Dates: Tuesday, February 10th OR Thursday, February 12th 

Location:  280 Magnolia Ave, El Cajon, CA 92020

Website: https://www.elcajon.gov/discover-el-cajon/events/knox-house-museum

Parking: There is limited parking in the museum’s small lot. There is a public parking lot across the street from the museum, and there is another parking lot diagonally across the street (just a short walk) where you will see some stores, a Rubio's, and a North Island Credit Union (it's near where they have East County Juror Parking, if you are familiar with that.) 

Cost: Free

ADA Accessibility: Because this is a historic home, it is not completely handicapped accessible. There are 2 small steps to access the main floor of the house and a staircase to the second floor. You can always opt to stay on the first floor!

There is a virtual tour available on their website for anyone who is not able to attend. Scroll down to the bottom of this page to find the virtual tour.

Our reading this week comes courtesy of Tara! Enjoy!

This week we have another in-person trip, this time to the Knox House Museum. The Knox House Museum is part of a hotel built in 1876 near what is now the southwest corner of Main Street and Magnolia Avenue. Originally a two-story, seven-room structure serving as Knox's residence and hotel, it soon boasted an add-on dining room for guests on the east side and was El Cajon's first commercial building. This week, we will take a tour of the building hosted by the El Cajon Historical Society and learn more about the history of El Cajon! 

Let's start this week's lesson with some introductory videos about the Knox Museum and El Cajon.

Did You Know?

Before being named El Cajon during incorporation on November 12, 1912 , the village and town had been called The Corners, Knox's Corners, and even Knoxville. 

The Knox Hotel was built by Amaziah Lord Knox in the latter part of 1876 and became a familiar landmark and a welcome stopping place for early travelers through the El Cajon Valley.

It was built in a field near the southwest corner of the present Main Street and Magnolia Avenue on Knox's ten acre parcel of land.   Mr. Knox paid $1,000 for the land. The original building was a two story seven-room structure which served as a combination residence and hotel. Attached to the east side of the building was a dining room. Another one or two rooms were attached to the rear. Still further to the east was a corral for the horses and mules. In 1881-82 the dining room wing was removed and in its place a much larger two story hotel was built which adjoined the original 1876 building on its east side.

• In about 1868 Isaac and James B. Lankershim had purchased the greater part of the 48,799,85 acre Pedrorena "Rancho El Cajon," and Sublitt-Meredith Company had purchased a smaller portion. Both were subdividing the land for sale for large wheat or grain ranches. Mr. Knox was employed by Isaac Lankershim to manage wheat planting of a large acreage of the valley and to build Lankershim's house on his Rancho Viejo.

• For a number of years, beginning in 1870 after gold was discovered in Julian, there was a lot of travel on the road between San Diego and Julian. This road or wagon trail passed through El Cajon Valley -- coming over the Grossmont Pass and up the road (now Main Street) to the present corner of Main and Magnolia. Here the road made a sharp turn north to the Santee area and then east again to Lakeside, Foster, up the old Mussey Grade (now covered by the waters of San Vicente Dam), and then on to Julian. (I tried really hard to find a map of this to give us a visual but have not been able to find one, unfortunately.)

• Teamsters with their freight wagons would camp for the night at the corner of present Main Street and Magnolia Avenue enroute to and from Julian. They even left some of their mules in the field while they made the trip on to San Diego and until they returned again on their way back to Julian.  Fewer mules were needed for the trip between El Cajon and San Diego.

• Mr. Knox was observing this activity with great interest. He decided that a little hotel or tavern would be a very welcome accommodation to these teamsters and travelers -- and so, in 1876 he built the little combination residence and hotel which was the first beginning of the city of El Cajon. Also, its lobby provided space for El Cajon's first post office when Knox was appointed as El Cajon's first postmaster on June 6, 1878. In 1877 the population of the entire El Cajon Valley was 25 families, comprising about 90 individuals. Then in about 1881-82 Mr. Knox built his larger new hotel adjoining the original structure. During all of his years of service, he also conducted a livery stable in connection with the hotel business. The hotel was so successful that the road became known as Knox's Corners. (You can find an old map of Knox's Corners before 1900 here: 

 Mr. Knox sold the hotel in 1908. In later years (in the 1915 era) a still newer annex was constructed joining the east side of the 1882 section and the original section was moved slightly toward the rear of the lot. The sign on the new section read "El Cajon Hotel - New and Modern - W.L. Wilkerson, Prop."

