OpenStreetMap (new tab)

Google Map (new tab)

Google Streetview (new tab)

Overview

The history of the Lugo Family, and their ranches and dwellings, has been chronicled by many authors, very few ever agreeing on the basic facts. In my years of reading about California history I have found discussion of the Lugo clan and their buildings to have been one of the most convoluted. An example was this excerpt taken from the City of Bell Gardens' history. It stated: "In 1771 Antonio Lugo was a 35-year-old corporal in the Spanish army and was given a land grant of more than 29,514 acres, which today is known as the cities of Bell Gardens, Maywood, Vernon, Huntington Park, Walnut Park, Cudahy, South Gate, Lynwood and Commerce. The land grant was given as reward for his military service during the establishment of the Franciscan Missions in California while being the attendant of colonization for the area." (See City of Bell Gardens, "History of Bell Gardens," accessed 05/12/2017.) This quote contained two large mistakes. Antonio Maria Lugo was born in 1778, and his father, Jose Francisco, received a land pension in the 1780s. Antonio, at about age 35, c. 1810, received his own land substantial land grant that he later supplemented with other ranch lands in Southern CA for his children.

This adobe house at 6360 East Gage Avenue stood as the residence of the Lugo Family on their vast agricultural estate south of Los Angeles, Rancho San Antonio. The first patriarch of the Lugo clan, Jose Francisco Salvador Lugo (1740-1805), obtained acreage outside the new town of Los Angeles (founded 09/04/1781), in 1789. On this parcel, received as part of his military pension, Francisco Salvador built the walls of this adobe house. His son, Don Antonio Maria Lugo (1778–1860), enlarged the family land grant in 1810, and re-filed his deed with Mexican authorities in 1838 and the new American government in 1852. In 1855, Don Antonio sub-divided the estate among his many children. In 1860, two sons sold their holdings to Anglo settlers, the first of many sales to landholders outside the family. Midwestern meatpacker Michael Cudahy (1841-1910) would obtain a 2,800-acre parcel of the former Lugo Estate in 1908, and subdivide it into one-acre lots, forming the city of Cudahy, CA.

Building History

Jose Francisco Salvador Lugo, born in Sinaloa, Mexico in 1740, had been a Spanish soldier who joined the important 1774 expedition led by Capitán Fernando Xavier de Rivera y Moncada to settle lands in Alta California near Monterey. Jose Francisco settled for a time near the Mission San Antonio de Padua near Jolon, CA, where his son, Antonio Maria, was born on 06/13/1778. Jose Francisco was transferred back south to San Luis Obispo, and then put down roots near Los Angeles in the 1780s. At his retirement from the military, he received the first Lugo land grant in Alta California, in 1789.

Antonio Maria joined the military at age 18, and was first stationed at the Royal Presidio of Santa Barbara. Seventeen years later, he requested a land grant on which he could create a stock-farming enterprise. The Spanish government deeded him the vast Rancho San Antonio estate in 1810, making him one of the largest landowners in the state. In addition to the Rancho San Antonio, he obtained more ranch land ffrom the Mexican government for his three of his sons and a friend of theirs in San Bernardino County, the 35,509-acre Rancho San Bernardino; the same year, he also petitioned the Mexican Government to obtain the Rancho Santa Ana del Chino, a 22,193-acre estate on which his daugher, Maria de Jesus Lugo (who died in childbirth in 1842) and her husband, Isaac Williams (1799–1856), would settle. Don Antonio, who could not read or write and only spoke Spanish, resided on his Rancho San Antonio for the remainder of his life, sub-dividing it for his many children by two wives. They, in turn, sold off parcels little by little and had some swaths taken by less than scrupulous Americans who contested Lugo Family deed ownership. Writers have disagreed about the size of Rancho San Antonio, some saying it was 22,234 acres others saying it was 29,513 acres.

Henry T. Gage (1852-1924), a Saginaw, MI-born lawyer, came to CA in 1874, where he dealt in sheep at first. In 1880, he married Francis (Fanny) Rains, a grand-daughter of Antonio Maria Lugo and, from her dowry, received 27 acres of Rancho San Antonio land and the adobe built by Antonio Maria Lugo. Gage altered the house significantly, giving it much of its current appearance.

Demolished; Lugo House burned in 1984;