are chamfered. Apart from columns and
occasional pediments, Greek Revival architecture had a severe and undecorated aesthetic, unlike Gothic
Revival with its elaborate fretwork.
right middle ground there is no evidence of the County Courthouse, which was excavated and its foundations laid
by August 1872, with walls going up the following month (“Improvements,” weekly San Luis Obispo Tribune, 17 Aug.
1872, p. 2). In 2017 Robert Sachs discovered a portrait of George Washington as a Mason, signed by Léon
Trousset and dated 1870, in the vault of the Masonic Lodge in San Luis Obispo. It was plausibly painted to mark
the founding of a new lodge in June 1870 (Sachs, Robert, “Introduction,” The History Behind the Portrait of George
Washington by Leon Trousset [San Luis Obispo: King David’s Lodge, 2021]). Trousset’s panoramic landscape of San
Luis Obispo features green grass, which suggests spring of 1870. The 12 Oct. 1870 San Francisco Chronicle lists a
letter at the post office for “Trousset Leon” (p. 4).
50
Rancho Petaluma Adobe, built by General Mariano Vallejo in 1836. It is missing decorative detailing of
the columns but has the Greek Revival form, like many rustic plantations in the Deep South
There are quite a few Greek Revival buildings in the Trousset painting, as well as in early
photographs of San Luis Obispo, both in adobe and wood, the latter including Captain John and
Ramona Wilson’s house where the History Center (Carnegie Library) is now, believed to have
been the first wood-frame house in the town. The only survivors from the nineteenth century’s
Greek Revival era are the Sauer-Adams Adobe, the Dallidet Adobe, and the Simmler Adobe,
each dating from the 1860s (the Dallidet possibly 1859).
West Monterey Street in Leon Trousset’s panorama: Tudor-arched, semi-peripteral Gothic Revival (the
Hays-Latimer Adobe), left, and two Greek Revivals, neither still extant: the Stanuseich House at center
and board and batten, side-gabled Wilson House at right
Not only was Greek Revival a popular form in early American San Luis Obispo, it had been a
defining architectural movement in Alta California since the 1830s, when it was imported from
New England. The two-story adobe built in Santa Barbara in 1834 by Captain Alpheus
Thompson of Maine, the earliest documented Greek Revival structure in California, was semi-
peripteral (surrounded by porticoes on three sides) and had pediments and pilasters to further
emphasize its Grecian reference. The adobe built in Monterey in 1835 by Thomas Larkin of
Massachusetts is also semi-peripteral. It lacks the classical details that characterized the
demolished Thompson Adobe, but its symmetry and severity are part of the Greek Revival
aesthetic, recognizable in other provincial examples of the style, particularly in the American
South. General Mariano Vallejo’s wholly peripteral Rancho Petaluma Adobe saw Greek Revival
architecture accepted into the Californio hierarchy. The so-called Monterey style adobe is a
California version of Greek Revival neither originating in nor limited to Monterey.
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The oldest surviving image of San Luis Obispo, the 1850 William R. Hutton drawing, shows the
Greek Revival house of Captain John Wilson and Ramona Carrillo de Pacheco de Wilson, with
its two-story portico and second-story gallery on a side-gabled board and batten structure,
directly west of the Mission. The second oldest image, Henry Miller’s 1856 drawing, shows a
new Greek Revival adobe directly east of the Mission, with a two-story portico with second-
story gallery topped by a pediment. The third oldest image is the Trousset painting.
Of numerous other Greek Revival buildings in San Luis Obispo, the most sophisticated survivor
is the Sauer-Adams Adobe, with hip roof, a second-story gallery of square columns with bases
and capitals, door- and window-topping pediments, and a rectangular fanlight, all Greek Revival
characteristics. Its second story and hip roof were most likely added circa the Sauer purchase in
1860 and appear in the Trousset painting, but the second-story colonnade does not and must
have been added later. Similarly the Old Whaling Station, Monterey, was built with Greek
Revival severity, symmetry, and rectangular fanlight but only later gained a second-story balcony
and colonnade. The severe, symmetrical, hip-roofed, front-porticoed, square-columned Dallidet
Adobe, constructed in 1859 or 1860, has equally the character-defining features of California’s
Greek Revival, as does the similar Simmler Adobe.
Above: Simmler, symmetrical, severe, square-column-porticoed, hip-roofed. Below: Dallidet, symmetrical,
severe, square-column-porticoed, hip-roofed, rectangular fan-lit. Both have six-over-six windows.
52
Sauer-Adams Adobe, symmetrical, less severe (with pedimented doors and windows and Gothic Revival
fretwork), square-column-galleried, hip roofed, rectangular fan-lit
2. Criterion C: It embodies distinctive characteristics of a method of construction:
Adobe There are 14 known adobes in San Luis: 1 from the late eighteenth century (the
Mission); 3 adapted from the early nineteenth century (Sauer, Sauer-Adams, La Loma); 1
uncertain (Murray); 3 almost certainly dating circa 1860 (Hays-Latimer, Dallidet, and Simmler);
3 likely mid-nineteenth-century (Andrews, Mancilla-Freitas, Rodriguez); 3 from the mid to late
twentieth century (Heyd, Smith, and Nelson and Garris), the Heyd to be demolished shortly.
The adobe section of the Simmler Adobe consists of a 17’ x 30’ adobe room on a stone
foundation, roofed with a probably contemporary milled truss.
Adobe was both a traditional and practical building material in San Luis in the mid nineteenth
century and did not immediately disappear with the availability of milled lumber. John and
Ramona Wilson’s wood house in San Luis, reputed to be the town’s earliest, was documented
by 1850 but plausibly built by 1846, when led the supplicants along the corredor of the next-door
Mission to beg Col. Frémont for José de Jesus Pico’s life, possibly before then, given that John
Wilson acquired the Ranchos Pecho y Islay and Cañada de los Osos in 1844 and the Mission in
1845. By 1870 the Tribune felt the need to explain why someone would build an adobe rather
than wood (Juan Cappe’s new tavern, the choice of adobe attributed to his Mexican patria).147
The Dallidet Adobe was built in 1859 or 1860, with a post-1876 wood extension on the back.
The Gothic Revival Hays-Latimer Adobe was likely built by Irish civil engineer William Parker
and simultaneously sheathed in lumber with a surrounding veranda circa 1862. Adobe remained
a practical climate-moderator and must have seemed more substantial than balloon-frame
structures, let alone box-frame, as the Wilson House may have been. Clapboard, shiplap, and
board and batten, however, were the materials of contemporary architectural trends.
The designer of the Hays-Latimer Adobe skillfully integrated its adobe portions
(accommodating interior spaces) and wooden portions (accommodating exterior spaces). It has
147. “Enterprising,” San Luis Obispo Tribune, 24 Sep. 1870, p. 2.).
53
The Simmler’s adobe room, toward west (with fireplace) and north (to kitchen). Note wood ceiling.
54
the sophisticated layout and decorative features that suggest a well-read and practiced
architect, possibly its owner Parker, one of two civil engineers in the county.
In contrast, the later wooden rear extension on the Dallidet Adobe involves an awkward
descent (because of the adobe’s wine cellar) and poky bedrooms. Similarly, the wooden
surround on the Simmler Adobe, including both interior rooms and exterior porch, is of sparse
vertical dimensions. Almost certainly the central adobe section was built at one time and the
wooden surround later, the roof having to descend awkwardly to retain pitch.
The “Construction Chronology” of the 1998 Rosa Butron de Canet Adobe Condition Assessment
and Preliminary Rehabilitation Study by Gil Sanchez depends on the misattribution of the property
to Vicente Canet so assumes the 30’ by 17’ adobe structure to have been built during the
Rancho Era and “less likely during Blas Castro’s ownership” (p. 8). Given Castro obtained the
land from the town trustees, this is most likely an early American Era adobe both built and
adapted in the 1860s, in original condition, and of significance, interest, and research value for
those reasons. The Sanchez report points out that the brick size is not determinative of era,
and its observation about the unslanted nature of the window openings suggesting utilitarian
Foundation rocks behind the walls
Hip end of the Simmler roof truss
55
Simmler rafter showing milling pattern
rather than sophisticated domestic construction is well taken, but this could equally be
explained by Castro hiring inferior craftsmen or not paying for superior work.
