Stow House

Stow House was finished in 1873, and the order of what came next matters: the National Register nomination says Sherman P. Stow completed the Carpenter Gothic cottage and married Ida Hollister "soon thereafter". The land was not his either — his father, Southern Pacific attorney William Whitney Stow, bought 1,043 acres of Rancho La Patera in 1871 so his twenty-year-old son could farm. What the family built here was California's first commercial lemon grove, and the laboratory people whisper about was an agricultural experiment station, where Edgar Stow found a way to beat oak root fungus and sent rootstock as far as Palestine. The ghost story is much younger than the house. The earliest public claim we can date is a Ghost Adventures episode broadcast on 28 June 2023, selling "a stately California ranch steeped in tragedy". The Goleta Valley Historical Society, which has cared for the house since 1967, has never mentioned a ghost — or that episode — anywhere on its website. The story worth telling is the one the standard version leaves out: the Chinese cooks and laundrymen who lived in the wing that was cut off the back of the house.

The house at the centre of Rancho La Patera was not built for a bride, and it was not bought by the man who built it. Both halves of that correction come from the same document: the National Register nomination filed in 2000 by Monte G. Kim, the Goleta Valley Historical Society's own historian. The land had been Chumash long before it was anyone's ranch. The Goleta Slough supported one of the most densely settled stretches of the California coast, and the place-name itself survives in the ethnographic record: Chester King's 1975 inventory of historic Chumash villages lists a settlement recorded by Alexander S. Taylor in 1860 as lying "near the islet of La Patera near the sea shore". The Spanish name means duck pond. Under Mexican rule the area formed part of the Dos Pueblos Rancho, granted to Nicolás Den in 1842 by governor Juan Bautista Alvarado, and it included a 2,000-acre tract north of the slough called La Patera. In 1852 Den sold the property to his father-in-law Daniel Hill. When Hill died in 1865 the family carved Rancho La Goleta into 38 farmsteads, and his widow Rafaela took title to much of La Patera. In 1868 the heirs advertised the parcels at $22 an acre in newspapers as far off as San Francisco and Los Angeles. One of the buyers was William Whitney Stow (1825–1895), an attorney for the Southern Pacific Railroad and a former Speaker of the California Assembly. In 1871 he bought 1,043 acres of the La Patera tract from Rafaela Ortega Hill and her new husband German Senter — not for himself, but for his twenty-year-old son Sherman P. Stow (1851–1907), who wanted a career in agriculture. Sherman began the ranch house in the autumn of 1872, on a knoll just east of the duck pond that would become Stow Lake and later Lake Los Carneros. He built it out of fir shipped down from Puget Sound and finished it the following year. The nomination is precise about what happened next, and the order matters: "Using fir shipped from the Puget Sound, Sherman completed the Gothic Revival cottage the following year. Soon thereafter, Sherman married Ida Hollister." The house came first; the marriage followed. Ida G. Stow (1851–1927) laid out the gardens through the 1870s, and the coast redwood still standing east of the house was an anniversary present from Sherman to her. The society attributes the Carpenter Gothic design to a Bay Area architect, Frank Walker, but hedges it as "believed to have been"; the National Register form records the architect and builder simply as unknown. What the Stows did with the land is the part that earned the listing. The couple planted a hundred acres of almond, walnut and pecan, then 3,700 lime trees, and in 1874 — the society's own walking tour dates it a year later — a thirty-acre grove of Lisbon lemons, described in the nomination as the first commercial lemon grove in California. By 1888 the grove held 3,100 trees. In 1897 Sherman became the first president of the Johnston Fruit Company, the region's only private packing house. The building grew with the business. Around 1885 a 33-foot Italianate second storey went up over the kitchen, pantry and laundry. Between 1913 and 1915 the west porch was rebuilt to wrap the south-west corner and French doors were cut in beside the main entrance. And around 1915 the entire north wing was demolished, turning the original U-shaped plan into the L that visitors see today. That demolition is the most interesting thing about the house, because of who lived in the wing. The rear rooms were the domestic workers' quarters, and the society states plainly that "male Chinese immigrant cooks and laundrymen, whose numbers varied from one to three, were among the workers who occupied these rooms from the 1870s to the 1930s". The rooms were not destroyed: in 1914 Sherman H. Stow lifted that 1870s structure, stacked it on top of a new food pantry, and made the two-storey Bunkhouse that now holds the historical society's archives. The society calls it "a physical reminder of the contributions of immigrants to Goleta Valley culture and history". The staff quarters were literally detached from the big house and re-erected in the yard — and that, rather than any spectre, is the household the standard account of Stow House leaves out. Sherman P. Stow died in 1907, leaving three sons and three daughters. His first-born, Sherman H. Stow (1876–1915), ran the ranch until what the nomination calls his "untimely death" in 1915, at thirty-nine. Management then passed to his younger brother Edgar Whitney Stow, who had been born in the house on 26 May 1885, the fifth of the six children. Edgar took an agriculture degree at Berkeley in 1908, dug trenches for oil pipe, appraised ranches for a San Francisco real-estate firm, and came home in 1915. In 1917 he married Sally Taylor Alexander, of the De la Guerra family. Edgar is the reason the house is on the National Register, and he is also the source of the laboratory. In the early 1920s he bought the equipment of a defunct kelp processing plant and set up what the society calls his own "experiment station" in a wood-frame building beside the house. There he ran trials on lemon buds and rootstocks, mixed his own insecticide formula, and designed pruning and spraying rigs built in the ranch shop. His best-known result was a defence against oak root fungus: budding Lisbon or Eureka lemons onto grapefruit rootstock, which resisted the disease. He also argued that the fruit was the best guide to irrigation, measuring a sample of lemons and watering only when their growth rate flattened. The California Citrograph published his findings in 1936, and that October the Goleta Valley Leader reported that the "fame of Santa Barbara county lemons has reached far away Palestine", where the grower Alfred Kaufman had written to Stow about his rootstock experiments. Stow obtained Palestine sweet lemon rootstock in Florida, found it resistant to gummosis, and distributed it locally; his 1949 obituary in the Santa Barbara News-Press recorded that "many of the finest orchards in the two counties obtained the root stock from La Patera". He was also, briefly, a politician — Assembly in 1923, State Senate in 1932, retired in 1936 after losing his re-election bid — and he never moved the family to Sacramento, bowing, relatives told the nomination's researcher, to his wife's wishes. Disliking Prohibition, he planted a vineyard, pressed the fruit himself and excavated a wine cellar under the house. A stroke late in life left him bedridden and confined to the ground floor, and the room beside the parlour became his convalescent chamber. He recovered enough to travel, and died unexpectedly on 23 June 1949, aged 64, at his summer cabin in the Santa Ynez Valley — not in the house. Stow descendants lived here until 1966, the year the laboratory building was hauled off to the family's Cathedral Oaks Road property, where it still serves as a ranch office; only its concrete foundation remains on site. Santa Barbara County bought the landmark in 1967 and the Goleta Valley Historical Society has cared for it ever since. The Stow House was listed on the National Register on 28 September 2000 under Criterion B, for its association with Edgar — significant locally, the form is careful to say, not nationally or statewide. The listing covers the house alone: one contributing building on under an acre, with the barn, bunkhouse and packing shed deliberately excluded because they were built or moved after 1949.

