Casa de San Pedro

The hide trade came first. In 1823 the firm of McCulloch and Hartnell put up an adobe warehouse above the bay to hold cattle hides bought from the San Gabriel and San Fernando missions, the first commercial building on San Pedro Bay. Mission San Gabriel took it over in 1829, and Abel Stearns bought it in 1834 and gave it the name it still carries. Richard Henry Dana landed here on the brig Pilgrim in 1835 and put the hide house into Two Years Before the Mast. Only the site survives, inside Fort MacArthur.

What the plaque says

The first known commercial structure on the shore of San Pedro Bay was built here in 1823 by the trading firm of McCulloch & Hartnell to store cattle hides from the San Gabriel and San Fernando Missions. Richard Henry Dana described this adobe hide house in Two Years Before The Mast. Thus began the development of the Port of Los Angeles.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Korean Friendship Bell — 0.9 mi
  Seventeen tons of bronze given by Korea for the American bicentennial, on the bluff above the harbor its troops shipped out from.
• Terminal Island and Furusato — 1.2 mi
  Three thousand Japanese Americans built a village here they called Furusato, and in February 1942 were given forty-eight hours to leave it.
• Point Fermin Lighthouse — 1.2 mi
  The first light into San Pedro Bay, lit in 1874 by two sisters, dark since Pearl Harbor, on a bluff that is still sliding.
• The Port of Los Angeles — 1.3 mi
  The busiest container port in the country, sitting on ground that was dredged into existence: marsh, then landfill, then Pier 400.

More markers nearby

• Timms' Point and Landing — 0.8 mi
• Liberty Hill Site — 1.4 mi
• S.S. Catalina — 2.1 mi
• Site of Home of Diego Sepúlveda — 2.3 mi