Casa Adobe de San Rafael

The Casa Adobe de San Rafael stands at 1340 Dorothy Drive in Glendale, on land that once formed part of Rancho San Rafael, the 1784 Spanish concession to Jose Maria Verdugo and the foundational grant of the Glendale-Burbank corridor. The house is generally attributed to Tomas Sanchez, who served as sheriff of Los Angeles County in the 1860s, with construction dating to that decade or shortly after. It is one of the few substantially intact Mexican-period and immediate post-statehood adobes still standing in the central Los Angeles basin.

The building is a one-story vernacular adobe of rectangular plan, with thick walls of sun-dried earth bricks on a low stone footing and a low-pitched, wood-shingled gable roof. A wide verandah on the principal elevation shelters the doors and windows of the main rooms, in keeping with the rancho-period type. Lime-plastered surfaces protect the adobe core, and the interior plan follows the linear, room-after-room organization typical of California adobes built before the introduction of platform framing and central halls. Measured documentation by the Historic American Buildings Survey, archived at the Library of Congress, records the structure in detail.

The City of Glendale acquired the property in the 1930s, and the adjoining gardens were developed in subsequent decades. The site was opened as a small public park and house museum, providing one of the few opportunities to enter a surviving Verdugo-era adobe in the eastern San Fernando Valley area.

The Casa Adobe de San Rafael operates today under the City of Glendale as a public park and interpretive site. Within California's broader adobe tradition, the building represents the domestic architecture of the post-Verdugo period in the Los Angeles basin, complementing the Centinela, Avila, and Lopez adobes in documenting the small group of mid-19th-century earthen-walled houses that survived the rapid urbanization of greater Los Angeles in the 20th century.