The central roof is milled trusswork consistent with the Sauer-Adams and Hays-Latimer
Adobes—both roofed in the 1860s (the Sauer-Adams when it was expanded to a second floor).
These roofs replaced the hewn pine beams of an earlier era, and the Simmler’s roof clearly
predates the too-low roof extensions for the wings rather than having been conceived as a
unified roof for expansion. It is possible that an earlier adobe on the property was repaired and
reroofed, but it seems more plausible that adobe and roof were built from scratch circa 1860
and the wings were added circa 1865. The Dallidet and Hays-Latimer roofs have been altered,
leaving the Sauer-Adams and Simmler Adobes to represent their era in original form.
It seems least plausible that the former hotelier Jacob Simmler and the wealthy ranchera Rosa
Butrón would build a one-room adobe for a town house in 1865 and by 1870 add wings. It
seems most plausible that Blas Castro, on vacant land sold by the trustees on the outskirts of
the town in 1860, would build a one-room adobe, much like Pierre Dallidet’s at the same time,
and five years later the Simmlers would buy it and give it architectural presence and additional
comfort with a wood portico and wings in the prevalent Greek Revival style.
3. Criterion C: It embodies distinctive characteristics of a method of construction:
Western single-wall load-bearing or box frame Though the adobe section is an
important element of the structure, it’s worth pointing out one of the worst disasters of San
Luis Obispo preservation: the Murray Adobe—whose significant wood central section
(associated with the law office of Walter Murray and the founding of the Tribune) was
demolished by architecture students, leaving an adobe lean-to shorn of significance.
Like the Simmler additions, the demolished section of the Murray Adobe appears to have been
single-wall load-bearing construction. (This is the recollection of Bruce Fraser, who was one of
the students instructed to tear it down. If any documentation of the demolition existed it
appears to have been lost.) The destruction of the Murray Adobe makes the Simmler Adobe
the earliest box frame structure in San Luis Obispo whose date (pre-1870) has been confirmed.
A crucial and common method of construction in the Old West, box frame rarely survives—
less, apparently, from instability than intentional destruction. Two-thirds of the 122 standing,
unmodified, original buildings of the ghost town of Bodie, California are box frame.148
The availability of sturdy old-growth redwood, the burgeoning of sawmills, and the Californian
aesthetic distaste for corrugated iron made box frame the quick construction method of choice
148. Andrea Sue Morrison, Structural Failures of Single-Wall Construction in a Western Mining Town: Bodie, California
(University of Pennsylvania master’s thesis, 1999), p. 2.
56
from the Gold Rush on.149 Corrugated iron and 1” by 12” redwood planks both doubled as
structurally-supporting and sheathing materials. Corrugated iron kit buildings were imported in
the Gold Rush, fell out of favor, then dominated in New Zealand and Australia, in absence of
suitable construction wood. Corrugated iron made a comeback in California in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for industrial buildings where fire safety was an issue
(though it was impossible to break through the roof during a fire). At that point, the balloon
frame was firmly established for residential structures. Corrugated iron was to return via
Nissen huts in World War I and Quonset huts in World War II (Papp, Halcyon Press Building).
The presence of board and batten walls does not confirm box framing; on-site examination of
the interior is necessary. The Jack Carriage House, for instance, is a post and beam structure
with vertical 1x12” old-growth redwood sheathing (covered on the outside in false historicist
fake board and batten made of plywood). The Wilson House, which a photograph confirms was
board and batten, may have been box frame, balloon frame, or post and beam.
Board and batten is visible at the edges of the shiplap siding on the exterior, but the interior reveals
absence of 2x4 or post and beam framing, confirming box frame construction
In San Luis Obispo, box frame has been little studied. From my experience, residential box
frame here tends to date until the end of the nineteenth century (e.g., The Establishment, built
as the Chicago Hotel, in 1897), though box frame garages were constructed in the 1910s, ’20s,
and even ’30s.150 The vertical, structural boards of box frames tend, in San Luis, to be covered
with horizontal shiplap, mostly in residential buildings but even some garages, like that at 679
Monterey. Whether this was for looks or stability or both is unknown.
From examination confirmed by historic photography, substantial portions and probably all of
the Simmler-era wood wings of the adobe appear to be box frame, and any that was visible
from the street, both front and sides, was covered with shiplap. The rear was uncovered, as
seen on the following page, in a detail from a photograph dated 1936 in Edith Gragg’s album.
149. James Papp, The Halcyon Press Building, 1600 Ocean Street, Oceano: Certificate of Appropriateness, 13 May 2022,
pp. 13–14.
150. James Papp, Garage, 1336 Morro Street: Historic Resource Evaluation, 10 June 2022; Nuss House Garage, 1123
Pismo Street: Historic Resource Evaluation, 8 June 2020; Garage and Shed at 1035 Islay: Historic Resource Evaluation, 23
July 2021.
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The adobe in Glover’s 1877 engraving shows the side windows of the wood wings, plus two
rear structures that may be extensions or separate sheds and may later have been incorporated
or demolished (next page). The early 1890s panoramic photograph from Cerro San Luis shows
the rear section of the Simmler-era house complete, confirmed in the 1905 Sanborn Map.
Thus the Simmler Adobe box framing is not only associated with the historically significant
person of Jacob Simmler but embodies the distinctive characteristics of this method of
construction in the Old West—and San Luis Obispo in particular—especially as it was used in
extending adobes such as the Dallidet (whose post-1876 western extension is box frame) and
the Sauer-Adams (which has small box frame additions from the late nineteenth century).
The Sanchez report anticipated the demolition of the post-Simmler additions to the rear of the
house, with the exception of the pre-1905 shed, which was to be restored as a separate
structure. The shed, however, has lost its integrity as a shed, and the rear extensions together
have gained historic significance for their association with Mary Gail Black and the campaign for
the County Commission on the Status of Women.
Above left: detail of Simmler Adobe, Glover engraving, with rear extensions or sheds. Above right: detail
of adobe (center) from panoramic photograph taken from Cerro San Luis, early 1890s, shallow slope of
extended roof showing up in lighter shade. History Center of San Luis Obispo County.
Edith Gragg, 1936, rear of the Simmler Adobe showing board and batten walls. History Center of San
Luis Obispo County.
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Northeast extension with board and batten Simmler-era shed, a characteristically Old West tableau
C. Significance of the Simmler Garden: Criterion C: It embodies distinctive
characeristics of a period of construction: the American Tree-Planting Movement
The Simmler Garden is the rarest and most significant part of the Simmler property, both in
itself as a surviving nineteenth-century garden and as the surviving contemporary designed
garden setting of an early American Era adobe.
The three extant nineteenth-century horticultural landscapes in San Luis Obispo—the Simmler
Garden, the San Luis Cemetery, and the Jack Garden—all have their origins in the 1870s, and
each embodies a different style or period of construction. The Simmler Garden is the last
surviving Tree-Planting Movement garden, the San Luis Cemetery is an exemplar of the Rural
Cemetery Movement, and the Jack Garden is a Gardenesque landscape as pioneered by
Scottish landscape architect John Claudius Loudon. Gardens are extremely fragile structures in
comparison to buildings, being composed not only of hardscape but of a softscape of living
organisms with limited lifespans and needing not only constant care but constant renewal.
A cultural landscape is a landscape that has been imbued with specific human meaning, generally
through physical alteration (rarely—as with Native American cultural landscapes—through the
application of a belief system). The National Park Service in 1968 gave as “examples of historic
sites (grounds or terrain) … battlefields, historic campgrounds, historic trails, and historic
farms.”151 In the same year, it classified historic gardens as historic structures and accorded
them “treatment herein for the several classes of historic structures.” But it was not until 1984
that the Park Service published the first technical guidance on identifying, evaluating, and
managing cultural landscapes. This was after San Luis Obispo’s 1982 Historic Resource Survey,
whose reconnaissance and documentation focused on buildings to the exclusion of landscapes.
