Bancroft Ranch House

The county cast this in 1958 and got the landmark number wrong, calling it 656 when the register says 626. It gets the authorship wrong too. Bancroft's thirty-nine volumes were produced by a staff that ran as high as fifty, and his librarian Henry Oak and Frances Fuller Victor both said publicly that they had written large parts of what carried only his name. Bancroft called the operation a literary factory himself. No state plaque stands here.

What the plaque says

Bancroft Ranch House Adobe built about 1850 by A. S. Ensworth. Home of Capt. Rufus K. Porter and family. Curved timbers brought from the “Clarissa Andrews,” famed coaling hulk formerly of the Pacific Mail Steamship Co. Historian Hubert Howe Bancroft later owned this estate and here wrote a part of his monumental history of California. State Registered Landmark No. 656 Marker placed by San Diego County Board of Supervisors and the Historical Markers Committee Erected 1958 Honoring Hubert Howe Bancroft 1832 - 1918 Noted historian of the West and the Spring Valley citizens who saved this historic adobe San Diego Chapter, NSDAR

Where it stands

More markers nearby

• San Diego State University — 4.7 mi
• El Camino Real — 6.6 mi
• Mission San Diego de Alcalá — 6.6 mi
• Mission Dam and Flume — 6.9 mi