How a 19th Century romance novel transformed American architecture

Across Southern California the same building repeats itself: white or tan stucco exterior walls, black wrought-iron details, and red-tile roof. It’s vaguely reminiscent of a colonial-era Mexican mission or  Spanish farmhouse. Yet this style, so synonymous with Southern California, was introduced just over a century ago—the trendy by-product of a now forgotten novel that captivated Americans in the late 19^th century.   

Ramona, written by Helen Hunt Jackson, was published in 1884 and became a sensation in the United States: It sold 15,000 copies in the first 10 months following its release. The novel tells a tragic love story set during California’s political and cultural upheaval after the American conquest of the Southwest. The book’s titular heroine is a beautiful orphan raised in a wealthy Mexican family living in Southern California. She falls in love with Alessandro, a young Native American of Luiseñodescent employed by her adoptive family. Alessandro woos Ramona, and though class and racial divisions make their love forbidden, the pair steals away into the chaparral, hiding out along old trails dappled by ancient shade trees that run along country streams, and braving upland snowstorms with little more than their love to keep them warm. A bloodthirsty Anglo-American settler eventually murders Alessandro, and Ramona mournfully retreats to Mexico, leaving only the enchantment of her story behind.  

The novel quickly became a cultural craze across the country, particularly in Southern California. Though Ramona was a work of fiction, enthusiastic fans searched for its sources of inspiration, especially Ramona’s family home. Vendors sold souvenir spoons at the supposed site of the couple’s marriage. Two houses, one north of San Diego and the other north of Los Angeles, emerged as potential models based on their similarity to the house in the book. Plus, Jackson had visited both houses while conceiving the story. Tourists mobbed the private homes like Rancho Camulos where the wealthy Mexican American Del Valle family lived. They also descended on Rancho Guajome Adobe, an 1850s estate similar to the house Jackson described. Both are now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.  

The fervor over Ramona lasted for decades, well past the book’s publication. In 1905, the novel was turned into a play that starred then unknown Lawrence Griffith as the hero, Alessandro. That casting decision proved propitious; Griffith became better known as the pioneering Hollywood director D. W. Griffith, and he directed a film adaptation of the novel in 1910. And the play is still around—in 1993; it was named California’s official state outdoor play, and it’s performed annually at the Ramona Bowl Amphitheater, in the state’s Inland Empire region, over three spring weekends. 

But Ramona’s most enduring legacy may be Southern California’s Spanish Colonial Revival architecture. This is far from what Jackson had envisioned.  

The woman behind Ramona 

In late 19th-century America, Helen Hunt Jackson was a literary star.

She frequently wrote poems, fiction, travel stories, and home advice articles for major magazines, including Harper’s and Atlantic Monthly. By some estimates, she was the best paid woman writer of her generation, and she was friends with America’s literary elite, including Emily Dickinson. 

The tenor of her writing shifted in 1879 after Jackson attended a lecture by Standing Bear, chief of the Ponca tribe and a well-known civil rights activist. He was on a speaking tour to raise awareness of the plight of his people, who had been forced off their land by the U.S. His speech galvanized Jackson and she began researching the history of the U.S.’s wrongdoings against Native Americans. She complied her research into a book, A Century of Dishonor, published in 1881. “A full history of the wrongs they have suffered at the hands of the authorities, military and civil, and also of the citizens of this country, it would take years to write and volumes to hold,” she wrote. “There is but one hope of righting this wrong. It lies in appeal to the heart and the conscience of the American people.” She sent a copy of the book to every member of Congress.   

A Century of Dishonor landed with a thud and the New York Times noted in Jackson’s 1885 obituary that the book did little to influence Washington lawmakers, even turning them into “enemies.” She pivoted to fiction, hoping itcould achieve the reform she sought. She imagined a novel that could spur readers to the Native American cause much in the same way that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s wildly influential novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin mainstreamed the abolition movement. Ramona was born.   

Ramona’s romance smolders amid racial violence. Anglo-Americans destroy a newly conquered California, stealing land from its native inhabitants. Ramona says of the settlers: “They have power, and great riches … Money is all that they think of. To get money, they will commit any crime, even murder.”   

In Jackson’s novelistic universe, Americans are spineless and a bit lazy, driven only by capitalistic greed. At one point, an Anglo-American steals the land that Alessandro and Ramona are living on. Jackson’s point of view is clear in the dialogue: "Of course, I know it does seem a little rough on fellows like you, that are industrious, and have done some work on the land,” the interloper says. “But you see the land’s in the market; I’ve paid my money for it."   