The significance of a cultural landscape is analogous to the significance of buildings: based on
their association with historic events or persons; their embodiment of a particular type, period,
or method of construction; their representation of the work of a master or high artistic values;
or their ability to yield important information of history or prehistory.
The San Luis Cemetery, for instance, founded in 1871, has significance as a cultural landscape
for its embodiment of the Rural Cemetery Movement, and though not on the Master or
Contributing List, it retains the integrity of location, design, setting, materials, workmanship,
151. Robert R. Page, A Gide to Cultural Landscape Reports: Contents, Process, and Techniques (Washington, DC: US
Department of the Interior, 1998), p. 10.
59
feeling, and association to communicate that significance. The Jack Garden is significant for its
embodiment of the Gardenesque landscape as conceived by Loudon, interpreted for American
audiences by Andrew Jackson Downing, and executed by Nellie Hollister Jack, who also had a
documented connection to the Tree-Planting Movement and used the rear of the Jack property
to raise seedling that she then planted throughout the county.152 Fortunately, the landscape
consultants who preserved the Jack Garden in the 1980s recognized the Gardenesque
landscape for what it was and resisted proposals to turn it into a falsely historicist “Victorian”
formal garden. Cooler heads also prevailed at the proposal to place the Pinho House in the
middle of the Gardenesque lawn to create a modern “heritage park.” Italianate houses such as
the Jack or Pinho House are numerous in California, but a surviving Gardenesque landscape
from the 1880s is beyond rare; the Jack Garden is likely the only one in the state.
Edith Gragg, Simmler Adobe and Grape Arbor, 1931. History Center of San Luis Obispo County.
Though San Luis has been willing to preserve agricultural buildings as artifacts, it has shown less
interest in preserving their relationship to each other and their surroundings in a way that
would retain their significance. Cultural landscapes such as industrial sites are seen as eyesores,
and historic mines have been overlooked as part of natural landscapes. There has also been a
tendency to see individual trees as landmarkable rather than perceive the significance of their
152. Judith Collins et al, Jack House and Garden Handbook (San Luis Obispo: Department of Parks and Recreation,
2017), p. 138, 198–199.
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relationship in a landscape. All this contradicts more than a half century of national preservation
standards from the National Park Service and National Register of Historic Places.
The historiographic context brings us to the question: Is the Simmler Garden a significant
cultural landscape? The Monday Club’s adobe documentarians thought so in 1930,
photographing separately and inscribing together the “Simmler Adobe and Grape Arbor.” Mary
Gail Black thought so in 1986–1988, specifying the landscape’s trees for preservation in the
property’s gift to the people of the city. The City of San Luis Obispo also thought so, in not
only negotiating and accepting the terms of the gift but in announcing, through Recreation
Director Jim Stockton, that the property would have an analogous use to the Dallidet Adobe
and Garden and the Jack House and Garden and pointing out the grove of trees as “being
among the greatest in the city” (Eddy, op. cit.). This is also the conclusion of the Gil Sanchez
report in 1998. Though the firm’s specialty was architectural preservation, and it focused on the
house plus garden hardscape (fence, paths, and arbor), its Work Task 3 for New Use was:
“Retain a landscape architect sympathetic to historic landscape areas and identify historic plants
and trees to retain” (p. 23).
By 1954 Waterman and Black are documented as believing the property to have been part of
the old Mission Garden (Gregory Morris, “Adobe Buildings of San Luis Obispo,” 1954;
“Waterman Adobe Slates Mexican Christmas for Tour,” Telegram-Tribune, 1960). In 1988 Black
claimed Mission Era origins for a grape vine and mulberry tree on the property (Eddy). Though
Trousset’s 1870 painting shows only grassland, this belief of older origin moved Waterman and
Black, who had occupied the property by 1927, to preserve the garden’s contents and form.
E. S. Glover’s 1877 engraving shows a line of
presumably horticultural trees (too tall to
harvest from) in front of the southeast-facing
street façade and smaller trees, possibly
comprising an orchard, at back and sides, plus
bushes at west. This transformation is
confirmed by Carleton Watkins’ 1876
photograph, showing dark foliage that the
adobe’s roof rises from, in contrast to
neighboring homesteads’ grassland, crops,
pasture, and hay fields. The early 1890s
photograph from Cerro San Luis (following
page) shows trees of varied form, size, and
shade surrounding the adobe.
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There were also published descriptions of the Simmler Garden, very rare for San Luis
landscapes. The article “Fine White Raspberries,” on the daily Tribune front page, 11 July 1904,
eighteen months before J. J. Simmler’s death, cited him as one of only two growers of white
raspberries in the county. Five years after Simmler’s death, his second wife, in a 1911
advertisement for a suite of rooms to sublet in the adobe, added, “Nice garden with plenty of
fruit and flowers.”153 The 1930 Gragg photo of the Simmler Grape Arbor, taken not long after
Waterman and Black moved in, shows a well-developed set of vines, some of which Waterman
and Gragg believed to be a century old, and it and Gragg’s other photographs show various
trees, at least one of which (the mulberry) Waterman and Black believed to be of similar age.
The arboreal, decorative and productive Simmler Garden may not strike a modern person as a
particular landscape, but in the Old West—given over to forests, grasslands, deserts, open
ranges, ranches, and farms—it was not only a particular landscape but a revolutionary one.
The Tree-Planting Movement was promoted by Nebraska newspaper editor and politician Julius
Sterling Morton, who served in the late 1850s and early 1860s as President James Buchanan’s
secretary of Nebraska Territory and governor of Nebraska and in the 1890s as secretary of
agriculture to Presidents Grover Cleveland and William McKinley.
An advocate for introducing orchards, flowers, and forests to the Nebraska grasslands, Morton
defined the Tree-Planting Movement garden in an 1871 address to the people of Nebraska on
behalf of the State Horticultural Society: “Orchards are missionaries of culture and refinement.
If every farmer in Nebraska will plant and cultivate an orchard and a flower garden, together
with a few forest trees, this will become mentally and morally the best agricultural state in the
Union.”154 The combination of productive trees, forest trees, and flowers was, in other words, a
cultural statement in a baldly utilitarian country.
The following year, Morton founded Arbor Day, with the planting of an estimated million trees
in Nebraska on April 10. The concept was carried to other states and other countries, with
President Theodore Roosevelt issuing an Arbor Day Proclamation to the School Children of
the United States on 15 April 1907.
Significantly, the San Luis Obispo Tribune reported on that first Arbor Day (though a month and a
half later) and advocated the same thing for San Luis. This sentiment fell on fertile ground, for
153. “For Rent,” Daily Telegram, 14 Apr. 1911.
154. Ralph R. Widner, ed., Forests and Forestry in the American States (Washington, DC: National Association of
State Foresters, 1968), p. 48.
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there was a local history of angst about treelessness, reported four years earlier in San
Francisco’s Alta California. From the 1840s, San Luis Obispo had been presented in the American
press as the dividing line between the more verdant north and drier south of Alta California.155
The 1870s were to be a period of low rainfall but high local enthusiasm for vines and trees.
Dr. W. W. Hays, who had retired as an army surgeon in Benicia and moved to San Luis for his
consumption in 1866, was advertising olive, walnut, fig, and pecan trees and “foreign grape
vines” in 1873 (“For Sale, Cheap!,” San Luis Obispo Tribune, 25 Jan. 1873, p. 2). The Tribune
reported that in March Hays had planted a fig cutting and in November it had produced fifty-
two figs (p. 3). Hays, a horticultural experimenter with a double lot stretching from Monterey
to Palm, had one of the era’s great Tree-Planting Movement gardens, unfortunately subdivided
and denuded under the Latimers in the twentieth century.
Above: first Arbor Day reported on in the San Luis
Obispo Tribune, 1 June 1872, p. 2. Right:
extract on “Oriental Trees” from “A Letter from
San Luis Obispo,,” Daily Alta California, 22 Aug.
1868, p. 1.
