Casa de la Guerra in the heart of downtown Santa Barbara was restored to its prominence and elegance in a years-long project by the Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation. 
Archaeologist Michael Imwalle at work restoring Casa de la Guerra circa 1990. 
The east wing of Casa de la Guerra undergoes construction in the 1990s. Note the stone foundation of the original cross wall that was about to be rebuilt with adobe blocks stored against the walls. 
The ceiling of the restored bodega (wine room) of Casa de la Guerra features intricate work required to tie the reeds to the vigas (beams). The ceiling was slightly dropped below the roof to allow for required seismic retrofitting. 
Casa de la Guerra’s porch undergoes construction. Beams for the roof were harvested from Los Padres National Forest. 
The restored porch with its tamped earthen floor. 
Charles Storke holds a statue from his Mexican collection that he donated to the Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation. 
A plaque on the wall of Casa de la Guerra facing East De la Guerra Street honors the contributions and commitments made by Charles Storke to the restoration project. 
From left, Patrick O’Dowd, UC Santa Barbara professor Harold Kirker and Jarrell Jackman in front of the Presidio Chapel under construction circa 1984. Kirker served as O’Dowd and Jackman’s mentor at UCSB in the 1970s and both applied the knowledge they acquired from him in restoring Casa de la Guerra years later. 
Thanks to a partnership with the Santa Barbara Shakespeare Company, Shakespeare became a staple in the courtyard of the restored Casa de la Guerra. Irwin Appel, center, plays Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor. 
A scene from As You Like It in the casa courtyard. 
An audience awaits the start of a Shakespeare play in the courtyard of Casa de la Guerra. Over the years, thousands of people experienced Shakespeare in the restored historical setting. 
Historic Casa de la Guerra was the home of Santa Barbara presidio comandante Don José de la Guerra and his large family.
[Noozhawk’s note: One in a series. Click here for previous columns.]
Immortalized as the wedding reception site of Anita de la Guerra and prominent Alta California businessman Alfred Robinson in Richard Henry Dana’s 1840 memoir, Two Years Before the Mast, the historic Casa de la Guerra was the home of Santa Barbara comandante Don José and his large family.
Thus, in 1989, the Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation was about to shower it with the attention it deserved.
Casa de la Guerra, as I noted in previous columns, remained in ownership of the SBTHP after El Paseo was sold in 1989. It required a lot split with the new property line running right through the middle of buildings, as the casa — at 15 E. De la Guerra St. — actually had been physically connected to El Paseo.
With the property division accomplished, SBTHP began to contemplate what to do with the sprawling, 12-room adobe that originally had been built between 1819 and 1826.
We were about to embark on a major restoration that would convert rooms from commercial use into a house museum. The journey was long; well over a decade was spent on the project.
On the face of it, one might think that restoring the building was easy enough — just replacing damaged elements and retaining as much of the original as possible. The question turned out to be: What was “original?”
By the 1950s, the federal government had become involved with the historic preservation movement, and came up with what is called “The Secretary of Interior’s Standards for the Treatment of Historic Buildings.”
The standards identified four approaches:
» Preservation — which may include capturing the flow of history of the building over time
» Rehabilitation — converting a building and site to a function different from its original use
» Reconstruction — rebuilding something that has vanished, such as El Presidio de Santa Bárbara
» Restoration — returning a building to a particular time period in its history
The trust took the latter approach — restoration — in dealing with Casa de la Guerra. But it took awhile to arrive at the Restoration to which particular time period.
When escrow closed on the sale of El Paseo in 1989, the trust began a cautious examination of one of the rooms that originally had been the office of Don José de la Guerra.
At the same time, I hired two trained preservationists to come up with a plan for renovating the adobe. Archaeologist Mike Imwalle, now the trust’s associate executive director of cultural resources, would be the primary person working in what we called Room 8 and he began uncovering astounding discoveries.
At the same time, the preservation consultants came up with a plan that tried to capture the “flow of history” of the adobe and its various renovation phases, one of which followed the devastating, 1857 Fort Tejon earthquake.
To give an example of the complexity of the decision-making process, the casa had several different porches in its history, and deciding which to use required a commitment to a particular approach.
On a visit to Santa Barbara, the acting state historic preservation officer reviewed the preservationists’ proposal to restore some of the lost “flow of history.” Even he noted the challenge: That “flow of history,” he said, was to leave what was there, but not bring back different periods of history.
