In addition to the check, SheaHomes President Paul Barnes, fulfilled a request made by the Historical Society for a boulder and brass plaque to be placed in the new Everly Community near the ancient site of the springs to honor its use by tribes traveling between the desert and the shores of the Pacific Ocean.
In addition to the check, SheaHomes President Paul Barnes, fulfilled a request made by the Historical Society for a boulder and brass plaque to be placed in the new Everly Community near the ancient site of the springs to honor its use by tribes traveling between the desert and the shores of the Pacific Ocean.
Named by Spanish explorers, its existence was included in a 1906 U.S. Army Engineers’ report on California’s waterways. By then, an American settler had built a large adobe room on its banks in which to cure olives picked from trees planted most likely during San Diego’s mission era. The springs would continue to flow until slowed by the paving of Avocado Boulevard in the Fifties. It stopped after the Boulevard’s widening in the Seventies. Decades before that, however, another settler family had built a wooden house on the property that was identified in 1985 as historic in SANDAG’s Historic Preserve Inventory of El Cajon buildings.
Also on the property was a barn that was still in use just a few years ago. In it, the final owners housed horses in their riding school. Other animals inhabiting the place were ducks, chickens, goats, a reindeer and a one-humped camel named “Jasmine.” Many adults today remember riding by the ranch as children and searching the grounds for a quick peek at the improbable reindeer and the inexplicable camel. Following the sale of the property to SheaHomes, the ranch’s decrepit old buildings were razed in 2014. Today, with Jasmine and the reindeer living with their owners along the Washington/Oregon border, the first of the developer’s houses in El Cajon’s Everly Homes community are now under construction. With it being a private community, visits to the plaque and boulder are not available to the public. However, those riding up Avocado toward Fuerte Drive or on to Highway 94 can still spot many of the foothill’s massive and ages-old boulders alongside the northeastern side of Mt. Helix.