In January 1877 the Tribune enjoined its reader with a headline, “PLANT TREES.” A search for
“plant trees” on newspapers.com turns up more hits (87) in the Tribune in the 1870s than in
the Los Angeles Herald, Daily Star, and Evening Express combined (85), and the other California
counties lag far behind. In 1875 in the Tribune, the San Luis Obispo Nursery claimed to have
30,000 of their own trees and plants growing (advertisement, 27 Nov., p. 4).
Panoramic photographs show few trees in San Luis till tree cover takes over in the 1930s. Much
of the tree-planting may have been taking place in the countryside—that is where Nellie Jack
ventured out with her buggy, companion, two shovels, and seedlings in cans (Collins, op. cit.).
Panoramic photographs from Cerro San Luis and Terrace Hill and other documentation show
enthusiasm for planting gardens of varied trees in town to be concentrated among few people:
notably among Dr. W. W. Hays, Nellie Hollister Jack, D. M. Meredith, and Jacob Simmler. Their
horticultural experiments all made the papers. There were also vineyards (Dallidet, the
155. “From California,” New York Evening Post, 23 May 1843, p. 2.; Alfred Robinson, “[Fisher’s National Magazine]
A Sketch of California,” Pennsylvania Somerset Herald, 15 Sep. 1846, p. 1; “California—Its Soil and People,” New
York Evening Post, 3 May 1847, p. 1
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Goldtrees, and Hays) and plantations (behind the Norcross House in the Carleton Watkins
photo), but these were not of Morton’s variety-based Tree-Planting Movement.
By the 1880s the Tribune’s enthusiasm had waned (hits for “plant trees” diminishes from 87 to
14), but consistent print and photographic documentation shows Jacob Simmler’s varied
arboreal garden continuing into the twentieth century, and consistent aerial (p. 22) and ground
photography and print documentation show it preserved through the Waterman-Marsh era.
Meanwhile, on the outskirts of Nebraska City, Julius Sterling Morton acquired 160 acres and
constructed his own Tree-Planting Movement garden, now Arbor Lodge State Historical Park
and Arboretum. Like the Simmler Garden, it had and has a varied mix of forest and orchard
trees and flowers laid out without formality—though on a much larger scale.
Beginning and end of “Plant Trees,” San Luis
Obispo Tribune, 27 Jan. 1877, p. 4
The Simmler Garden—independent of its California Historical Landmark–qualified significance
as a very rare surviving Tree-Planting Movement garden from the 1870s and a very rare
surviving original designed garden setting for an adobe—is also significant for its association
with Jacob Simmler, Mary Gail Black, and the campaign for the County Commission on the
Status of Women. A 1904 article on Justice Simmler’s “Fine White Raspberries”; a 1929 tea for
the Business and Professional Women’s Club of San Luis Obispo, hosted “in the gardens and
home of Miss Mildred Waterman,” with Mary Gail Black listed in attendance156; a 1971
156. “B.P.W. Garden Tea Successful and Colorful Event of Sunday Afternoon,” San Luis Obispo Daily Telegram, 10
June 1929, p. 2.
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afternoon wedding ceremony “held in the gardens at the San Luis Obispo residence of Mary
Gail Black” (“Wheeler-Williams Vows Exchanged in Garden Rites,”); the women of the County
Commission campaign “just before eight o’clock” beginning “to file down the bricks under the
light on the wisteria arbor,” (McPhee, A Small Town Women’s Movement, 62): these historic
figures and events are as much associated with the garden as the adobe and box frame and
more visibly so. Historic preservation is not a professional practice of picking and choosing a
room here or tree there that is significant and carries feeling and assocation; significance resides
in a whole structure, including if that structure is a landscape, and feeling and association come
from the totality.
Photograph of the Grape Arbor from Boy Scout
Gregory Morris’s 1954 Historical Society
competition report on adobes of San Luis Obispo.
History Center of San Luis Obispo County.
Wisteria above the portico, Grape Arbor to the
right, flowers in foreground. “Waterman Adobe to
Be Seen on Historical Tour,” San Luis Obispo
County Telegram-Tribune, 18 Apr. 1958, p. 5.
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Edith Gragg, southeast section of Simmler Garden, 1930 (above) and 1931 (below). History Center of
San Luis Obispo County.
.
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VI. Periods of Significance The period of significance for the Simmler Adobe and
Simmler Garden under Criterion A is June 1974–June 1975 (the duration of the campaign for
the County Commission on the Status of Women). The periods of significance for the adobe
and garden under Criterion B are 1865–1906 (the documented association with Jacob Simmler)
and 1928–1989 (the documented association with Mary Gail Black). The period of significance
for the adobe under Criterion C, type and methods of construction (Greek Revival, adobe, and
single-wall load-bearing), is circa 1861–early 1890s (when they are likely or documented). The
period of significance for the garden under Criterion C is 1876–1930 (from its early
documentation by Watkins and Glover through its first documentation by Edith Gragg of the
Monday Club as a historic landscape).
The combined periods of significance are circa 1861–1989 for the Simmler Adobe and 1876–
1989 for the Simmler Garden.
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VII. Degree of Significance The very rare surviving Tree-Planting Movement garden is
both of significance to the statewide cultural history of California and of regional uniqueness,
thus qualifying for designation as a California Historical Landmark. There are only two
other surviving nineteenth-century landscapes in the City of San Luis Obispo—the Jack Garden
(in J. C. Loudon’s Gardenesque style) and San Luis Cemetery (an exemplar of the Rural
Cemetery Movement), and there is no other known Tree-Planting Movement landscape
surviving in the region. The adobe also qualifies as a California Historical Landmark due to the
very rare survival of its immediate designed setting. There are currently only thirteen California
Historical Landmarks in San Luis Obispo County, ranging from Morro Rock to Hearst Castle.
There are only three in the City of San Luis Obispo—the Mission (No. 325), the Dallidet
Adobe (No. 720), and the Ah Louis Store (No. 802)—none of whose gardens survive in their
recognizably original state.
This foregoing uniqueness and importance also qualifies both Simmler Garden and Simmler
Adobe for San Luis Obispo’s Master List. The fact that the garden and adobe are associated
with Mary Gail Black—a historically significant person who was gender-nonconforming and in a
same-sex partnership—and the campaign for the County Commission on the Status of Women
also qualifies both garden and house for the uniqueness and importance standards of the Master
List, which is currently entirely heteronormative and virtually entirely male in its historic
associations. Service in a nineteenth-century political office has traditionally been considered
sufficient, in association with a historically significant person, for Master List status and was the
original justification in the DPR523. Nine of San Luis Obispo’s ten nineteenth-century adobes
have also been placed on the Master List (why the Sauer Adobe is Contributing is mysterious
but may have no rational explanation). Surviving Greek Revival houses in San Luis, all of them
adobes, are rarer and number only three, an additional justification for Master List status for
the primary residence. That its box frame construction is the earliest documented in San Luis
Obispo would also qualify the house for Master List status.
The adobe’s Greek Revival type of construction and adobe and box frame methods of
construction are of local rather than statewide or national significance under NRHP and
California Register of Historical Resources (CRHR) criteria. Jacob Simmler and Mary Gail Black
are persons of local historic significance and the campaign for the County Commission on the
Status of Women an event of local historic significance. For this local significance, both house
and garden qualify for designation on the National Register of Historic Places and the
California Register of Historical Resources.
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VIII. Documentation of Significance For as long as the Simmler Adobe has been
documented as historic, the Simmler Garden has been documented as historic, i.e., in Edith
Gragg’s photographs Simmler Adobe and Grape Arbor 1930, taken as part of the Monday Club’s
effort (through Gragg, Rosa Dallidet, Constance Van Harreveld, and Erna P. Marsh) to
document county adobes.
