Old Town San Diego State Historic Park preserves the center of the civilian settlement that developed below San Diego’s Spanish presidio. The region is the ancestral homeland of Kumeyaay people, whose communities maintained extensive networks of villages, seasonal movement, cultivation, hunting, and trade long before colonization. Spanish forces and missionaries established a presidio and Mission San Diego de Alcalá on the nearby hill in 1769, initiating military occupation, missionization, disease, and profound disruption of Indigenous life.

The mission moved inland in 1774, but the presidio remained the colonial center. After Mexican independence in 1821, soldiers and families increasingly built homes at the base of the hill around a plaza. Adobe houses, shops, workshops, gardens, and corrals formed the pueblo of San Diego. Residents included Californios, Indigenous laborers, soldiers, merchants, migrants, and people of mixed ancestry. Cattle ranching and hides connected the settlement to Pacific commerce, while water scarcity and distance from major markets constrained growth.

War brought a decisive political change. During the United States conquest of California in 1846, American forces occupied San Diego. Fighting in the region and the Battle of San Pasqual created insecurity; Casa de Estudillo is traditionally associated with sheltering women and children during the conflict. The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo transferred California to the United States. Statehood in 1850 introduced new courts, taxes, property rules, and English-speaking migration, often undermining Mexican landholders and marginalizing Kumeyaay claims.

Old Town remained San Diego’s civic and commercial center through much of the 1850s. Buildings accommodated the courthouse, newspaper, hotels, stores, schools, and transportation businesses. A destructive fire in 1872 and Alonzo Horton’s promotion of a “New Town” nearer the bay shifted investment southward. Government records and commerce followed, and the older plaza district declined.

Tourism and preservation reshaped the area. Early twentieth-century restoration of Casa de Estudillo, supported by the Spreckels interests and architect Hazel Wood Waterman, reflected romantic ideas about Spanish California and replaced missing features. Private attractions and reconstructed buildings later reinforced a picturesque narrative that often minimized conquest, Indigenous persistence, labor, and racial conflict. California established the state historic park in 1968 and stabilized five original adobe buildings while adding relocated or reconstructed structures.

Interpretation has since broadened. The park’s Kumeyaay exhibit foregrounds the First People whose history was once treated as background to European settlement. Old Town is therefore both a historic district and a record of changing public memory. Its plazas and adobes document the Mexican pueblo and early American city, while their preservation history reveals how generations selected, restored, commercialized, and challenged a usable image of San Diego’s beginnings.

Individual park buildings further demonstrate the instability of the word “original.” Some adobes remain on their historic sites but contain replaced roofs, floors, doors, or plaster; other buildings were moved or reconstructed to evoke the period. Archaeology, maps, photographs, and family records help identify these layers. Commercial restaurants and shops support visitation while risking an atmosphere of staged nostalgia. The park’s strongest interpretation makes those choices visible and treats descendants of Kumeyaay and Californio communities as participants in the historical conversation, not simply as characters represented by furnishings and costumes.