Adobe Flores

Adobe Flores stands in the San Rafael Hills district of present-day South Pasadena, on land that once formed part of Rancho San Rafael, the 1784 Spanish grant to Jose Maria Verdugo. Local tradition dates the single-story adobe to 1838, placing its construction in the late Mexican period when the Verdugo and allied families were subdividing pasturelands of the rancho into smaller working ranchos and dwelling sites along the Arroyo Seco.

The house is a vernacular California adobe of the type built across the Los Angeles basin in the years before American annexation. Walls were raised from sun-dried adobe bricks laid on a low stone footing, finished with lime plaster inside and out, and protected by a wood-framed, low-pitched roof. The plan follows the linear room-by-room arrangement typical of Mexican-era residences, with doors opening to a sheltered porch rather than through interior corridors. Modifications over the 19th and 20th centuries added windows, partitions, and roof material in keeping with the property's continuous domestic use.

Adobe Flores takes its name from the tradition that General Jose Maria Flores, the Mexican commander during the closing months of the Mexican-American War in California, used the building as a temporary headquarters or refuge in the period surrounding the Treaty of Cahuenga in January 1847. The attribution is not fully documented, and historians describe the connection as a local belief preserved through generations of owners rather than an established fact.

The property remains in private ownership and is not open to the public. It survives as one of the small number of Mexican-period adobes still standing in the northeastern Los Angeles basin, joining structures such as the Centinela Adobe, the Avila Adobe, and several Verdugo family dwellings in the broader fabric of southern California's ranchero architecture. Within California's adobe tradition, Adobe Flores represents the modest rural house typical of the late rancho era, surviving by virtue of continuous occupancy and adaptation rather than formal preservation.