The property was placed on the Master List in 1983 following the city’s historic resources
survey. The house’s rarity as a surviving nineteenth-century adobe and the property’s
association with judge and postmaster Jacob Simmler was noted in the DPR523. In 1988,
however, when the gift negotiated between Black and the city was announced, the historic
significance of both house and garden was emphasized by Black and the city’s representative,
long-time Recreation Director Jim Stockton (Eddy), along with the intent of turning them to a
use similar to that of the Jack House and Garden and Dallidet Adobe and Garden. The
preservation of both the Simmler Adobe and Simmler Garden for public recreation was
specified in the agreement.
The 1998 Gil Sanchez report also recognized the historic significance of the Simmler Garden:
“Retain a landscape architect sympathetic to historic landscape areas and identify historic plants
and trees to retain” (p. 23).
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IX. Character-Defining Features
Character-defining features are not what make a resource pretty to current eyes but tell the
significance and complexity of its stories to future ones.
Simmler Garden Character-defining features of the Simmler Garden include
as an American Tree-Planting Movement Garden
• a mixture of forest and orchard trees and flowers
• open access (no walls or directional paths, apart from those that appertain to the house)
• informal arrangement
• absence of the linearity of a formal garden, the faux naturalness of the Picturesque, and the
self-consciously faux naturalness of the Gardenesque (i.e., highly cultivated exotic plants in a
twee setting)
for the Simmler era (documented in the 1876 Watkins photograph, 1877 Glover engraving,
early 1890s anonymous photograph from Cerro San Luis, 1891 and 1905 Sanborn Maps, and
newspaper references)
• the house surrounded by trees
• tall, non-productive trees along the street frontage
• smaller, orchard-type trees behind
• the inclusion of bushes and vines (besides the bushes in the Glover engraving, there is the
article on Simmler’s cultivation of rare white raspberries)
• probable flowers (the garden was documented in advertisements to have fruit trees and
flowers within five years of Jacob Simmler’s death and in the tenure of his widow)
• rare outbuildings and none in front of the house (a shed directly behind the house, now
incorporated into it, a larger one to the northwest, and a smaller one to the northeast)
for the Black era (documented in the 1 October 2000 tree survey by Central Coast Chapter,
California Land Surveyors Association; Carol McPhee, A Small Town Women’s Movement and
interview; Eddy, 1988; photographs by Gragg [1930–1936], Morris [1954], Telegram-Tribune)
• the Simmler Grape Arbor, likely dating from the Simmler era, as it was flourishing when first
photographed in 1930, and Black believed at least one of the vines to date to the Mission era
(the arbor was demolished after January 2012, but photographic documentation of it would
allow it to be reconstructed to SOI Standards)
• straight paths to and around the front and side of the house laid in basket weave pattern
• drunk brick/Hollywood bond and mosaic paths behind the house
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• flower beds (currently matilija poppies along the east boundary but with photographic record
of flowers in front of the house, as well as a wisteria fronting the portico)
• preservation of the Simmler era Tree Planting Movement variety and arrangement
• mulberry, oak, avocado, redwood, magnolia, persimmon, sycamore, lemon verbena, and likely
California bay
The garden had visible fencing on the west side in the early 1890s and on the street in 1930
(photographs), neither of a formal nature and neither resembling today’s fencing.
Black believed the garden’s grape and mulberry dated to the Mission Era, so they presumably
dated to the Jacob Simmler era of twenty-one years before the Watermans purchased the
property. The 1 October 2000 tree survey, eleven years after Black’s death, identifies mature
avocado, oak, magnolia, and sycamore that may well predate the Black era though don’t
necessarily reach back to the Jacob Simmler era; some may have been planted by his widow.
There are younger olives, persimmons, pine, and redwood. The southeast red mulberry seems
to be identified as a poplar in the survey. A number of trees are not identified.
Variety, a mixture of productive and decorative plants, informal layout, and the ability to access
the garden as the user chooses are more important than specific varieties of plants in defining,
maintaining, and renewing the character of the Simmler Garden as a Tree-Planting Movement
garden, though known varieties (including whatever may be gleaned from historic photographs)
emphasize the association with the campaign for the County Commission on the Status of
Women and Jacob Simmler and Mary Gail Black.
Hardscape in the form of mosaic and drunk brick/Hollywood bond paths circa early 1930s survive but
are slated to be demolished by the manufactured housing project. Straight brick paths that appear from
aerial photography to date from the 1960s also survive.
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Tree survey, 1 Oct. 2000. The major loss since then is the 40” oak at lower right
72
NASA-Ames infrared greenfield coverage photograph, 10 Dec. 1986, Simmler Adobe and Garden. The
101 is at top, Brizzolara Street next, Dana Street, and Oddfellows Hall bottom right. Creek bank
appears, as now, wooded but with plants smaller than the Simmler Garden’s trees.
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Simmler Adobe Character-defining features of the Simmler Adobe include
for the exterior of the Greek Revival adobe and box frame front section of the house
• symmetry
• simplicity and severity of design (linearity and absence of decorative features)
• sparse fenestration
• a portico with square columns
• a hip roof, including its low adaptation to added symmetrical box frame wings.
• shiplap siding used where visible from the street
• original windows, doors, and hardware, including but not limited to the six-over-six front
façade windows
for the rear section of the house
• the bricolage nature of its mid-twentieth-century adaptation under Waterman and Black, who
(particularly Black) may have done much of the work (McPhee, A Small Town Women’s
Movement, interview)
• varied types, methods, and periods of construction, as well as varied design, materials, and
workmanship, comprising everything from pre-1905 board and batten to Mid Century
Modern brickwork with aluminum window frames
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Exterior windows, doors, and hardware in the front appear to be largely original, as appear
such features currently visible in back, and these are also character-defining features, including
the six-over-six windows and paneled doors on the front façade.
The house had a shingle roof in 1891 and 1905, according to the Sanborn Map, and a composite
roof in front and shingle roofs in rear sections in the Black era, according to the 1926–1956
Sanborn Maps. The Simmler era of significance associated with the front would indicate a return
to wood shingle or similar appearance there and the Black era of significance associated with
the rear would indicate a return to wood shingle or similar appearance there.
Municipal historic preservation does not normally claim jurisdiction over interiors, but given the
donation and acceptance of the house for recreative use as a museum (“SLO, House Owner in
Accord over Future Museum,” Eddy), like the historic Jack House and and Dallidet Adobe, the
interiors function in essence as public right of way.
Character-defining features of the interior include
• the plastered adobe living room and its reverse walls in the box frame rooms, the only places
where the adobe construction is visible to the eye
• the adobe’s deep-set but untapered door and window frames
• fireplace and wood fireplace surround in the adobe room
• the flat wood ceiling in the adobe room and pitched plank ceilings in the box frame rooms
• surviving wallpapers from the origins of the box frame additions
• the Moderne kitchen with arched doorways (the bathrooms are of less consistent design)
• Mid Century Modern brickwork and associated fenestration
• wood strip flooring, recycled by Waterman and Black from a Pismo dance hall (McPhee,
interview)
• nineteenth-century hand-planed plank doors and manufactured panel doors
Adobe front window
Pismo dance hall flooring
Two-plank hand-planed door
Although the adobe was lived in for well over a century, modern notions of comfort and style
will inevitably bring the temptation of modern renovation over historic restoration. Not only
would this tend to reduce already modest room size, it would inevitably diminish integrity of
design, materials, and workmanship, feeling, and association. The adobe with cracked plaster,
75
the double wood walls communicate the house’s significance in a way that plasterboard and
fiberglass insulation would not. Writing as someone who lives and works in an unrenovated
adobe with box frame extensions (the Sauer-Adams), it is comfortable, liveable, and sustainable.
The State Historical Building Code should be applied to restoration.
Neoclassical redwood fireplace
surround
Bell lever, front door
Two-plank door
Mid Century Modern chimney
Sloping plank ceiling, rear of fireplace
Moderne cabinetry built into 1860s ceiling pitch.
The kitchen was key in hosting the campaign for
the County Commission on the Status of Women.
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X. Integrity Both adobe and garden survived with integrity intact under the long-term
conservation of two families: the opposite-sex Simmler family for sixty-one years and the same-
sex Waterman-Black family for sixty-two, with only six months between their periods of
ownership. This conservation has resulted in the Simmler Adobe being the only one of the
region’s eighteenth- or nineteenth-century adobes that has retained its original designed setting
sufficiently intact to communicate its significance: in this case as an early American Era adobe
with a Tree-Planting Movement garden.
