A piece of the Inland Empire’s vast Latino and indigenous history lives on in the Trujillo Adobe in Riverside.
In the latest state budget for the new fiscal year, $10.4 million is earmarked for the Riverside County Regional Park & Open-Space District to preserve and enhance the historic site, also known as La Placita de los Trujillos, on Center Street.
The nonprofit Spanish Town Heritage Foundation, started by descendants of the adobe’s original residents, the Trujillo family, has been working for nearly a decade on fundraising efforts to preserve the historic site.
With this money, the group also hopes to turn the area into a county park, museum and mini “Spanish Town” village, honoring the land’s early Indigenous and Spanish settlers and their roots.
Nancy Melendez, 72, President of the Spanish Town Heritage Foundation, points to a recently created mural outside the Trujillo Adobe in Riverside on Friday July 15, 2022. (Photo by Will Lester, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/SCNG)
Cousins Sharon Trujillo-Kasner, 70, and Nancy Melendez, 72, President of the Spanish Town Heritage Foundation, stand inside the 1842 Trujillo Adobe in Riverside on Friday July 15, 2022. (Photo by Will Lester, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/SCNG)
Original Adobe bricks can still be seen inside the 1842 Trujillo Adobe in Riverside on Friday July 15, 2022. (Photo by Will Lester, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/SCNG)
Sharon Trujillo-Kasner, 70, looks through old photographs of the 1842 built Trujillo Adobe in Riverside on Friday July 15, 2022. Over $10 million has been earmarked in the state budget to the Riverside County Regional Park & Open-Space District, to preserve and enhance north Riverside’s Trujillo Adobe historic site, also known as La Placita de los Trujillos. (Photo by Will Lester, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/SCNG)
A replica bell sits outside the Trujillo Adobe in Riverside on Friday July 15, 2022. The original adobe was registered as a point of historical interest in 1968 and county and city landmarks after. (Photo by Will Lester, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/SCNG)
A pair of Sharon Trujillo-Kasner’s huaraches that she wore when she was a child sit on a table outside the 1842 built Trujillo Adobe in Riverside on Friday July 15, 2022. (Photo by Will Lester, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/SCNG)
Cousins Sharon Trujillo-Kasner, 70, and Nancy Melendez, 72, President of the Spanish Town Heritage Foundation, stand near the original doorway inside the Trujillo Adobe in Riverside on Friday July 15, 2022. The Spanish Town Heritage Foundation has been working to preserve the original house and eventually turn the area into a mini “Spanish Town” village honoring the land’s original Spanish settlers and roots. (Photo by Will Lester, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/SCNG)
A hand decorated dish towel once used at the 1842 built Trujillo Adobe in Riverside sits on a table outside the structure on Friday July 15, 2022. (Photo by Will Lester, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/SCNG)
Cousins Sharon Trujillo-Kasner, 70, and Nancy Melendez, 72, President of Spanish Town Heritage Foundation, look at pictures and artifacts from the 1842 built Trujillo Adobe in Riverside on Friday July 15, 2022. (Photo by Will Lester, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/SCNG)
The funding “will preserve our local Indigenous and Latinx history,” said Riverside County Supervisor Karen Spiegel in a news release. “It will honor the generations of hard-working families in La Placita — now Northside neighborhood — and its founder Lorenzo Trujillo.”
The 160-year-old Spanish adobe is along the Old Spanish Trail, a trade route first established by Native Americans that spread from what is now California to Colorado, Nevada, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico, according to descendants of the Trujillo family.
Lorenzo Trujillo was a genízaro: a Native American of mixed ancestry who at one point was an indentured servant. He was taken into the Spanish Trujillo clan and led settlers from Santa Fe through the Old Spanish Trail to the land first granted to the Lugo brothers in Rancho San Bernardino, family members said. Trujillo eventually settled in what became La Placita de los Trujillos — in Riverside’s Northside and the Agua Mansa community, in what is now Colton — helping to guard livestock and crops.
“They were looking for what we now call the American Dream, for land and a home of their own,” said Nancy Melendez, president of the Spanish Town Heritage Foundation. Melendez’s great-grandparents, John and Sarah Trujillo, were the last family members to live in the adobe before it was sold in the 1950s.
