Stokes Adobe (Restaurant 1833)

The adobe at 500 Hartnell Street was raised in 1833 as a single-room residence for Ambrose Tomlinson, a fur trapper working the central California coast. James Stokes arrived in Monterey the same year aboard a British vessel, deserting with a trunk of medical supplies that he apparently took from the ship's stores. He purchased the property from Tomlinson and opened a pharmacy on the ground floor, identifying himself to Mexican authorities as a physician.

Stokes's clientele quickly included the upper tier of Mexican California's government. Governor José Figueroa retained him as his personal doctor; Figueroa died in 1835. Whether Stokes's treatments contributed to that death has never been established — the governor's health had been failing before Stokes arrived — but the association attached a dark reputation to both man and building that never fully faded.

In 1844, Stokes expanded the structure substantially, adding seven rooms and a full second story to house his wife Josefa and their children. The adobe briefly housed the printing operation that produced California's first English-language newspaper in the late 1840s. After the American takeover it cycled through uses as a bakery, a pottery kiln, and a boarding house. In the twentieth century it became Gallatin's, a white-tablecloth restaurant that drew film industry figures during the 1950s and 1960s.

Stokes himself died in 1864. Contemporary accounts cite self-poisoning following years of alcoholism and financial decline. He was buried in Monterey. The building operating today as Stokes Adobe restaurant is the same structure he expanded — the street-facing adobe walls date to 1844.