The twentieth-century rear extensions to the adobe, associated with the historic figure of Mary
Gail Black and the historic event of the campaign for the County Commission on the Status of
Women, survived a 2000 proposal by Friends of Las Casas Adobes (FOCA) to demolish them,
as does character-defining garden hardscape from the Black era in the form of brick and drunk
brick or Hollywood bond paths. The character-defining, possibly Simmler-era grape arbor
leading from the street to the house was demolished after January 2012, but there is
documentation sufficient to reconstruct it to Secretary of the Interior Standards.
The house appears unaltered (apart from vandalism and protection from vandalism) from its
1989 condition, which is the end point of its period of significance. Apart from recycled flooring
from a Pismo dance hall, Waterman and Black appear to have done little to change the adobe
core. Modern bathrooms and a kitchen, and wallpaper on the board walls, appear to be the
chief changes to the box frame additions.
The neglect of the garden by the city has allowed the form recorded in 2000 by the Central
Coast Chapter of the California Land Surveyors Association—which was presumably the form
left by Mary Gail Black eleven years before—to remain largely intact, although there has been
none of the accepted renewal of a historic garden, including replacement of trees and bushes.
Black-era matilija poppies survive and lemon verbena has vanished.
Integrity of the Simmler Garden
Location The garden remains in its original location.
Design The design of the garden is immediately recognizably of the Tree-Planting
Movement period of construction, with a variety of orchard and forest trees, bushes, and
flowers. A low thicket of rosemary stands where bushes stood in 1877. Tall decorative trees
line the street, while shorter orchard trees (persimmons, mulberry, avocados) occupy the
interior, as in 1877. The matilija poppies that Mary Gail Black cultivated still colonize the east
boundary with the Oddfellows (below left). The avocados that Black considered, according to
Carol McPhee, a joy and a burden (fruit and rats) survive. Whether the red mulberry (below
right) in the southeast corner is the mulberry that Black thought the padres planted, a
descendant, or unrelated, the garden still has a mulberry.
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A historic garden is expected to continue to be cultivated to survive with integrity, as plants age
and need replacement. The city has neglected the garden presumably in the hope that it will die
and not be replaced, but in the last third of a century it has held on. We can only hope that Jim
Stockton—who, according to his daughter Wendy was a friend and admirer of Mary Gail Black,
and who was enthusiastic about the significance of the garden—is not turning over in his grave.
The Simmler Grape Arbor (below, Jan. 2012) was demolished but can be reconstructed to SOI
Standards. The date of the current street fence is unclear.
78
79
Setting The setting of the garden includes the house, which retains its original
appearance from its periods of significance; the undeveloped Cerro San Luis; and the still low-
built and suburban Dana Street.
Materials The living materials of the garden are expected to change. Most trees are
survivors from the Black era, as observation and the 1998 tree map makes clear. It is unknown
if any survive from the Simmler era, but it is not unlikely. (Chopping them down is the only way
to tell.) Younger plants—natives and invasives—have colonized the creek bank.
The hardscape paving materials appear to be original to the Black era, certainly the drunk brick
or Hollywood bond. No photographs make clear if the bricks on the straight paths are original,
but given the city’s neglect of everything else, it seems unlikely that these would have been
replaced.
Workmanship Drunk brick paths clearly have their original workmanship, straight paths
probably, street fence is unclear, and the Grape Arbor is gone.
Feeling Some of the trees have been lost, the remainder are more mature, a few are
new, and all are neglected, but the garden clearly retains its feeling as a Tree-Planting
Movement garden rather than as, say, a formal, Picturesque, or Gardenesque landscape; a
utilitarian orchard or plantation; a styleless domestic yard; or the increasingly common
domestic parking lots.
Association Black would recognize both the appearance and plants of the garden.
Simmler would recognize the garden’s Tree-Planting principles, although many or most of the
trees will have changed in the last 115 years.
Integrity of the Simmler Adobe
Location The location of the adobe has remained the same.
Design The design of the adobe section has been covered with box frame additions and
the box frame with shiplap, but these changes are within the period of significance and are
themselves construction methods of significance. The Greek Revival design of the street façade
and sides remains intact. The design of the additions at the rear of the Simmler-era building,
though possibly objectionable to modern aesthetics or romantic sense of historicity, are
associated with the historic person of Mary Gail Black.
Much of the front section of the house still embodies nineteenth-century treatment of box
frame (e.g., wallpaper applied directly to wood). Alterations such as the Moderne kitchen now
have significance for their association with the Black era.
Setting The immediate setting of the 1870s Tree-Planting Movement garden remains
intact, with minor additions in the era of Mildred Waterman and Mary Gail Black, e.g., of brick
and drunk brick paths. Some trees may be original or descendants of original trees; others are
not; but replacement of plants is normal and not considered a loss of integrity in a garden
structure, as long as the designing principle remains the same, which in this case is a variety of
orchard and forest trees and flowers. The most significant loss to setting is the destruction of
the Grape Arbor under the city’s care, but this is sufficiently documented by photographs of
different eras to be reconstructed under SOI Standards.
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The less immediate setting includes a still low-built and suburban Dana Street and the view of
an undeveloped Cerro San Luis, without Alex Madonna’s planned Alpine village.
Materials Materials appear to date from the relevant periods of significance except, not
unexpectedly, the cold rolled roof surface, installed by the city, though the city would not have
allowed such a non-historic roofing for a private owner of an adobe.
Workmanship Workmanship, like materials, appears to be original.
Feeling Given the retention of design, materials, workmanship, and setting, feeling
remains intact.
Association Both Jacob Simmler and Mary Gail Black would easily recognize the house
and its garden setting.
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XI. Impacts and Mitigations157
A. Restoration of the front portion of the Simmler Adobe Details of how this
would be carried out are not available so cannot be assessed to Secretary of the Interior (SOI)
Standards for Restoration Nos. 2–9. The adobe has been used historically for living and—
documented in the Black era—gatherings, so Standard No. 1 for historical use would be fulfilled
if the adobe continued to be used in that combination. No plans are proposed to construct
designs never executed, fulfilling standard No. 10.
Given that the interior of the adobe was intended by the gift to be accessible to the public, SOI
Standards should apply to the interior as well as exterior. Given that the period of significance
extends through the era of Mary Gail Black (1928–1989), character-defining features from the
twentieth-century as well as nineteenth century should be preserved (Standard No. 2). Interior
and exterior features and materials from both the Simmler and Black eras appear in generally
sound shape, apart from some decay of roofing materials and vandalism, so SOI Standards
regarding preservation and repair over replacement should be feasible to adhere to.
B. Addition of the Peace Project Studio with connector This development
presents a complex problem under the two relevant Secretary of the Interior Standards for
Rehabilitation, No. 9 (“new additions … will not destroy historic materials, features, and spatial
relationships that characterize the property[;] … new work will be differentiated from the old
and will be compatible with the historic materials, features, size, scale and proportion, and
massing to protect the integrity of the property and its environment”) and No. 10 (“new
additions … will be undertaken in such a manner that, if removed in the future, the essential
form and integrity of the property and its environment would be unimpaired” [i.e.,
reversibility]).
The connector will displace a roughly ten-foot-wide section of shiplap and box frame containing
one window. At roughly 10 percent of the currently exposed siding of the circa 1865–1890s
section of the house, this would be a less than significant impact. Displaced materials can and
should be labeled and saved on site for future reversibility, however. The low-built connector
157. For clarification, I should note here that I entered into a 21 Sep. 2021 agreement with the Peace Project and
Smart Share Housing Solutions to provide a historic resource evaluation that would additionally discuss the impact
of their projects on historic resources, adherence to SOI Standards, possible mitigations, etc., after I received plans
and drawings. On 27 July 2022 I received Smart Share’s plans and drawings as submitted to the city 20 June 2022.
