Sgt. Jose Manuel Machado built this simple adobe-and-wood home in the 1830s. Jack Stewart, a Maine native, visited San Diego in 1835 and returned to live here in 1838, whereupon he married Machado's youngest daughter, Rosa. The two lived in the home with the entire family. When her parents died, Rosa Stewart bought out her brothers' and sisters' claims to the house, and she and her husband lived there until their deaths.
Descendents of the Stewarts occupied the house until 1966, when structural deterioration forced them out. California acquired it in 1967 and restored it to its historical state as a house museum.
Unlike the nearby Casa de Estudillo, the Machado-Stewart house represents how a middle-class family would have lived. It's created from the same materials -- adobe bricks and heavy wood support beams -- but furnishings are much simpler and it doesn't have private rooms.
Casa de Machado y Stewart is stocked with working class tools, such as a weaving loom, a spinning wheel, kitchenware and basic farming equipment.
A mannequin dressed in traditional Spanish clothing leans over a heavy wooden table, a large clay mortar -- essential for grinding corn -- in her hands. The grounds surrounding the house include a beautiful, extensive garden of citrus trees and succulents, heavy outdoor clay ovens and several wooden posts to which horses were once tethered.
Getting There:
Casa de Machado y Stewart - Old Town
4002 Wallace St.
San Diego, CA 92110
Click here for map
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