Leonis Adobe

This two-storey adobe in Calabasas is Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument No. 1, the first entry on the city's landmark register, declared on 6 August 1962 to stop a supermarket being built on the site. It is named after Miguel Leonis, the French Basque rancher who enlarged it in the late 1870s and died under the wheels of his own wagon in 1889. The older claim to the ground belonged to Espíritu Chijulla, the Chumash and Tongva woman he lived with for thirty years, whose father was one of the grantees of Rancho El Escorpión and whom his will dismissed as his housekeeper. She sued, and won half the estate in 1891 and the last ruling in 1905, sixteen years later. The ghost stories arrived long afterwards: the accounts of footsteps, of unexplained smells, of hands that caught a falling woman on the upstairs veranda and of a voice saying "Chichita" are told by books about the house, not by the museum, whose website mentions no ghost at all.

The Leonis Adobe carries a number no other building in Los Angeles can carry: Historic-Cultural Monument No. 1, the first entry on the city's landmark register, declared on 6 August 1962. The house is named after a man. The older claim to the ground under it belonged to a woman. The land came first. In July 1845 three Indigenous men — Odón Chihuya, whose surname is also written Chijulla, his son-in-law Urbano Chari and Urbano's son Manuel — negotiated joint ownership of a square league in the western San Fernando Valley that became Rancho El Escorpión. Odón had been born at Humaliwo (Malibu), but his father came from the village at the foot of Kas'ele'ew Peak, inside the grant itself. His daughter, María del Espíritu Santo Chijulla, born about 1836 and baptised at Mission San Fernando, lived at El Escorpión all her life. Half a century later the ethnographer John P. Harrington was told by Sétimo López that Espíritu and her family spoke Ventureño Chumash as well as Fernandeño Tongva — the ordinary bilingualism of that village. Miguel Leonis, a French Basque from Cambo-les-Bains, reached Southern California in the 1850s with nothing. The Los Angeles Daily Herald compressed the career into a single line when he died: he arrived a poor man in the early fifties, could neither read nor write, found work herding sheep, and through frugal living and shrewd trading in cattle and land became very wealthy. Espíritu had married José Antonio Menéndez in 1856 and had a son, Juan José, in 1857. Widowed, she began living with Leonis at El Escorpión in 1859; their daughter Marcelina was born in 1860 and died at twenty. Through the 1860s and early 1870s the rancho passed piece by piece into Leonis's hands, and by 1878 the couple had made an abandoned 1844 adobe at Calabasas their home. Leonis enlarged it into the two-storey Monterey-style house that stands today; the 1975 federal nomination dates that remodelling to the late 1870s and notes that most of the later restoration was an uncovering rather than a rebuilding. On a Tuesday evening in September 1889 Leonis was riding a wagon loaded with wood, with three companions, when a jolt threw him under the wheels. They broke the ribs on his right side and tore his face. He died on the Friday morning, 20 September. His will called Espíritu his housekeeper and left her a fraction of an estate the Herald valued at between half and three quarters of a million dollars. She refused the money and sued. Eleven lawyers were retained across the parties. The contest opened before Judge Clark on 5 May 1891; witnesses testified that Leonis had introduced her in Spanish as his esposa — wife — and not merely as his mujer. On 5 June the jury answered a list of written questions: yes, Miguel Leonis and Espíritu Chijulla had agreed to be man and wife; yes, he had publicly acknowledged her. She was awarded half the estate. Nettie Pryor, a daughter Leonis had by Librada Pryor, was excluded. That verdict was the beginning, not the end. More than a hundred suits followed, and the man she had made her agent, Laurent Etchepare, put her property into his own name; by 1898 the courts were untangling mortgages he had granted on land she swore he had taken from her by fraud. Her lawyers were Horace Bell and the future United States senator Stephen M. White. The case reached the California Supreme Court three times, and the final ruling in her favour came in 1905, sixteen years after Leonis's death. She died at the adobe a few months later, in 1906, and was buried at Mission San Fernando. Her son Juan José Menéndez inherited the house, worked as a blacksmith and built the barn that still stands in 1912. In 1917 Harrington and his wife Carobeth — later the writer Carobeth Laird — stayed with Juan and Juana Valenzuela de Menéndez at the adobe and recorded Fernandeño narratives there. Menéndez sold the property to the Agoure family in 1922; they lost it to foreclosure in 1931, after which the house served as a chicken-dinner restaurant and then as a retirement home. Its last resident was the film actor John Carradine. By 1961 the owner wanted a supermarket on the site. On 5 August 1962 the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner ran a full page on the wreck under the headline "Leonis' Adobe — Park or Parking?"; the next day the newly formed Cultural Heritage Board met for the first time and, within three hours, made the adobe Monument No. 1, which froze the demolition. Kathleen "Kay" Beachy bought the site for $240,000 in March 1963 and handed it to the Leonis Adobe Association. The restored house opened to the public on 21 May 1966 and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on 29 May 1975. The Plummer House, California Historical Landmark No. 160, was moved onto the grounds in 1983 and is now the visitor centre.

The Leonis Adobe Museum is at 23537 Calabasas Road, Calabasas, California 91302, beside the 101 freeway in Old Town Calabasas. Entry is free; the museum asks for donations and does not charge for its tours either. As published in August 2026 it opens Saturdays from 10:00 to 16:00 and Sundays from 13:00 to 16:00 — worth checking before you travel, because in the late 1990s the same museum opened Wednesday to Sunday and the schedule has shrunk since. The grounds can be walked freely during opening hours, but the inside of the adobe can only be seen on a guided tour: Saturdays at 11:30, 13:30 and 14:30, Sundays at 13:30 and 14:30. Tours last about half an hour, are given in spoken English, start at the front porch and admit no latecomers; private tours can be booked separately. Photographs and video are allowed on the grounds but not inside the adobe, and strollers cannot go into the house. The museum has its own free car park — tell the attendant you are visiting — and it is locked at closing time. The upper floor of the adobe is reachable only by stairs; the museum offers an audio tour with transcripts and a filmed tour of the upstairs as alternatives. There is a ramp at the rear of the Plummer House, the visitor centre and gift shop, and accessible parking spaces. The site is a working ranch, so the ground is uneven in places. Under the Americans with Disabilities Act only trained service dogs are admitted; emotional-support and therapy animals are not. No food or drink is allowed anywhere on the property except water bottles with lids, and smoking and vaping are banned outdoors as well as indoors. This is a living-history ranch, and the animals are the reason many families come: Percheron draught horses, Texas longhorns, sheep, angora goats, Black Spanish turkeys, chickens, doves and four barn cats. Alfalfa and chicken feed are sold in the gift shop; feeding the animals anything brought from outside is forbidden. The Plummer House, moved here from West Hollywood in 1983 and registered as California Historical Landmark No. 160, holds the shop and displays of Leonis family objects and finds from a well on the property. Two warnings. Calabasas Creek Park, the museum's 1880s-style park with its replica Chumash village and replica Calabasas jail, is closed for maintenance with no announced reopening date. And nobody here will tell you a ghost story on the tour: the 2026 programme is a 60th-anniversary dinner on 26 September (65 or 75 dollars), a Pumpkin Party on 24 October and a Holiday Roundup on 5 December (10 dollars each, under-twos free).