Site of Mormon Stockade

Five hundred Mormon colonists reached this valley in June 1851, bought the Lugo rancho, and within months threw up a log stockade around the site of Jose del Carmen Lugo's 1839 adobe, the first house in San Bernardino. More than a hundred families lived inside it for over a year. The attack never came. The raiding they feared was on horses and cattle along the Old Spanish Trail and the colonists kept neither; by 1857 Brigham Young had recalled them to Utah and the fort emptied. The 1927 bronze that recorded it has itself been missing since 2018.

What the plaque says

On this site in 1839 was built the first house in San Bernardino, the home of Jose del Carmen Lugo one of the grantees of the Rancho San Bernardino. Also on this site in 1851 a stockade of logs was built as a protection against Indians. In it more than a hundred pioneer families lived for over a year.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Original McDonald's Site — 1.4 mi
  The corner where two brothers invented fast food, now an unofficial museum the corporation has never blessed.
• Wigwam Motel — 3.5 mi
  Nineteen concrete teepees on Foothill Boulevard, the last of Frank Redford's Wigwam Villages and still renting rooms.
• Harada House — 9.5 mi
  The 1884 cottage a Japanese American family bought in their children's names, and kept in court.
• Lake Gregory — 9.5 mi
  A New Deal dam built by a Redlands orange grower, for the opposite reason to every other lake on this mountain.

More markers nearby

• Fort Benson — 3.1 mi
• The Arrowhead — 4.4 mi
• Guachama Rancheria — 4.5 mi
• San Bernardino Asistencia — 5.7 mi