In about 1944 when property was being sold for the construction of newer business buildings, the larger 1882 hotel was dismantled and the original 1876 building was acquired by Mr. S.H. Mathews and it was moved about two blocks away to the southeast corner of Lexington and Magnolia avenues. There it served as the private residence of the S.H. Mathews family until after the death of Mr. Mathews in 1971. Mr. Mathews enlarged the front window in the living room, removed the partition between the living room and the dining room, and added a bedroom and bathroom to the east side of the original structure.

In 1972 the hotel was purchased by the City of El Cajon and was moved to city property on the southwest corner of Park and Magnolia Avenue joining Judson Park. It has been restored as an historical museum, not only to serve the public at large, but with special emphasis on being helpful to students and all those seeking information on their local community history.

The wash bowl and pitcher are from the D.G. Durbin family, early settlers who came to the area in 1898.

The portraits of Amaziah and Illa Knox hanging on the wall in the parlor are the originals which hung in the Knox 1882 hotel building. The Bible is the Knox family bible.

 It had been given to a friend, who in turn donated it back to the museum.

Other exhibits are composed of artifacts saved by a number of El Cajon's early families.

Though of course the history of El Cajon and San Diego County goes way farther back in time than we will cover here, we have talked about earlier San Diego County history in previous lessons, so we'll start here in the early 1800s, as El Cajon made its first steps toward becoming a city.  

In the early part of the nineteenth century, the Spanish mission padres, who had founded San Diego Mission de Alcala in east Mission Valley, discovered the rich pasture land in the El Cajon Valley. Surrounded by foothills in every direction, the "Big Box Valley" became the namesake for the city ("El Cajon" translates to "the box" or "the drawer" in Spanish). For years, these foothills served as a barrier for straying cattle of the San Diego Mission, as well as ideal terrain to capture sparse rainfall for the grasslands and fertile land for agriculture on the valley floor.

After independence from Spain in 1821, land in Alta California transferred to Mexico, and the relatively new government began the process of secularizing the Roman Catholic missions in California. In 1845, Governor Pio Pico of Alta California confiscated the lands of Mission San Diego de Alcala and granted the eleven square leagues of El Cajon Valley to Dona Maria Antonio Estudillo, wife of Don Miguel de Pedrorena. The land grant, known as Rancho Cajon, included the present communities of Lakeside, Santee, Bostonia, El Cajon, and part of Grossmont.

The Pedrorenas continued their residence in San Diego, yet their proprietorship in their newly acquired land did not foster any economic development. Scattered homes of adobe construction were erected in the area during the mid 19th century; then in 1870, a school for six children was established in a homestead at Park and Magnolia Avenues.

While the Mexican land grants were honored by the U.S. Government, poorly defined boundaries of the Pedrorena's land led to legal confusion leading to pioneering homesteaders to be referred to as squatters. Eventually, real estate developments were initiated by San Francisco entrepreneur, Isaac Lankershim (pictured), who bought the majority of the Pedrorena's Rancho Cajon in 1868. Economic investments would soon arrive from New England native Amaziah L. Knox, and El Cajon's first commercial building, the Knox Hotel we are visiting, was established at the intersection of Main Street and Magnolia Avenue in 1876.

Over the years, Lankershim subdivided Rancho Cajon, selling large tracts for wheat ranching. It was soon discovered that the soil and climate would support any crop and El Cajon valley began to flourish as a produce center for citrus, avocados, grapes, and raisins.