La Placita de Los Trujillos was also the site of a community center, a modern water and farming system, a school, a church, and even Riverside County’s first voting precinct in the area, Melendez said.
“This little community thrived through the Mexican-American War, as California became a state, and later when Riverside established itself, it continued to grow. This community has always been faithful to its roots; many descendants still live in the area,” Melendez said.
The original adobe and the community were destroyed in 1862 by flooding of the Santa Ana River. Later that year, Melendez said, settlers rebuilt the adobe upstream, and that adobe — the oldest surviving structure in the city — remains. It was registered as a state point of historical interest in 1968, and named a Riverside County and a city landmark in 2015.
In 2017, the Hispanic Access Foundation named the adobe one of the top 10 national Hispanic historic sites in need of protection. In 2021, the Trujillo home was named one of America’s “Most Endangered Historic Places” by the National Trust for Historic Preservation — following Riverside’s Harada House the year before.
Nancy Melendez looks around the Trujillo Adobe, the ruins of an 1862 home in Riverside on June 3, 2021. The adobe made a list of national historic sites called the 11 Most Endangered Places. (File photo by David Allen, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/SCNG)
This historic photo shows the Trujillo Adobe before it deteriorated. All that is left of this structure on N. Orange St. in Riverside are three walls and a small part of a fourth. (Photo courtesy of the Trujillo family)
Clean up at Riverside’s historical Trujillo Adobe is held on an overcast Saturday, April 24, 2021. Many generations lived in this home, according to the sign. (Photo by Cindy Yamanaka, The Press-Enterprise/SCNG)
Spanish Town Heritage Foundation Secretary Sharon Kasner hugs friend Aaron Roberts of Riverside at Trujillo Adobe, a Riverside Historic Landmark, on Thursday, July, 22, 2021. The Riverside City Council approves a plan to add the name SpanishTown Rd. to Orange St. between Center St. and Columbia Ave. in Riverside’s Northside neighborhood a couple feet away. (Photo by Cindy Yamanaka, The Press-Enterprise/SCNG)
The Trujillo Adobe as it appeared in 1979. This building is the last remnant of the Agua Mansa townsite. (File photo by Steve Lech, Contributing Photographer)
Peggy Fryc, Native Daughter and Riverside Woman’s Club member, rakes at the Trujillo Adobe in Riverside on Saturday, April 24, 2021. Fryc was so focused that she almost worked through lunch despite a loud meal bell being rung. (Photo by Cindy Yamanaka, The Press-Enterprise/SCNG)
What appears to be a small portion of the La Placita de los Trujillos’ Trujillo Adobe, built in 1863, sits covered, for its protection from the elements, along Center Street in Riverside on Thursday, Dec. 12, 2019. During the 1840s, La Placita de los Trujillos and Agua Mansa were thriving farming communities along the Santa Ana River until both were decimated by a great flood in January of 1862. (Photo by Jennifer Cappuccio Maher, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/SCNG)
Spanish Town Heritage Foundation President Nancy Melendez, left, and a volunteer help fill in the rock border at the Trujillo Adobe marker in Riverside on Saturday, April 24, 2021. (Photo by Cindy Yamanaka, The Press-Enterprise/SCNG)
Sen. Richard Roth, D-Riverside and Assemblymember Jose Medina helped to secure the state funding to preserve the Trujillo Adobe.
“Riverside’s oldest historic landmark tells our Inland Empire story, a diverse story of indigenous peoples, Mexican and European settlers,” Roth said in a statement. “That history will now be preserved for our community to learn from and enjoy for generations to come.”
Assemblymember Jose Medina called the adobe “a critical reminder of our heritage.”
Funds will go toward the preservation of the adobe itself, which sits within a protected structure safe from driving rain, said officials from Riverside County parks district, which has managed the site since the home was sold. Any remaining funds will go toward acquiring more land to enable public access and the construction of an interpretive center.
Melendez and her cousins, Darlene Trujillo Elliot and Sharon Trujillo Kasner, said they are “overjoyed” to see their own culture and family’s history live on.
“Oftentimes we have been accused of rewriting history,” Melendez said. “We are not rewriting, but sharing it. Sharing all of the histories that come together to make this wonderful, diverse tapestry we call Riverside.”