"Ramona's Bedroom at Camulos"

Souvenir postcard: "Ramona's Bedroom at Camulos," published by Thomas P. Getz of North San Diego, probably in 1915 when he published other "Ramona"-related postcards.

The bedroom is located at the southeast corner of the Del Valle family's 1853 adobe hacienda-style home at Rancho Camulos.

Mary Pickford is inside "Ramona's Bedroom" looking out at Rancho Camulos in the 1910 film version. Click to enlarge.

Getz was the author of "The Story of Ramona's Marriage Place: Old San Diego, California" (~1900). The postcard was originally sold by Ramona's Marriage Place (see below), i.e., Casa de Estudillo (the 1827 Estudillo House), which is now part of Old Town San Diego State Historic Park. In 1915, its owner was John D. Spreckels, developer of the Hotel Del Coronado and owner of an electric railway. (His father was the sugar magnate.) J.D. Spreckels purchased the Estudillo House in 1906, restored it by 1910, and turned it into a tourist attraction as "Ramona's Marriage Place," capitalizing on Helen Hunt Jackson's 1884 novel, which was still wildly popular and frequently republished. Today the Estudillo House is one of three "Ramona"-related National Historic Landmarks, the others being Rancho Camulos — the "Home of Ramona" at the west end of the historic Rancho San Francisco (SCV) — and Rancho Guajome in the present Vista, San Diego County.

Cave Couts, a slaveholder from Tennessee and brother-in-law of L.A. merchant Abel Stearns (by Couts' marriage to Ysidora Bandini, a Californio), used Indian slave labor (Akins & Bauer 2021:141-142) to build the adobe at Guajome about the same time the Del Valles were building theirs at Camulos.

In D.W. Griffiths' 1910 cinematic version of "Ramona" for Biograph, Mary Pickford, as the title character, gazes forlornly out the window of "Ramona's Bedroom at Camulos."

A different (and better) publication of the same postcard image appears below.