California Governor's Mansion State Historic Park

The Governor's Mansion in Sacramento was built in 1877 as a private home for Albert Gallatin, a partner in the Huntington & Hopkins hardware company — one of the most successful Sacramento businesses of the post-Gold-Rush era. The 30-room, three-story house was designed by Sacramento architect Nathaniel Goodell in the Second Empire Italianate Victorian style and built by contractor Uriah Reese. Goodell's mansion design is considered one of the most refined surviving examples of high-Victorian residential architecture in California.

Gallatin sold the house in 1887 to Joseph Steffens, a local businessman. In 1903 the State of California purchased the property from the Steffens family for $32,500 to serve as the official residence of the California governor. Governor George Pardee and his family were the first occupants of the new state-owned mansion.

Thirteen successive governors and their families lived in the house from 1903 to 1967. Notable residents included Hiram Johnson (later a U.S. Senator), Earl Warren (later Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court), Pat Brown, and Ronald Reagan (later 40th President of the United States). The Reagan family lived in the mansion briefly in 1967 before deciding it was too small and outdated for modern use; subsequent governors lived elsewhere.

In 1967 the State of California retired the mansion from gubernatorial use and established Governor's Mansion State Historic Park, managed by California State Parks since 1967. The mansion has been preserved and interpreted to reflect the different gubernatorial-family eras, and it is open for guided tours year-round. The building's original Goodell architectural details, the period-appropriate furnishings from multiple decades of gubernatorial families, and the third-floor servants' quarters provide an unusually layered look at California state-level political and domestic life from the early 20th century through the 1960s.