Gaslamp Museum at the Davis-Horton House
Prefabricated saltbox house that survived a failed gold-rush-era town and multiple relocations.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the Gaslamp Museum at the Davis-Horton House in San Diego opens with Alonzo Horton buying eight hundred acres of waterfront for pocket change in eighteen sixty-seven, land cheap only because an earlier attempt at a city had already failed here. Seventeen years before, merchant William Heath Davis shipped a prefabricated saltbox house around Cape Horn to found what he called New Town, only to watch a depression and the gold rush empty it into what locals mocked as Rabbitville. In eighteen seventy-three the house was hauled to eleventh and K streets to serve as the county's unofficial hospital, one stop in a story of a building that kept moving long after its builder was gone.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
Whaley House Museum
Brick eighteen-fifties home built atop a frontier hanging site and later used as a courthouse.
Heritage County Park
Cluster of relocated Victorian mansions and a historic synagogue, saved from demolition and reassembled around a shared green.
Mormon Battalion Historic Site
Visitor center honoring soldiers who fired the town's first bricks, later used as its early courthouse.
La Casa de Estudillo
Adobe townhouse rebuilt in the early nineteen hundreds to match a bestselling romance novel's fictional wedding scene.
Marston House
Craftsman mansion of redwood and shingle, built for a department-store magnate on five acres of gardens.
Old Town San Diego State Historic Park
Restored nineteenth-century adobe hacienda once mythologized as a fictional novel's wedding chapel.