A 156-year-old Verne home with a storied past is on the market for just under $2 million.
The 2,284-square-foot adobe, known as La Casa de Carrion after the cattle rancher Saturnino Carrion who built it in 1868, sits on a 2-acre-plus lot. It has an L-shaped layout with two bedrooms and two bathrooms.
Records show it sold last in May 2001 for $414,000.
According to the listing, the house is “a fusion of timeless historical elements and modern convenience” with windows and doors dating to a 1951 restoration.
The listing describes it as having high beamed ceilings, wood floors and thick, 22-inch walls that “provide natural cooling even during the peak of summer.”
Updates include a gourmet kitchen with marble countertops, a dedicated coffee station and a spacious pantry.
Just outside is a kitchen garden.
Pat Cochran of Coldwell Banker Realty has the listing.
Designated California Historic Landmark in 1945, the adobe originally sat on Rancho San Jose land gifted to Carrion by his uncle, Ygnacio Palomares.
The 22,340-acre tract of land known as Rancho San Jose included what are now the northeastern Los Angeles County communities of Pomona, La Verne, San Dimas, Diamond Bar, Azusa, Covina, Walnut, Glendora and Claremont. In 1837, Alta California Gov. Juan Bautista Alvarado granted the large rancho — former mission land dismantled by the Mexican government — to Palomares and his friend, Ricardo Vejar.
These well-connected sons of wealthy families then divided the land between themselves, with Palomares taking the northern portion and building his family home. La Casa Primera de Rancho San Jose, designated a historic landmark in 1954 and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1975, now belongs to the city of Pomona. It’s managed by the Historical Society of the Pomona Valley as a museum open to the public.
But Casa de Carrion remains a private residence with its own claim to fame.
Watercolor artist Milford Zornes depicted the house on paper in a painting titled “Old Adobe” in 1934. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the First Lady viewed Zornes’ watercolor at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. and selected it for the White House.
“That was exciting,” Zornes said in an oral history conducted for the Archives of American Art by the Smithsonian Institution on June 30, 1965. He added that years later, while visiting the nation’s capitol, he “found it hanging in one of the executive offices in the White House.”
Today, the Smithsonian American Art Museum website shows “Old Adobe” in its Renwick Gallery collection as a transfer from the National Park Service, although it is not on view.