I should also note that Smart Share asked for a preliminary conclusion before completion of the HRE, at which
point I communicated orally that the documentary evidence showed
1. the Simmler Garden is a historic resource both for association with historic persons and a historic event and for
embodiment of a period of construction and has been considered a historic resource for decades, and placing
manufactured housing units throughout it would therefore create a significant impact
2. Mary Gail Black is a historic person under NRHP Criteria, the rear additions to the adobe are associated with
her, and their demolition would therefore create a significant impact; and
3. the campaign for the County Commission on the Status of Women is a historic event under NRHP Criteria, the
rear additions to the adobe are associated with it, and their demolition would therefore create a significant impact.
I confirmed those conclusions in subsequent discussions. Smart Share, in its 20 June 2022 submission to the city,
refers to the rear section as “Non-Historical Structure Attached to Adobe,” which contradicts those preliminary
conclusions and this report.
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replicates the size and shape of the historic house and is therefore compatible, but it should
incorporate features such as distinctive siding to differentiate it from the historic construction.
The straw-bale studio, in the distinguished tradition of Organic Architecture on the Central
Coast, harmonizes with the natural surroundings but consequently contrasts with the low,
angular, and symmetrical Greek Revival Simmler Adobe. There is nothing in SOI Standards that
dictates new additions be banal or lacking in architectural currency or creativity, and contrast in
itself does not prevent structures from compatibility. But additions that have successfully
employed contrast with historic resources also employ techniques of harmonization.
The Peace Project Studio pursues compatibility through similar size to the Simmler Adobe,
single-story construction, and horizontal striation. On a more conceptual level, the straw-bale
construction references the encased adobe construction of the house.
The studio’s volume appears about 50 percent larger than that of the house under the
proposed demolition of the house’s back section—the section associated with the campaign for
the County Commission on the Status of Women and Mary Gail Black. Not demolishing the
adobe’s back would mitigate the impact of the studio and connector’s significantly greater
volume, making the historic structure and addition about equal. The studio’s narrow façade
points toward the street, mitigating the volume’s impact on the adobe’s dominant Greek
Revival façade. But since the Black gift intended the entire grounds to be public, not just the
street view is relevant, and the studio and connector render the west façade no longer visible
as a unified composition. This would be mitigated by the similar east façade being visible—
except that this view is obscured by housing units 14–18.
The studio and connector have an impact on the historic resource of the Simmler Garden,
taking up about 10 percent of the landscape and blocking the view from the street, on the west
side, of foliage at the rear of the garden. The area where the studio is proposed, however, was
partially occupied by view-blocking structures (a large shed and later a two-story apartment
building) during the period of significance, in both the Simmler and Waterman-Black eras, from
at least the 1890s through 1989. It also seems to have been marginal as a treescape, having
been occupied by low bushes in the first clear representation in 1877 (as it is today), with one
small tree in the 1890s, and having been apparently bare of trees in aerial photographs from
1937 to 1987. Hence the impact on the garden would not be significant, if bushes could be
reintroduced in other areas of the garden in mitigation of their removal here.
Considering both the Peace Project Studio and Simmler Gardens as structures, under National
Park Service and National Register practice, the Organic Architecture of the studio and the
informal and naturalistic Tree-Planting Movement arrangement of the garden would appear to
be compatible but of course also differentiated, one being a building and the other a landscape.
C. Demolition of the rear portion of the Simmler Adobe The bricolage rear
section of the house, though not looking tidily or prettily “historic” to some modern eyes,
strongly conveys the realities of economic survival during the Great Depression and World
War II, as Mildred Waterman accommodated roomers till Black could return and add her
income to the family. It has a documented association with the activities of Black and other
members of the Women’s Movement, the large adobe room in front being used for meetings
but the back of the house for work such as planning, intimate discussion, and writing, as
documented by Carol McPhee in A Small Town Women’s Movement. The masculine appearance
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that was held against Black politically and socially was at least partly based on her work clothes,
as she took responsibility for building and maintaining these structures and neglected to change
before going into town (26 Apr. 2022 telephone interview with McPhee). Thus the rear section
is key to the historic narrative of the adobe.
Demolition of these additions to accommodate four housing unites behind the adobe and
setbacks for two or three others, would have a significant impact on the Simmler Adobe’s
ability to communicate its historic significance, such that—although it could remain listed for its
historic association with Jacob Simmler and its embodiment of Greek Revival architecture and
adobe and box frame construction—its ability to communicate the significance of its historic
association with Mary Gail Black and the campaign for the County Commission on the Status of
Women would be substantially eliminated. It would, in effect, be delisted for the Mary Gail
Black and Women’s Movement associations.
The proposed demolition would also violate SOI Standards for Rehabilitation Nos. 2 (“the
historic character of a property will be retained and preserved”), 4 (“changes to a property that
have acquired historic significance in their own right will be retained and preserved”), 5
(“distinctive materials, features, finishes, and construction techniques or examples of
craftsmanship that characterize a property will be preserved”), 9 (“related new construction
will not destroy historic materials, features, and spatial relationships that characterize the
property”), and 10 (“new construction will be undertaken in such a manner that, if removed in
the future, the essential form and integrity of the historic property … would be unimpaired”).
D. Demolition of Simmler Garden hardscape and softscape The plan shows
elimination—by the housing units behind the adobe—of the rare and character-defining mosaic
and drunk brick path complex, likely dating to the 1930s. The straight brick paths lining the east
side and front of the house are also shown eliminated in the Peace Project plan, not in the
Smart Share Housing Solutions Plan. In the Peace Project Plan (the Smart Share plan doesn’t
specify), the brick walkway from the street to the house, as well as the brick porch floor,
appear to be replaced with other materials. The straight brick walks lining the side and front of
the adobe conform to Greek Revival aesthetics. They appear to date, from aerial photography,
to the early 1960s, when plausibly the extant porch floor and path to the street were repaved
in the same bricks. This is well within the garden’s period of significance and demonstrates
Waterman and Black’s respect for the aesthetics of their historic resource. They, like
Simmler—who never applied shiplap to the board and batten at the back of the house—
allowed themselves more freedom in less public areas with the mosaic and drunk brick paths.
Along with the recent demolition of the character-defining Grape Arbor—dating from the
Simmler era, recognized by 1930 as being historic, and maintained throughout the Black era—
demolition of these paths would represent the total destruction of the design, materials, and
workmanship of garden hardscape, which would have a significant impact on the ability of the
garden to communicate its significance. It would also violate SOI Standards for Rehabilitation 2,
4, 5, 9, and 10.
The obvious mitigation for the elimination of the east and front paths and elimination of brick
from the porch and street paths would be to not remove them, since no obvious justification is
given; perhaps it is a maintenance issue. Mitigation to less than significant impact of the
placement of housing units over the mosaic and drunk brick paths is unclear, unless the paths
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could be preserved beneath the units for reversibility, which appears unlikely. An indirect
mitigation might be restoration of the Grape Arbor.
The proposal anticipates less loss to the garden softscape (that is, trees), though there has
already been substantial loss without replacement over the last thirty-three years of the garden
being treated as a diminishing rather than renewable resource. Retention of an odd, small
tribute structure to the character-defining Grape Arbor, which dated from the Simmler era and
was preserved through the Black era, is not shown on either the Peace Project or Smart Share
Housing Solutions plans, and no proposal is presented to restore the Grape Arbor.
The southeast corner’s character-defining red mulberry (the last survivor of a documented
historic tree variety for the garden) is eliminated by a manufactured home, and the nearby
character-defining thirty-foot stand of matilija poppies, which Black cultivated, appears also to
be eliminated, while the fate of the wide variety of native and non-native trees and shrubs on
the creek bank (the bank is documented as wooded from the 1870s to the present) is unclear.
A parking lot for four vehicles also takes over an area that is now lawn and is documented as
formerly occupied by trees and flowerbeds.
Mitigation to softscape could come in the form of actively renewing the totality and variety of
trees and shrubs, with attention to specific varieties of documented significance, rather than
simply allowing their diminution.