A sea change was about to take place in large part due to the hiring of historian Patrick O’Dowd to spearhead the Casa de la Guerra project. Added to this was the financial support of Charles Storke, son of Santa Barbara News-Press publisher Thomas Storke and himself a former executive editor of the newspaper.
The younger Storke came on the SBTHP board after the El Paseo sale and made a total commitment to help see the casa restoration project through to completion. He contacted his wide circle of friends and colleagues seeking individual donations and personally raised hundreds of thousands of dollars.
After several years of success, he came to my office to say that he wanted to write a check to finish the project and asked how how much more money was needed.
O’Dowd and I came up with a six-figure number, knowing that we were working on a “time and materials” basis that likely would require further funding. That turned out to be the case, and O’Dowd found a few other funding sources — notably the since-disbanded Redevelopment Agency of the City of Santa Barbara.
SBTHP received multiple RDA grants, another example of the trust successfully leveraging private/public use of funds as we had with the presidio restoration.
Meanwhile, O’Dowd shepherded the project through the city’s Historic Landmarks Commission and later organized an incredible exhibition and symposium on De la Guerra Plaza.
(City of Santa Barbara – City TV video)
O’Dowd and I also made trips throughout California to see what had been done at other historic adobes — almost all of them reflecting a flow of history approach. We even solved a window treatment issue at the Sonoma Barracks in Sonoma.
In this single column, I can’t possibly capture all the archaeological discoveries at Casa de la Guerra, but I will mention a few.
First, O’Dowd steered the project in the direction of a restoration of the house during the period when Don José de la Guerra lived in it, from 1826 to 1858.
Led by Imwalle and his team of Bob Sheets and Arturo Ruelas, we gutted the interior of the east wing, and discovered foundations of original adobe walls that had been replaced by wood-framed walls; Imwalle was also able to determine the level of the original planked floors.
Over the decades, several doors and windows had been filled in and new ones added; everything was restored back to the original.
On the exterior, all the chicken-wire plaster was removed and we discovered the original pockets that housed the porch roof beams. The porch floor tiles turned out NOT to be original, as they had covered over a packed earthen material that was hardened with lime.
Bases of the original columns were also uncovered. All of this enabled us to build an accurate reconstruction of the porch.
Another important discovery was in Room One that had the original roof beams (“vigas” in Spanish). Testing revealed the wood to be from a species of tree from our local mountains.
Then we learned that a recent fire in Los Padres National Forest had damaged the bark of this very species, and the U.S. Forest Service allowed us to harvest the burned trees, both for use at the casa and the presidio.
It was truly exciting to haul those large- and medium-size logs down the mountain in trucks. It fired our imaginations to think how arduous it must have been in the 1810s to cut down the trees with hand saws and then transport them using animals to the casa site.
The restoration of all 12 rooms, including the bodega (wine room), was undertaken in phases and completed around 2006. Some concessions, such as modern restrooms and a kitchen area, were added to make the site more user friendly.
All told, this restoration was the result of three primary people: Charles Storke, Patrick O’Dowd and Mike Imwalle. It also is important to mention that Kenny Ruiz and his crew of Moises Rodriguez and Roberto Soto-Ruiz split their time between the presidio and the casa, doing yeomen’s work at both locations. We also had the expertise of architect Wayne Donaldson and his team to solve design and engineering conundrums.
I give full credit to these people for completing the best restoration of any early adobe from the Hispanic period in California.
The foregoing has been a brief overview of the restoration that I cover more fully in my manuscript, “Creative Mudslinging.” The furnishing and uses of the interior space also are covered in that document, which I hope to publish in the coming year.
As I write this, De la Guerra Plaza, across the street from the casa and in front of City Hall, is going through a major city planning phase. The Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation set the stage for the reimagination of the plaza with O’Dowd’s plaza symposium and the casa restoration, which reminds me of the partnership we had with the Santa Barbara Shakespeare Company to produce plays in the casa courtyard.
There is a dramatic quality to the work of the SBTHP. Yes, “All the world is a stage” seems to fit SBTHP’s accomplishments during these years.
Next up: A new research center and “digging” deeper into archaeology.
— Jarrell Jackman is the former executive director of the Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation. After receiving his Ph.D. in history from UC Santa Barbara, he taught for six years in Europe and Washington, D.C. In 2015, he was honored as a knight of the Royal Order of Isabel la Católica by Spain’s King Felipe VI and was named an honorary state park ranger by the California State Park Rangers Association in 2016. Click here for previous columns. The opinions expressed are his own.