Rancho La Patera & Stow House is at 304 N. Los Carneros Road, Goleta, California 93117 (805 681 7216, [email protected]). The property is county-owned and run by the Goleta Valley Historical Society. The following was taken from the society's own visitor pages on 13 August 2026 and should be confirmed before travelling, because these are small volunteer-run opening hours and they change. The Visitor Center and Museum Store open Saturdays and Sundays from 1pm to 4pm. Guided tours of Stow House run on Saturdays and Sundays at 2pm and 3pm, and can be arranged on other days in advance. The Ranch Yard opens on Sundays from 11am to 2pm, and "Sundays at the Ranch" — barn animals, tractor rides, outdoor activities — is free. Admission is a suggested $5 donation. Group, school and youth-organisation tours are booked in advance, and the car park takes tour buses and RVs. Accessibility needs a phone call. The society publishes nothing about wheelchair access — the only thing described as accessible on its entire website is the car park, and that refers to bus and RV size. The National Register description records a wide eight-step brick staircase to the front porch and a seven-step staircase to the east porch, with further stepped entrances on the north side, so every documented way into the 1873 house is by stairs, and the museum rooms occupy a one-and-a-half storey plan. Ring ahead and ask. There are no ghost tours, and no paranormal events. The society runs no such programming and does not mention the subject anywhere in its published material, so do not arrive expecting a haunted attraction. What it does run is a full events calendar — Camp Stow, Fiesta Ranchera, Music at the Ranch, an Old Fashioned 4th of July, the Old Time Fiddlers' Festival and Holiday at the Ranch — and the site can be rented as a venue. What is worth the trip is the ground. The Ida G. Stow Memorial Arboretum, restored by the society in 2013–14, preserves a rare surviving Picturesque-style Victorian ranch garden: Norfolk Island pine, Canary date palm, lemon eucalyptus, Chilean wine palm and bunya-bunya, plus the coast redwood east of the house that Sherman gave Ida as an anniversary present. The Bunkhouse and the 1880 packing shed — now the archives and the History Education Center respectively — tell the working history, and the Education Center covers the valley's story from the Chumash onward. Edgar's laboratory is gone; only its concrete foundation survives, at the top of the drive on the right. Immediately east lies the Lake Los Carneros Natural & Historical Preserve, with miles of footpaths and birdwatching, and the Goleta Depot of the South Coast Railroad Museum is next door.