Hiding behind a fig tree and a distinctive David Shelton–decorated gate sits a quaint little Victorian cottage that was once home to a colorful character. (More about him in a minute.) The home was built about 1875 at 520 Chapala Street, and it appears on one of the earliest maps of Santa Barbara — the 1877 bird’s-eye view map drawn by Eli Sheldon Glover. It’s unclear who built this home, but by the early 1900s, it was owned by one of the most prominent families in our fair city: Thomas Bloodgood Dibblee and his wife, Francisca de la Guerra. (They did not live in the house. They lived in the biggest mansion on the Mesa called Punta del Castillo.) The modest frame home on Chapala Street sat on one of three properties on the block owned by this family.
A Moving Story
Dibblee had passed away in 1895, and in 1905, his widow, Francisca, sold this property to a successful builder named Willis W. Varney. He constructed many homes in Santa Barbara, including the home at 122 East Mission Street that I wrote about in one of my previous columns. The local paper noted that Francisca sold the property to Varney for $10. (Many people are fooled by the $10 price on a deed, but in most cases, far more money changes hands. The nominal amount of $10 was used in order to conceal the actual amount of money since the information on deeds is recorded in legal records.)