Despite the radical politics that motivated Jackson, readers largely ignored the sentimental appeal to the plight of Native Americans in favor of the romance. Geographer and writer Dydia DeLyser theorizes that Ramona’s rich scenographic charm overshadowed Jackson’s ambitions for the novel. The descriptions of lush landscapes are so compelling that they overwhelm the tale of tragic racism. Jackson’s narrator paints the land around Ramona’s house as an Eden that readers could daydream about instead of a place of deadly, racial strife:   

Though Ramona was a best seller, by Jackson’s standards, it was a flop.   

Ramona’s California dreams 

Ramona was published just as Southern California was consciously transforming itself into a place that promised to fulfill American’s sunny dreams. In 1885, the year after the novel was published, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway reached the Los Angeles area, sparking a marketing war with the Southern Pacific, the first railroad to link the city to the rest of the country about a decade earlier. Both railways appealed to readers fantasizing about Ramona-inspired romance, advertising rail lines that went to places supposedly featured in the novel. An 1886 ad in the Los Angeles Times for a real-estate development named for the book touted: “RAMONA! The Greatest Attraction Yet Offered. In the Way of Desirable Real Estate Investment and For Beautiful Villa Homes.”  

Anglos wanted to not just see the beautiful world described in the book but to live in it. The eccentric and prominent local journalist Charles Fletcher Lummis, for example, was so enamored with the Mexican past that he called himself Don Carlos. Lummis published a book about the Del Valle family home titled The Home of Ramona. The book helped establish the house as a destination for tourists eager to explore the newly accessible Southern California.   

The novel romanticizes not just the lovers and the landscape but also the old Spanish missions, the ruins of which dotted California in the late 19th century. “The Señora says the Missions were like palaces, and that there were thousands of Indians in every one of them,” Ramona says in the book. “Thousands and thousands, all working so happy and peaceful”—a rosy image that glossed over the exploitative working conditions for many Native Americans.  

Ramona fostered what former California State Librarian Kevin Starr called a mission cult, devoted to preserving and restoring the old buildings. Lummis went so far as to build his home in a style that mimicked the missions, and eventually, less eccentric Californians followed. Area architects such as Willis Polk, John Galen, and Julia Morgan incorporated details inspired by the missions into their buildings in the gilded age, developing a Mission Revival style. It featured stucco-walled buildings with arched colonnades, topped by red-tile roofs and belfries, like the ones once used to call Spanish colonists to prayer, though the style was employed more often for homes, hotels, and railroad stations than churches.  

In the 1920s, the Mission Revival style was replaced by a newer look that incorporated a broader range of influences, including elements from Morocco, Italy, and Andalusia. This became known as Spanish Colonial Revival or Mediterranean Revival and is still widespread today. It was pioneered by architect George Washington Smith, whose Montecito home built in this style was called “the germ of hope for future California architecture” in a 1920 article in Architectural Forum. 

During this period, Ramona remained incredibly popular, and its architecture was still a cultural touchstone. The 20th-century California architect Irving Gill wrote in a 1916 essay: “Ramona’s house, a landmark as familiar in the South as some of the Missions, was built around three sides of an open space. In California we have liberally borrowed this home plan, for it is hard to devise a better, cozier, more convenient or practical scheme for a home.”  

Ramona’s narrator describes the home’s design: “The house was of adobe, low, with a wide veranda on the three sides of the inner court, and a still broader one across the entire front, which looked to the south. These verandas, especially those on the inner court, were supplementary rooms to the house. The greater part of the family life went on in them.” The home was “one of the best specimens to be found in California of the representative house of the half barbaric, half elegant, wholly generous and free-handed life led there by Mexican men and women of degree in the early part of this century.”   

The home’s design facilitated the supposedly more relaxed and pleasurable life by foregoing the strict functionalism of styles more popular on the East Coast. Unlike Victorian or Gothic Revival-style homes, which sharply divided family life among discrete rooms with specific purposes, Ramona’s home was open. It also had ample open-air spaces, which allowed the family life inside the home to spill outside. Alessandro and Ramona’s love letters and secret songs flowed through these verandas, adding to the romance of the architecture. The home also connected its residents to nature more than dwellings back East, which were tightly sealed to keep cold winters out. Here, life could be more sensually stimulated by the gentle caresses of the mild climate that attracted so many newcomers.        

By the 1920s and early ’30s, Spanish Colonial Revival had become wildly popular and was a default style for buildings in Southern California. But then it fell out of fashion as tastemakers embraced modernism. When historical styles became popular in the 1960s and ’70s, the red-tiled-roof style came back as a “traditional” American motif and is still popular today.   

Jackson died at age 54, shortly after Ramona was released, never seeing the full and lasting impact of her novel. Though she is largely forgotten today, Jackson has arguably been as influential as any architect or designer in shaping America, and her surprising architectural legacy shows no signs of retreat.