By the turn of the century the two blocks of Main Street, astride Magnolia, boasted two hotels, a general store, meat market, post office, pharmacy, harness shop, blacksmith shop, and smaller sundry shops and offices (which you can see in the map of Knox's Corners I posted the link to above in the section about the Knox Hotel).

At the general election on November 12, 1912, 123 of 158 electors voted to incorporate a 1 1/4 square mile area centering on Main Street and Magnolia Avenue. Committees were appointed for Streets, Alleys, Water and Lights, Finance and Licenses, and Health, Morals, and Sanitation. Ordinances and resolutions were passed to provide for the grading and sprinkling of streets, contract for bridge construction and mapping the city, banning cattle and hogs from the central city, and outlawing horseracing down Main Street. For the next thirty years El Cajon followed the pattern of orderly development typical of rural/ small town America. By 1940 the population had reached a modest 1,471 residents.

In the five years following World War II, the winds of change became apparent. While land area increased slightly to 1.67 square miles, in-migration increased the population to 5,600. The office of City Manager was instituted in 1950 in time to meet the most explosive decade of growth in El Cajon's history. By 1960 the incorporated area was to increase five-fold to 9.8 square miles and population six-fold to 37,618.

Today, the El Cajon Valley has undergone a dramatic transformation from the agrarian farmlands of the nineteenth century to the largest City in East County San Diego with over 100,000 residents. One might wonder what Amaziah Knox would say if he knew that the intersection where he established the city's first commercial building and hotel would become the heart and soul of a vibrant and diverse community, well into the twenty-first century.  You can hear from some current El Cajon residents in this two-minute video from KPBS: https://www.facebook.com/KPBSSanDiego/videos/364259047804981/

If you want to learn more about the history of El Cajon, you may want to check out this timeline with some fun photos: https://www.elcajon.gov/discover-el-cajon/history/el-cajon-historical-timeline

*Acknowledgement Note - This was adapted from the El Cajon city government site and based on the writings of the late Mrs. Hazel Sperry, former Secretary and Curator of El Cajon Historical Society.

The museum provided these questions on their website as things for you to think about on the tour. 

Just for fun: Things to Consider while visiting Knox House:

Before this became the Knox home, it was a hotel for miners, drovers and stagecoach travelers going to and from the Julian gold strike. The Historical Society has furnished the building to represent what settlers brought with them from back East and Europe to live on San Diego’s frontier between the years 1869 and 1912. The master bedroom set was brought here by Illa -- most likely with her first husband, who died from tuberculosis shortly after they arrived.

Questions for the Tour:

So, why in 1876, would anyone build a small-windowed, weather-tight Victorian farmhouse in hot Southern California?

What do the books, magazines and organ in the parlor tell you about Amaziah and Illa Knox?

What do the children’s toys and books tell you about the parenting of their two youngest children?

What do the foods in the kitchen tell you about the state of Americans’ health around the turn of the 19th Century?

How do those foods differ from what Americans had been eating prior to the health fears and governmental intervention of the early 1900s?

Can you even imagine early settlers pushing the perambulator (do you know what that is?) along the village/town’s unpaved streets and paths?

What’s missing from the house?

Did you know that silent films used to be made in El Cajon? Check out this 1983 article from the El Cajon Historical Society that tells you all about it:

You can find personal stories and narrative from El Cajon residents here:

Do you want to know why the Knox Museum is painted such an odd color? (Hint: it is probably not the original color.) Check out this article here: 

If you aren't able to make it to the in-person tour, you can find a video tour of the museum below. This was created by the El Cajon Historical Society and can also be found on their website here: https://elcajonhistory.org/echsmedia/echs_tour.htm

Can’t wait to see you all this week!

https://www.elcajon.gov/discover-el-cajon/history

https://elcajonhistory.org/index.html

http://drwokuluk.com/el_cajon_photos.html

https://www.sdjewishworld.com/2016/03/03/i-8-jewish-travel-comics-and-stuff/