Old Town San Diego State Historic Park

This guide to Old Town San Diego State Historic Park follows a newspaper's eighteen eighty-seven claim that a crumbling adobe was Ramona's Marriage Place, the site of a wedding from Helen Hunt Jackson's popular novel, even though the book never names it and the author likely never visited. You'll hear how the real Estudillo family had already abandoned the house to a caretaker selling off its doorframes, and how sugar baron John D. Spreckels and showman Tommy Getz turned the invented scene into a tourist draw, complete with postcards and couples marrying in the very room. It traces the myth's grip on the public well into the twentieth century. Stand in the courtyard and think about which parts of the story you're standing in are fact.