E. Siting of sixteen/twenty manufactured homes plus walkways, a parking lot, and
ancillary structures in the Simmler Garden The proposed high-density development
of manufactured homes would occupy more than half of the Simmler Garden. Unlike the Peace
Project Studio, the housing development is proposed for areas of the garden currently wooded
and documented to have been wooded throughout its period of significance 1876/1877–1989.
The remaining undeveloped garden would occupy about 20 percent of the original: wedged
between parking lot and housing units in front of the adobe.
In these circumstances, the landscape would lose its integrity of design, materials, and
workmanship and hence feeling. It would also lose its strong association with Jacob Simmler, its
creator, and Mary Gail Black, its preserver. With only location and partial setting left (the
Simmler Adobe being shorn of its Black-associated rear additions), the garden would no longer
be able to communicate its significance as historic landscape of the American Tree-Planting
Movement. It would communicate, instead, as a high-density manufactured housing
development interspersed with mature trees and containing a vestigial historic house—much
like the Casa Del Rey Mobile Park surrounding the significant but unlisted Coffee-Rice House
on Highway 1 in Oceano.
Hence the Simmler Garden would lose its qualification for California Historical Landmark
designation, and the Simmler Adobe would lose its qualification for that designation based on
the survival of its original designed landscape as a setting. The Simmler Garden would also lose
the qualification for its current Master Listing.
The Simmler Adobe would retain its Master List qualification for embodiment of the adobe and
box frame methods of construction, but with immediate setting so crowded and compromised
with abutting structures, its ability to communicate its significance as an early American Era
Greek Revival suburban house, or its association with Jacob Simmler, would be doubtful. It
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would lose its qualification for association with Mary Gail Black and the campaign for the
County Commission on the Status of Women due to the demolition of its rear section.158
Above: Casa Del Rey Mobile Home Park, Highway 1, Oceano, an example of an unlisted historic
resource (the Coffee-Rice House, later the Halcyon Sanatorium) turned into a site for dense
manufactured housing without considering the resource’s ability to communicate its significance. Below:
the 16-unit proposal for the Master Listed Simmler Adobe and Garden, more densely developed than
Casa Del Rey.
The cumulative impact of the sixteen or twenty one-story manufactured housing units
proposed for the Simmler Garden, in combination with the thirty two-story manufactured
housing units directly across the street, would be significant both in terms of the Simmler
Adobe and Simmler Garden and the Dana Street section of the Downtown Historic District.
In terms of the Simmler Garden, the housing development would violate SOI Standards for
Rehabilitation No. 1 (“a property must be used as it was historically or be given a new use that
158. The City of San Luis Obispo has previously claimed that delisting is a necessary threshold for significant impact
on a historic resource. In San Luis Architectural Preservation! v. City of San Luis Obispo, the court ruled, “The definition
does not require, as the City contends, that a project threatens a resource’s listing on any such register” (31 Jan.
2022).
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requires minimal change to its distinctive materials, features, spaces, and spatial relationships”),
2 (“the historic character of a property will be retained and preserved[;] the … alteration of
features, spaces, and spatial relationships that characterize a property will be avoided”), and 9
(“related new construction will not destroy historic … spatial relationships that characterize
the property[;] … new work … will be compatible with the historic materials, features, size,
scale and proportion, and massing to protect the protect the integrity of the property and its
environment”). It would likely also violate No. 10 regarding reversibility, as the dense
placement of housing units would prevent new planting to renew garden softscape. In the event
of the units’ removal, much of the old growth would likely already have died or been removed
as a threat to the units.
Regarding the Simmler Adobe, the manufactured housing development would violate SOI
Standards for Rehabilitation Nos. 2 and 9 in terms of spatial relationships and size, scale and
proportion, and massing. (SOI Standards for Rehabilitation Nos. 2, 4, 5, 9, and 10 in light of
proposed demolition of much of the adobe to accommodate housing units in the rear have
already been discussed.) The combined mass of 16 manufactured homes (about two-and-a-
quarter times the square footage of the partially demolished adobe), plus about 1,500 square
feet of raised walkway (more than the square footage of the adobe again), plus parking and
paving: these would alter the spatial relationships of the adobe and be incompatible with its
historic size and scale.
The fact that five-foot intervals would separate identical manufactured units in two linear ranks
would render them, at eye level, a collective mass—analogous to army barracks—rather than
the idyllic scattering that the description “village” of “tiny homes” suggests.
Were the Peace Project Studio not to be built, this mass would be increased by 25 percent and
densely pack the adobe on three sides, with units, walkways, and a trash enclosure (pointing
towards rather than away from the historic house) at only 5 to 10 feet away.
There are mitigations that might slightly reduce the impact, but there is no reasonable
mitigation that could make these impacts less than significant. For instance, the removal of four
housing units and the shifting of others would allow the historically significant rear section of
the Simmler Adobe not to be demolished, but the greater part of the rarer and more
historically significant Simmler Garden would still be transformed into a dense, linear housing
complex of identical units. (The proposal does not clarify that they will be identical, but
suggestion to client to vary their design was rejected on the basis of cost.) Only reduction to
three total units behind the Peace Project Studio, overlapping an area where there was a
building during the period of significance, and hidden from street view by the studio, would
reduce the impact below such significance as to cause historic delisting, or significant impact
short of delisting, but it is unlikely the developer, Smart Share Housing Solutions, would find
that practicable or acceptable.
This is probably a good place to address the notion that preserving the trees without the
landscape would fulfill the terms of Black’s gift, which is a rare literal example of not being able
to see the forest for the trees.
1. To conclude that by mentioning the trees, Black intended their landscape to be sacrificed is
analogous to assuming that when she mentioned the Canet Adobe, she was expecting
everything but her mud-brick living room to be demolished, or the bricks to be separated and
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used for other purposes. The garden and house are holistic entities in their significance within
the practice of preservation under National Register Guidelines and Secretary of the Interior
Standards. Equally, all evidence of Black’s six-decade custodianship of the garden and house
shows that they were, for her, also holistic entities.
2. If the Simmler Garden were turned into a manufactured housing complex, the trees would
likely not long survive, as they would inevitably be sacrificed to the property interests of the
owners or the occupants of the units. Trees would be cut down and branches lopped as they
became dangerous or inconvenient, and there would be no room to replace old trees with
new.
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XII. Alternatives The Peace Project Studio appears to have been carefully considered
and designed in relation to both the Simmler Adobe and Simmler Garden for compatibility and
differentiation for less than significant impact under Secretary of the Interior Standards. Smart
Share Housing Solutions’ manufactured housing complex, in contrast, is clearly an expedient
proposal with no accommodation to the ability of the two rare historic resources to
communicate their significance. Rather, the goal seems to be fit as many units as possible into
the available space.
It would be difficult to imagine a less suitable site for a complex of factory-produced housing
units, or one more likely to frustrate all interested parties, than a Master Listed and California
Historical Landmark–qualified historic garden with historic adobe in a flood zone, whose
donation to the city as historic resources was negotiated and agreed upon for specific, explicit,
and quite different purposes, purposes repeatedly confirmed by the City Council over the last
third of a century, most recently in the 2017 Downtown Concept Plan. Three obvious
alternatives comprise:
1. Build the housing complex on a historic site without its original designed
landscape intact The Rodriguez Adobe, for instance, is a city-owned adobe surrounded
by a non-historic lawn where a development would impact only the historic building and not a
historic landscape or the interaction between the historic building and its historic setting.
2. Build the housing complex on a site designated for recreation that is not historic
The city owns nearly four dozen parks and open spaces where recreational land could be
sacrificed without impact on a historic adobe and an extremely rare and important garden form
surviving from the Old West.
3. Build the housing complex on a non-historic, non-recreation site There are a
number of city-owned sites, such as parking lots, that have already been graded, are not in flood
zones, were not gifted and accepted for a park and museum, and are not environmentally or
historically sensitive. A complex of factory-built homes could be sited on one of these without
issues of significant and unmitigable impact on rare and important historic resources, issues of
city planning documents, issues of logistics, issues of sustainability, or issues of donor and donee
intent.